So, there are books out there. I use Computer Architecture: A Quantitative Approach by Hennessy and Patterson. Recent revisions have removed historical information. I understand why they did remove it. I wanted to use Stallings book, but the department had already made arrangements with the publisher.
The biggest problem on why we don't write books is that people don't buy them. They take the PDF and stick it on github. Publishers don't respond to the authors on take down requests, github doesn't care about authors, so why spend the time on publishing a book? We can chase grant money. I'm fortunate enough to not have to chase grant money.
While financial incentives is important to some, a lot of people write books to share their knowledge and give the book out for free. I think more people are doing this now, and there are also open collaborative textbook projects.
And I personally think that it is weird to write books during your working hour, and also get monet from selling that book.
This is the most ignorant response I've seen yet. We don't expect monetary gain from publishing a book. We expect our costs to be covered.
This is about the consumer, not the publisher. If we lived in a socialist system, they would still pirate our publications and we will still be in debt over it.
Nobody teaches it, and nobody writes books about it (not that anyone reads anymore)