More on the cost of scientific and medical publications

In addition to all the other issues that keep prices artificially high and out of the reach of even professionals, scientific, technical, and medical manuals impose an additional bit of mocking formality.

The bibliography, the part of a book or article where you check the author's background information, has to be formatted differently according to standard style guides.

The Chicago Manual of Style sez (subscription required):

For a book with two authors, note that only the first-listed name is inverted in the bibliography entry.
2. Geoffrey C. Ward and Ken Burns, The War: An Intimate History, 1941–1945 (New York: Knopf, 2007), 52.
Ward, Geoffrey C., and Ken Burns. The War: An Intimate History, 1941–1945. New York: Knopf, 2007.
...
For a book with four or more authors, list all the authors in the bibliography entry.

The AMA Style Guide, meanwhile, sez something quite different  (subscription required):

Use the author's surname followed by initials without periods. In listed references, the names of all authors should be given 
unless there are more than 6, in which case the names of the first 3 authors are used, followed by “et al.”
 2 authors:
 Doe JF, Roe JP III.

There are other, even more insidious nuances in the style guides. So, if you want to publish your book in a medical journal, you have edit your bibliographic entries one way and use another for other journals. you get to spend hours changing names to or from initials, adding or removing et alii, all in the name of pseudoscientific writing.