Publishing genealogy books has always been an expensive undertaking. Most genealogy books are self-published by the authors. That is, each author pays all the printing costs and then tries to recover his or her expenses by selling individual copies of the book. Publishing expenses typically run several thousand dollars, even tens of thousands if you wish to publish a lot of books. Then the author has to learn new business skills in order to warehouse and advertise the books, take orders, pack them, ship them, and keep track of all the finances.
Of course, no genealogy book is ever really "finished." Corrections and newly discovered information should be added, but that is difficult to do with printed volumes. I would also suggest that collaborative efforts are not well served by traditional printed books; many who buy the books could add supplemental information about extended relatives if there was a mechanism for doing so.
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