On 5/25/07, James Wolfe <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > No offense taken. I haven't bought a CF book in wow, nearly a decade > > since none of them are truly good. Like I said, the problem is the > > market is too small for a big publisher to take a risk. Breakeven on > > a > > book for an O'Reilly or Wiley is between 6000 and 8000 copies > > depending on the size/price, and all the investment is upfront. > > This is a catch-22. > > Assuming you are correct (a large if), then the onus clearly falls on Adobe > to publish a quality reference book. If no one else can, and they decide not > to, then they choose actively to watch CF crumble and eventually fail.
Having written 3 books, been involved in reviewing them for 5 publishers, contributed to several more, and been through the proposal process with O'Reilly a number of times and knowing a number of other authors in the Java and database worlds, I can tell you with some authority that 6-8 thousand books is the breakeven ballpark for medium-sized tech books. > Even if you are wrong and anyone could make money from a book, I don't know > why Adobe wouldn't publish one. I can't imagine that the cost of producing > and publishing a quality book would be more than a drop in the bucket next to > the development cost of Scorpio. They have -- Ben's book. And they make a *ton* of money from it since there's effectively no competition. Little incentive for them to compete with themselves on a general book and little incentive to try and write a higher-end book for a smaller market (eg higher end CF developers). Java one gets 20-30k people; CFUnited gets something like 1500 (MAX is hard to count since it cuts across Flex, Flash, etc) so assuming 10% of those folks buy a given book it's easy to look at the math. If it was good business, they'd do it. That's all it is -- business. -- John Paul Ashenfelter CTO/Transitionpoint (blog) http://www.ashenfelter.com (email) [EMAIL PROTECTED] ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~| Create Web Applications With ColdFusion MX7 & Flex 2. Build powerful, scalable RIAs. Free Trial http://www.adobe.com/products/coldfusion/flex2/?sdid=RVJS Archive: http://www.houseoffusion.com/groups/CF-Talk/message.cfm/messageid:279330 Subscription: http://www.houseoffusion.com/groups/CF-Talk/subscribe.cfm Unsubscribe: http://www.houseoffusion.com/cf_lists/unsubscribe.cfm?user=89.70.4
