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tbrown wrote:

The Annoyed Man wrote:Well that's just pure corruption. It literally costs pennies to reproduce an electronic file. I'm amazed.

Why? They're following a model very similar to iTunes. Buying a whole album from iTunes costs about the same as buying the physical CD. They cut down production and distribution costs, but the consumer doesn't share the savings.

What's funny about that is that I haven't bought a CD in ages. I pretty much buy from iTunes only. Where the analogy breaks down is the ability to buy single songs. I might not like all the songs on a CD. With iTunes, I don't have to buy all of them. But for me, that is neither here nor there, because the price of a CD is pretty small potatoes, so any potential cost differential between the CD format and the digital format isn't going to break the bank—whereas the cost differential between an electronic book file and the printed version is much harder to defend.

Anyway, I don't really have a dog in the hunt.....at least not at this time. As I posted previously, I can understand that textbooks would probably cost more than books of popular literature due to the difference in the unit cost of production (I have a background in the printing industry). With smaller press runs, there are fewer copies over which to amortize the fixed costs of running a press. But some of the practices described in this thread seem to be overtly usurious.....and this from institutions which are allegedly promoting education.

apostate wrote:

The Annoyed Man wrote:Academia ought to be called out on the ecological impact of their revisions. The rational way to do textbooks in this day and age is to have students buy a Kindle, or a Nook, or an iPad (or some other similar technology costing a fraction of a semester's book budget), and make the textbooks available for download at a very reduced price. The technology costs a small portion of a total book budget; the books can sell for much less money; the cost of producing electronic revisions is vastly less expensive than reprinting a book; you get to save a tree; you only need to buy the device once and you can resell it if you decide you don't want to keep it upon graduation........WHY AREN'T THEY ALREADY DOING THIS????

Oh, but they are doing it, except for the part about "a very reduced price."

Let me give you an example from the class I'm taking now. The electronic version of the textbook (from the publisher) costs roughly 3/4 of the campus bookstore price for a new book. That sounds like a nice discount. However, it's single user and non-transferable. It's also more than I paid Amazon for the new textbook plus Monster Hunter Vendetta.

Well that's just pure corruption. It literally costs pennies to reproduce an electronic file. I'm amazed. I'm also glad that school is behind me......for now. I had planned on perhaps attending a seminary after I retire. Hopefully, their book prices would be less usurous. Accountability to a higher power, and all that.....

My mother authored a couple of textbooks for French classes. Guess which books she used when she taught her own classes? The cost back then wasn't even close to today's prices, but I seem to remember that it went for about $25 or so, and this was back in the 1970s. OTH, she didn't get rich on it either. In the end, she pretty much did it for the love of teaching, because I'll bet that she didn't make more than a penny an hour for all the tons of time she put into it—if she made anything at all.

The cold hard reality of textbook pricing (even if you remove the university's artificially induced overpricing) is that they just aren't published in large enough numbers, compared to commercial fiction for instance, to keep the unit production cost down. Add in that the authors deserve to get paid for their work, the distribution network costs have to be covered, and the publisher needs to make a profit, and the retail cost per unit goes up considerably.

That may not change the fact that a given university's bookstore is run by crooks and enforces insane policies, but even if they were run by Mother Teresa, the books would still be pretty expensive. Academia ought to be called out on the ecological impact of their revisions. The rational way to do textbooks in this day and age is to have students buy a Kindle, or a Nook, or an iPad (or some other similar technology costing a fraction of a semester's book budget), and make the textbooks available for download at a very reduced price. The technology costs a small portion of a total book budget; the books can sell for much less money; the cost of producing electronic revisions is vastly less expensive than reprinting a book; you get to save a tree; you only need to buy the device once and you can resell it if you decide you don't want to keep it upon graduation........WHY AREN'T THEY ALREADY DOING THIS????