The textbook seems nice and clear. The only nitpick i have is that it should talk more about equations of state. I understand that it may not be the focus of the text, but mentioning the current state of equations of state (SAFTs, cubics, multiparameter) would help guide readers looking on how to generate their own steam tables for their fluid of interest, even if the advice is just "go use CoolProp"
On the other hand, i really like the ilustrations on turbomachinery, helps ground the theoretical content.
Love the price transparency, the obvious followup question is where the other ~85% of the pie goes when I buy a ~50€ paper book, if the author only earns a little under 15%?
I imagine printing will be about 2 to 5€, if it's not ultra cheap print on demand refuse. Is the rest all for publishers and Amazon dot com?
Following up with actual numbers for the project, from Lulu, in Euros:
List Price 43
Print cost 11
Distribution fees (read: Amazon, 50% of selling price): 21.5
Lulu share of profit : 2
Rest to author: 8,5
Because of the different prices on different locales in different currencies the actual share I receive averages 7€ (gross revenue before income tax, although in my case the yearly income is too small to trigger it where I live).
For books sold directly on Lulu
List price 43
Print cost 11
Lulu share of profit: 6.5
Rest to author: 25.5
The mindset should not be "this is all that’s left for me", however: a book is many things at once and for better or for worse, Amazon creates a big part of it. Kevin kelly has some excellent advice at https://kk.org/thetechnium/everything-i-know-about-self-publ...
Amazon takes the lion’s share, and then the rest of the pie looks very different depending on which route you go. Big publishers print in batches and have very low print/distribution costs. I ended up on the other end of the spectrum, self-publishing with Lulu (print-on-demand, so much higher costs). I wrote an article in French on exploring the economics of textbooks, from the open-source point of view, a few years back: https://framablog.org/2022/01/20/mais-ou-sont-les-livres-uni...
Thanks, I enjoyed the article. I've bought a couple creative commons books (PDF and printed), both to have the physical artifact and to send gratitude to the author, in a form that unambiguously means something. I rarely see a pay-what-you-want option, but that would make sense to me. Buying a free PDF isn't really like buying an apple or a manufactured good, it feels more like buying music on Bandcamp. It costs nothing to copy a file, but I still want to send what I can.
Sadly I haven't been very satisfied with print on demand books. It can be serviceable for textbooks, it does make prints a lot more accessible, but the quality has been pretty disappointing for me. When I buy a POD I often end up reading the PDF instead, which seems a bit wasteful.
> I wrote an article in French on exploring the economics of textbooks, from the open-source point of view, a few years back
Thanks for that, it’s very informative. I contemplated publishing a book that way and never actually got that far into the planning phase. Do you think things have changed much since then?
When selling a product through a reseller, the markup is around 80-100%. I was horrified by this in the 80s, but soon learned that the resellers would be out of business otherwise.
The reason resellers exist is they do the marketing, warehousing, shipping, customer service, etc.
A scan of contents list suggests that it is mostly about heat engines. No mention of chemistry. Chemical reactions are mentioned in passing in the text but with no detail. Also no obvious signs of much interest in conduction, convection, or radiation.
So it's fairly narrow focus, but that is not necessarily a bad thing.
Indeed! Truth be told, I think the book really is missing a chapter on refrigeration systems. I had to call it done at some point for my own sanity. Maybe someone will jump in and add one someday!
Thanks! I think most of the weight comes from the PNG diagrams, but I don’t actually know: I’ll put it on my to-do list to investigate, maybe there are some easy wins here.
Calculus hasn't changed a whole lot. There are probably better books for learning than I used in the 1970s, but I have to believe that you can find pretty decent older calculus texts for not a lot.
The textbook seems nice and clear. The only nitpick i have is that it should talk more about equations of state. I understand that it may not be the focus of the text, but mentioning the current state of equations of state (SAFTs, cubics, multiparameter) would help guide readers looking on how to generate their own steam tables for their fluid of interest, even if the advice is just "go use CoolProp"
On the other hand, i really like the ilustrations on turbomachinery, helps ground the theoretical content.
I imagine printing will be about 2 to 5€, if it's not ultra cheap print on demand refuse. Is the rest all for publishers and Amazon dot com?
Because of the different prices on different locales in different currencies the actual share I receive averages 7€ (gross revenue before income tax, although in my case the yearly income is too small to trigger it where I live).
For books sold directly on Lulu List price 43 Print cost 11 Lulu share of profit: 6.5 Rest to author: 25.5
The mindset should not be "this is all that’s left for me", however: a book is many things at once and for better or for worse, Amazon creates a big part of it. Kevin kelly has some excellent advice at https://kk.org/thetechnium/everything-i-know-about-self-publ...
Sadly I haven't been very satisfied with print on demand books. It can be serviceable for textbooks, it does make prints a lot more accessible, but the quality has been pretty disappointing for me. When I buy a POD I often end up reading the PDF instead, which seems a bit wasteful.
Thanks for that, it’s very informative. I contemplated publishing a book that way and never actually got that far into the planning phase. Do you think things have changed much since then?
- tablets are everywhere in the classrooms now, so the number of places where a good PDF can do good is much bigger
- there are better workflows to get a high-quality PDF than LaTeX, so much frustration can be saved, and all that can be learned easily with AI tools
- in a sea of AI slop, all the humans are desperate for a One Good Resource they can trust
Go for it!!!!
The reason resellers exist is they do the marketing, warehousing, shipping, customer service, etc.
So it's fairly narrow focus, but that is not necessarily a bad thing.
Somewhat a death of 1000 cuts.
I used https://www.xpdfreader.com/pdfimages-man.html to extract them and take a look.