The economics of writing technical books

Maybe put the whole text on GitHub?

Right. That was my takeaway too. Some of the examples of success stories he gives aren't technical at all - they're business books. It would be absolutely exceptional for a software engineering book to sell 100k copies. If you're writing about a specific technology, selling a thousand would be a pretty typical result. And this happens over the course of years.

There's just no money in this. There is a small market for authors who can crank out passable technical content serially for series such as "...for Dummies": if you have ten books generating royalties in parallel, it might be worth your time. But one or two books? Absolutely not, you'll make more working a minimum-wage job.

This doesn't mean you shouldn't try, but it's basically a hobby for folks who have something to share, and have a daytime job to pay the bills. Plus, yep, the sucky part is that books piracy is widespread, and that even people who benefit from your writing and have the means to pay are just accustomed to sharing bootleg copies for free.

+1 for Mathematica’s documentation system. It is the best of any software doc, OSS/free or closed/commercial. By far.

The prospects for making money selling as an artist (author, painter, athlete, musician, actor) are so poor why do they care so much about copyright law?

The route to riches for, say, a musician is to become famous and charge for the coliseum seats to hear him play. To become famous doesn't it make more sense to give the music away? Being famous means you get high consulting rates, get paid for personal appearances, get paid for putting your name on sneakers, etc. A famous author could get paid for writing movie scripts or snagging a professorship or teaching seminars.

If copyright law disappeared tomorrow, would the artists really be worse off?

I think this is a fairly accurate article, although I think it overlooks the indirect benefits of writing a book.

My book, Effective Haskell (https://pragprog.com/titles/rshaskell/effective-haskell/), is a pretty well reviewed book on a fairly niche technology. It's been in print for about a year, and was in beta for around 6 months before that. I'd estimate I spent around 4,500 hours over 5 years writing my book and the royalties so far mean that the value of that time was around $5/hour pre-tax. That hourly rate will go up slowly over time until the book stops selling, but it's pretty hard to argue that it's objectively worth it just for the royalties.

My motivation for writing the book was never the money, and I've generally treated the royalties as a nice bonus. I started writing because I cared a lot about the technology, and I wanted to share it with other people. Writing the book was my way of contributing something to a community that I'd benefited from a lot in my career.

In addition to the satisfaction, there have been other benefits I've seen to writing a book. It's opened up opportunities for other side income. I've had paid speaking opportunities, and I've been invited as a guest lecturer at a couple of universities and been offered to chance to design and teach a course at a well ranked local university. If I wanted to actively pursue consulting as a side gig I think the reputational gain would help me there as well.

Writing a book has also helped me in my career. In a direct way, I think the benefit to my reputation helped me get interviews. The communication and technical writing skills I gained writing a book have also helped me as I've moved into a leadership role. It's impossible to know precisely how much writing a book contributed or to put a clear monetary value on that, but I do think it's contributed.

The other side of this is that, a year after finishing writing on my book I'm still recovering a bit from the burnout of working so intensely on a side project for so long. I still have some follow-up work (extended solutions to all exercises, errata, fixing up and publishing some cut chapters as free content) that I intend to take on and it's been really hard to find the energy to do it. I'd like to write a second book one day, but I'd still advise people to be mindful of the amount of work it takes and to avoid writing one unless they are absolutely certain that it's something they want to do.