Interesting People mailing list archives
whether prices are excessive. [with comment by editor]
From: David Farber <dave () farber net>
Date: Tue, 8 Jul 2008 06:57:12 -0700
________________________________________ From: Harry Hochheiser [hshoch () gmail com] Sent: Tuesday, July 08, 2008 9:55 AM To: David Farber Cc: ip Subject: Re: [IP] Re: whether prices are excessive. [with comment by editor] Dave: O'Reilly offers such a service - try safariu.com (Note - I have no affiliation with O'Reilly, and I am not a safari u customer). When I checked this out a year or two ago, it seemed like it had a lot of potentially good, but back-catalog content. Not a bad way to squeeze a few dollars out of books that probably wouldn't sell anymore. Speaking as a CS prof. who is inundated with textbooks, I will say that there are _lots_ of books that do get updated on an amazingly frequent basis, but nobody forces faculty to update to the latest edition just because it's there. Count me among those who say "use an earlier edition if you'd like". I a bit surprised that IP readers have not said too much about some of the excellent sources of online texts out there. From excellent CS books such as "How to Design Programs" or "How to Think like a Computer Scientist" (Java/C++/Python versions), to wikibooks, www.freetechbooks.com, www.techbooksforfree.com, http://freecomputerbooks.com, there's a ton of stuff out there that could be used relatively easily. Not just in computer science - the National Library of Medicine, for example, has full text of several classic biology texts. -Harry On Tue, Jul 8, 2008 at 9:03 AM, David Farber <dave () farber net> wrote:
My memory says that there were endless attempts to "revolutionize" text book publishing. Xerox and others proposed custom editions produced cheeply on high speed copiers, There were proposals for books composed with chapters from different authors. There were endless variations that got NO WHERE. WHY!!! Maybe Amazon should try Kindle editions? Dave ________________________________________ From: James Grimmelmann [james.grimmelmann () gmail com] On Behalf Of James Grimmelmann [james () grimmelmann net] Sent: Tuesday, July 08, 2008 8:38 AM To: David Farber Cc: mary.shaw () gmail com Subject: Re: [IP] whether prices are excessive. On Jul 8, 2008, at 7:57 AM, David Farber wrote:________________________________________ From: Mary Shaw [mary.shaw () gmail com] Sent: Monday, July 07, 2008 10:06 PM To: Sunil Garg; David Farber Subject: Re: [IP] The real meaning of the Act of 'Civil Disobedience'<snip>Divide the retail price of a book into six roughly equal segments -- 15-20% per segment. Two parts (40%) goes to the retailer for rent, salaries, stocking books, etc One part (15%) goes to the wholesaler for warehousing, distribution, etc One part goes to the publisher for editing, business risk (fronting the money), marketing One part goes to the printer for putting ink on paper and binding the volume One part goes to the author. For a $60 textbook, that's about $10/part.$60? Perhaps I see the cause of this disagreement. At Amazon, the best-selling textbook in: organic chemistry is $185.80 list (http://www.amazon.com/Organic-Chemistry-5th-Ace/dp/0131963163) calculus is $178.36 list (http://www.amazon.com/Calculus-Analytic-Geometry-8th-Larson/dp/061850298X ) algorithms is $82.00 list (http://www.amazon.com/Introduction-Algorithms-Thomas-H-Cormen/dp/0262032937 ) anthropology is $127.00 list (http://www.amazon.com/Anthropology-12th-Carol-R-Ember/dp/0132277530) property law is $142.00 list (http://www.amazon.com/Property-James-E-Krier/dp/0735557926/) pathology is $116.00 list (http://www.amazon.com/Robbins-Cotran-Pathologic-Disease-Seventh/dp/0721601871 ) And so on. In some fields, there's a lot of diversity in prices. Others have been effectively cartelized by the major publishers. Some of my (law) students can't afford to buy all their books at the start of the semester and have to space out their purchases.The retail markup seems to be in line with general retail practice. A low-visibility cost to the publisher is fronting the money to edit and print a text that doesn't compete well in the market. A few years ago I paid my printer $3-4/copy for 250-300 pages softbound, so $10-15 per copy for a large textbook doesn't seem out of line. For textbooks, author royalties used to go 10-15%, higher as volume goes up, so that's about right. As I noted earlier, it doesn't pay the author very much per hour. Note that the author does get a cut of the income. This isn't like the music industry, where a common complaint is that the performer isn't getting any of the income. So which of these parts is exorbitantly expensive? As for frequently-changing editions, it's gratuitous to suggest that they're changed solely to force students to buy new books.In my experience talking to textbook authors, the main pressure they get from publishers is to make enough changes to justify a new, differently-paginated edition.Particularly in computer science, the material changes. For some large freshman courses, university-specific editions are sometimes printed to keep the size and cost of the book down by including only the chapters required for the course. One way to get the cost of textbooks down would be to sidestep the retailer. For example, a student could sign up at course registration time to get the books automatically, and a distributor could make up individualized text packages and ship them in bulk to a university dispensary. Given the lead time, it seems like this could take a third off the top of the price. Another possibility to explore would be sets of monographs rather than monolithic textbooks. That, however, has integration problems of various kinds.All three of these are good ideas, especially if combined. Note that if we went to free PDF online textbooks, that would cut out everything except the physical printing costs, and students could choose to forego even those if they had to. Those textbooks could be built up from individual modules that a professor would add and remove as necessary. The transition may take some time as professors adjust, but I expect that there will be enough people willing to write instructional materials as a form of professional service to create high-quality textbooks without a textbook industry. James ------------------------------------------- Archives: http://www.listbox.com/member/archive/247/=now RSS Feed: http://www.listbox.com/member/archive/rss/247/ Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com
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- Re: whether prices are excessive. [with comment by editor] David Farber (Jul 08)
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- whether prices are excessive. [with comment by editor] David Farber (Jul 08)