[IP] Are books updated to give an excuse to charge students more?

[David Farber <dave@farber.net>]

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From: Paul Levy [plevy@citizen.org]
Sent: Tuesday, July 08, 2008 8:28 AM
To: David Farber
Subject: Are books updated to give an excuse to charge students more?

slightly corrected to fix typo in subject line, and to snip out parts of message to which I respond


I cannot speak to the current market in textbooks, but for about ten years, from the mid-80's to the mid-90's,  I was the overall editor of a looseleaf labor law treatise.  The publisher (a company since absorbed by larger fish) required us to produce looseleaf replacements on a regular basis, with a certain minimum number of pages per release.  When certain areas did not change enough to produce replacement pages, we were encouraged to find appendix materials that could be added or replaced.  And when this lagged at various points, I was told in no uncertain terms that if we did not produce a sufficient volume of releases, sufficient to justify continuing profits at the expense of current subscribers, the publisher was going to drop the book.

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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

As for frequently-changing editions, it's gratuitous to suggest that they're changed solely to force students to buy new books. 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.

snip

Paul Alan Levy
Public Citizen Litigation Group
1600 - 20th Street, N.W.
Washington, D.C. 20009
(202) 588-1000
http://www.citizen.org/litigation



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