In 2009, Śaunak Sen and I wrote a book about QTL mapping and the R/qtl software. We started working on it in the fall of 2006, and it was a heck of a lot of work.
We’d talked to several publishers, and ended up publishing with Springer. John Kimmel was the editor we worked with; I like John, and I felt that Springer (or John) did a good job of keeping prices reasonable. We were able to publish in full color with a list price of $99, so that on Amazon it was about $65. (In April, 2013, there was a brief period where it was just $42 at Amazon!)
Springer did arrange several rounds of reviews; they typically pay reviewers $100 or a few books. But the copy editing was terrible (at the very least, you want a copy editor to read the book, and it was pretty clear that our copy editor hadn’t), and the actual type-setting and construction of the index was left to us, the authors.
It feels nice to have written a proper book, but I don’t think it makes that big of a difference, for me or for readers.
And John Kimmel has since left Springer to go to Chapman & Hall/CRC, and Springer has raised the price of our book to $169, so it’s now selling for $130 at Amazon. I think that’s obnoxious. It’s not like they’ve gone back and printed extra copies, so it’s hard to see how their costs could have gone up. But in the publishing agreement we signed, we gave Springer full rights to set the price of the book.
(Update: it’s now listed at $199, though it’s still about $130 at Amazon.)
I have a hard time recommending the book at that price; I’m tempted to help people find pirated PDFs online. (And seriously, if you can’t find a pirated copy, you should work on your internet skills.)
I corresponded with an editor at Springer, on why our book has become so expensive and whether there’s anything we can do about it. They responded
-
If we do a new edition, it could be listed as $129.
-
If the book is adopted by university classes, “the pricing grid it is based on would have lower prices.”
-
Our book is available electronically, for purchase by chapter as well.
Purchase by chapter? Yeah, for $30 per chapter!
Springer has published books and allowed the authors to post a PDF, but only for really big sellers, and ours is definitely not in that category.
I’m both disgusted and embarrassed by this situation. If I could do it all over again, I’d self-publish: post everything on the web, and arrange some way for folks to have it printed cheaply.