>>Which book was that? And how many e-copies were sold?
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>I don't know which book David meant. But I can tell you that the combined paper and e-book sales of my last two VFP books were low enough to make it hard to justify the time to write new books or update existing books.
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>In the case of HackFox in particular, it bugs me a lot not to have a VFP 8 version, but I know how much time it takes to produce it and we can't justify that amount of time for the expected return.

>Please understand two things. For authors, the key issue is the time it takes to write and edit a book. Ted and I spent 14 months on HackFox 3, and 9 months on HackFox 6. With HackFox 7, we brought in two more authors and sped up the cycle somewhat, but it was still hours and hours and hours of time that wasn't billable.
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>Second, while printing is certainly a piece of the cost equation for books, it's the people that are the expensive part. For a quality book, you have authors, technical editors, copy editors, layout, and indexer, at a minimum. Then, there are the actual costs of selling: advertising, processing, etc. Yes, e-books cost less to produce, but not as much less as you'd think.

I can imagine all you said. And I can also imagine why it bugs you not being able to produce the vfp8 version.

IMO, the Hacker's Guide - more than all other books - is a treasure, worth far more than the original help guide. If the vfp community was a country, then the government should buy the Hacker's Guide company and publish updates forced by law. Not having those updates is dangerous for vfp (for the virtual country) and thus for our earnings.

The problem is perhaps that it's a private, currently non-profitable, investment. As I said, I can imagine that you cannot produce updates under these conditions. But there's a negative spiral at stake here. We, the community, must be creative and do something about it, don't you think?