Have you bought a technical book lately? I do that rather a lot, and the price of books is just incredible! Software by contrast is a product that continues to decline in selling price (for a given function) at a very noticable rate year-on-year. What is extraordinary about this is that the book has relatively close-ended value, while the software is largely open-ended, so the software should cost more money per function than a book, simply because it performs more of the work. Quicken, for example, is far more valuable than any number of books on accounting, because it provides so much more than just talk. Yet many college accounting text books out-price quicken. When then will the declining cost of software intersect the cost of the books required to learn how to write it ;-).