Lamenting the Size of Computer Books

I still have my copy of Kernighan and Ritchie's The C Programming Language that I bought around 1980 when I first learned C (transitioning from FORTRAN), on a VAX-11/780 running Berkeley Unix that we installed following instructions outlined by Bill Joy (Sun Microsystems wasn't incorporated yet). Kernighan and Ritchie's paperback book, published by Prentice-Hall, was all of 225 pages or so, yet it was packed with everything I needed to learn C. Kernighan and Ritchie subsequently had a second edition of the book in 1988, updated to ANSI C, and it's still only about 275 pages long. I continued from C to C++ and when Addison-Wesley published Bjarne Stroustrup's The C++ Programming Language in 1985, it too was only about 325 pages. Then something happened and computer book sizes jumped. In fact I was part of that trend—I wrote the 800-page The Waite Group's Microsoft C Bible in 1988. Of course, today the majority of computer books (at least the ones dealing with programming languages or operating systems) are typically close to a thousand pages in size!

I think I know the reasons why computer books end up so large. First, the subject matter has grown in complexity, so we need more book pages. For example, C relies on libraries to do all the hard work and once you start describing the libraries, it's hard to keep the book's size down. C++ also has standard libraries and when you describe them, guess what, the book gets larger. Even Stroustrup's third edition of The C++ Programming Language grew to 920 pages. The second reason is that it's not economical to sell smaller books at lower prices—I am not an expert on this, but it seems the numbers just don't work out. A third reason is the book buyer's expectation of getting a certain number of pages at a certain price. This is related to the reason that smaller print books are not economical. If there are a whole bunch of books on the same subject and all priced at $49.99, the feeling—right or wrong—is that the book with most pages would be perceived to be a better value. Even with all these reasons for selling the huge tomes, I still wish we could move to 300-page computer books that focus on narrow topics and offer good value to the book buyer. Perhaps computer ebooks will help us reduce the size and offer better value than print books.

Tags: books ebooks epublishing trends size C C++ Kernighan Ritchie Stroustrup Joy billjoy

Comments

[Joe Wikert]

Hi Naba. I was a couple of years behind you learning the C language from K&R in 1984/1985. I totally agree that it was a very effective, small book. But, while you could obviously learn the language from K&R, it didn't offer all the rich and detailed examples you can find in other C tutorials. In fact, I wound up using K&R as more of a core reference and probably got more tutorial use out of a couple of the other books from back then, including Stephan Kochan's book on ANSI C.

That said, I also agree with your observation on the size of computer books. As a publisher, I'm as guilty as anyone of allowing us to focus (sometimes) on page count and spine width. We often worry that a book will "get lost on the shelves" if it doesn't have a large enough spine. Does that justify padding a book with 100 pages or more of fluff? Absolutely not, but it's sometimes a difficult trap to avoid.

You and I have both posted in the past about more bite-size chunks, and I truly believe that will be an important concept for the future. I tend to get many of the answers to my questions from Google. The information I find via Google is generally in bite-size chunks (as opposed to chapter-length pieces). We just need to find the right platform and delivery mechanism for these bite-size chunks.

[Naba Barkakati]

Joe, I was wondering if the evolution to bite-size chunks might be through an intermediate step where the chunks are a bit larger, perhaps several chapters- - for ease of selling through our current online channels and then maybe we can have some protocols worked out for delivery of even smaller chunks (including some way to get the payments). Perhaps Wiley can set up an online store where I could search/browse and buy those intermediate-size chunks using PayPal, just as I buy stuff on ebay. If we can create the market with a fairly low investment, then it'd be possible to try out ideas. Of course, we still have the problem of figuring out the format for the chunks and whether we need some protection or is a low price point good enough to enable distrbution in the open (with the stipulation that the buyer is not allowed to redistribute and post on the Internet). Lots of things to work out, but I hope we'll get there in the near future :-)

[Joe Wikert]

Hi Naba. We actually did something very similar to this in the hold Hungry Minds days. It wasn't terribly successful, but that doesn't mean it won't work in the future. The other problem was that it featured electronic content which mirrored the print version. As I've said before, I don't think that formula is ever going to be that popular.