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I had my first (and only, until now) random observation way back in August 2003. I don’t know if this is necessarily a series since I am only averaging one every 9 months, but I’ll number it just for kicks.

What is up with books getting extremely short yet still costing some $40 US?

Since I haven’t posted anything on agile software development in a while, I was looking to purchase a book or two from Amazon to get me going again. So I looked at Ken Schwaber’s book Agile Project Management with Scrum. Now don’t get me wrong. I have met Ken in person and seen him speak at a conference before, and he is very sharp. And I thoroughly enjoyed his first book Agile Software Development with Scrum.

But $40 for 163 pages? That is a quarter ($0.25) for each page! At least his first book was only $27 for the same length. I'm not saying length is everything, but one of my graduate professors always said, “Too long does not always mean enough, but too short always means not enough.”

So I ended up buying Agile Project Management: Creating Innovative Products by Jim Highsmith instead. 312 pages for less than the cost of Ken’s book.