Now, Mr Butler, please stop banging your forehead on the wall. (The neighbors are complaining.)

A role-playing game book is a very technical document, providing a set of rules to follows and supplemental material to use to achieve a desired outcome. Not too much unlike a textbook, which is also rules to follow and/or supplemental material to achieve the outcome of education.

But are most people going to select a tabletop role-playing game from their bookshelf and sit down with it for a little light leisure reading? Nope. (Well, all right, maybe some hard-core gamers will, but not most people.)

As a result, the market for role-playing games is limited to that subset of people who are seeking to produce that desired outcome. It’s a pretty small market now that everyone’s playing video games.

And while role-playing game books don’t cost in the hundreds of dollars like textbooks, it is not uncommon to see them going for as high as $40 to $50, especially if it’s a really thick book (like Nobilis 2nd Ed. or Spycraft 2nd Ed.). Just the three most basic books of D&D 4th Ed. will run you $100.

Members of a certain class of gamer frequently and vocally complain about these high prices, and consider themselves justified in downloading pirated copies because RPG publishers are “price-gouging”. (Not at all unlike those textbook scan and download sites I’ve heard about, come to think of it.)

They don’t understand the economic realities of the situation: fixed costs being what they are, gaming publishers have to charge high prices if they want to recoup their investment in publishing the books. Just as textbook publishers do.

Let me try this one last time, and see if it gets through. (gets out clue sledgehammer)

TEXTBOOKS.

BOOKS.

Period.

Do textbook authors want people to read their books? Yes! They expect people to read their books as part of an academic curriculum, which is what they are designed for. They are not written for general leisure reading, but for professors to use in a classroom setting. Not surprisingly, this tends to limit their market to students. The vast majority of textbooks are bought because they are picked by the people designing a course – not from generating grassroots demand for them among students. Textbooks do not play by the rules of general-market sales. Why is this so hard for people to understand?

And no, someone who writes textbooks is not a ‘typical academic author of non-fiction.’ Textbooks are not written ‘on speculation’ (as I specifically pointed out above) with a hope for getting sales and royalties from the general marketplace; they are ordered for production for the specific student market, which is both limited and can be estimated with far greater precision than the general population. Textbook authors do not, from what I know, expect to ‘get back anything’ from writing a textbook, in the sense that a mass-market author does; they expect to be paid a commensurate fee for the work up-front, in the same way a freelance author gets paid up-front for writing a software manual.

Unfortunately, major publishers still have a high and undeserved level of prestige. As the co-author of a book which is in the hands of a major publisher, I have learned the hard way just how little they do to deserve that reputation.

Assuming volume is so low, maybe the marketers have been dozing.

Textbooks are not mass-market books. They have an inherently limited audience and will not sell significantly outside of that audience, no matter how far you drop the price. Balzac may be a great author, but the number of people who read him outside of a literature class is small, the number of people who’ll read a critical analysis of him smaller still. Go out onto the street of someplace other than a college town and ask how many people have heard of Balzac? 1%? 0.1%? 0.01%? I’d be willing to bet that you could drop the price to $10, and it wouldn’t increase the sales by more than a few percentage points – not even remotely close enough to make up the loss in revenue.

If the audience is so small, why isn’t the professor overseeing a wiki or whatever?

Textbooks are not mass-market books, part II: They are not written to try and catch the general public’s interest, on speculation as it were. They are written to fill a specific academic need, by experts who expect to be paid well for their time. Why isn’t the author “overseeing a wiki or whatever”? Because it takes them a lot of effort to assemble the material, and they’re not going to do it for free! Expertise costs money and experts expect to get paid when hired to do a job.

(The so-called “free copies” Chris mentioned? They came from a subscription service, meaning they were paid for by Stanford and other universities via that academic subscription – and from what I’ve heard, those subscriptions are not cheap, $20,000-60,000/year or more. Those were not “free copies” to the university. And I would be shocked if the authors were not receiving compensation from the subscription service.)

As for the Balzac textbook, it is specialized—but not that that specialized. It isn’t as if Balzac is a minor writer. Assuming volume is so low, maybe the marketers have been dozing.

Thanks,
David

You said it yourself:

for example, $6,431.20 for the Kindle edition of the admittedly specialized Selected Nuclear Materials and Engineering Systems (part 4)

Textbooks are priced at a level to recover the costs of production over the number of copies they expect to sell. While a textbook on nuclear engineering is admittedly a smaller market than a Balzac textbook, any textbook is going to have a relatively tiny number of sales compared to a mainstream novel, let alone a bestseller. Lowering the price is not going to increase sales beyond the number of people who would normally buy textbooks, either.

The labor costs of production are also going to be higher on a textbook than on a typical novel – if for no other reason that the people putting them together are typically higher-paid professionals. (How much does it cost to hire a nuclear engineer?)

So – higher costs, lower sales volume. Nothing mysterious about that at all.