More or less by coincidence I recently visited the website of Springer and I found out that the book I wrote in 1995, entitled “Solid-state imaging with charge-coupled devices”, is still available. But the price is incredibly, unreasonably high. They charge 390 Euro for the book. This is ridiculous !!!! I am writing this blog just to mention that I absolutely have no influence on the price setting. With this high price apparently Springer simply tells to their customers that they preferably do not sell the book anymore.
Originally the book was published by Kluwer, and even in the early days, also Kluwer was charging quite a bit of money. If I remember well it was around 200 Dutch Guilders, equivalent to 100 Euro. 20 years ago this was also a lot of money. But nevertheless, the book was selling quite well, and 100 Euro is still a lot less than 390 Euro. Unfortunately I do not have that many copies left (only 4) of the book, otherwise I could start my own little business with selling my own book for an acceptable price …
If Springer is not ashamed of this price setting, at least I am ….
Message to potential new authors of technical books : you do not become rich of writing a book, but someone else will !!!
Albert, 19-01-2016.
I am so said to hear that Springer, as a famous publisher, did such an unreasonable thing. I certainly support with Prof. Albert Theuwissen’s statement.
The most upsetting thing is that years ago, when I was a student, the high cost of technical books was understandable. They were filled with figures, tables, equations, special fonts, etc. and were quite laborious to typeset and produce – and with low volumes, the high cost was justified.
While I was a student in the 80’s the revolution occurred thanks to Don Knuth, Xerox Parc scientists, and many others, with Tex, LaTex, and WYSIWYG editing becoming mainstream, and so the author himself produced a copy-ready book with no laborious typesetting necessary.
This should have resulted in the most esoteric technical books being available for $10 or $20… but that did not occur and here we are three decades later, and the situation is WORSE. You could argue that the author now does all the work to provide “camera-ready” books, and reaps NONE of the benefits. Someone is making a KILLING on these things…
There should be a revolt against the greedy publishers…
I was under the impression you could bypass the publishers these days by publishing direct to amazon kindle or the android store. Is it the need to have physical copies in education that is holding academic staff back from doing this?