Cost vs. Size of Books

My newest book, Programming Reactive Extensions and LINQ, is released. I’m very  excited about this book, and believe that it provides high-quality information that would otherwise be hard to find, clear explanations, and useful examples.

Paul Betts and I worked hard to ensure that the signal-to-noise ratio in the book was very high, and that there was no fluff or filler.

We took great pride in being able to present two fairly complex inter-related technologies (Rx and LINQ)  in a relatively short book. Naively, I thought that the book being small would be a prime selling point.

The book runs to 182 pages, and is priced at Amazon at $32.24.

This has caused at least one reviewer to pan the book, saying that $32 for 180 pages is a “rip-off.”  He made no complaint about the quality of the book; his entire critique was  restricted to the relationship between the number of pages and the price.

Personally, I do not buy books by the pound, but rather by how useful or entertaining they will be. The question in my mind is not whether 182 pages is worth $32, but rather whether these 182 pages are worth $32. After all, at least theoretically, 182 pages of valuable information must be worth more than 400 pages of fluff.

The real question that you have to ask yourself is simply this:  “would I rather have this book or keep the $32?”  It isn’t really any more complicated than that.