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Re: why books are expensive
From: David Farber <dave () farber net>
Date: Tue, 8 Jul 2008 12:17:45 -0700
________________________________________ From: John Levine [johnl () iecc com] Sent: Tuesday, July 08, 2008 3:15 PM To: David Farber Subject: Re: [IP] Re: why books are expensive
the Dragon book at $106). If textbooks books were available electronically for download, the retailer/printer/wholesaler segments would mostly disappear and the overall cost would be on the order of $20.
Having been in the book business for a while, I also have to disagree. When you're publishing a book, any book, there's a big fixed cost to create the book, involving the author, editors, artists, typesetters, and so forth. For the books I've written, which have a streamlined editorial process and a very simple production process (one color, standard design template), the cost to get a book out the door is still well over $100K. Textbooks, being larger and having much more complex design and structure, frequently multiple colors, are probably two or three times that. So a large chunk of the cost of a textbook is going to be the same whether it's delivered on paper or on bits. In view of the small retail discounts on textbooks, I doubt that more than $25 of a $100 textbook goes to distribution and printing, and anyway the distribtution cost doesn't go away if they're selling PDFs. It's pretty clear to me that textbooks that sell a lot of copies can be cheaper than books that sell only a few copies, since the fixed cost amortized per copy is less. So a really good way for professors to help their students avoid textbook sticker shock is to use, whenever possible, the same text they used last year, and the same text that other professors use. Different isn't necessarily better, and in this case, different is frequently worse. Regards, John Levine, johnl () iecc com, Primary Perpetrator of "The Internet for Dummies", Information Superhighwayman wanna-be, http://www.johnlevine.com, ex-Mayor "More Wiener schnitzel, please", said Tom, revealingly. ------------------------------------------- Archives: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/247/=now RSS Feed: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/rss/247/ Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com
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- Re: why books are expensive David Farber (Jul 08)