Re: whether prices are excessive. [with comment by editor]

[David Farber <dave () farber net>]

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



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