[IP] whether prices are excessive. [with comment by editor]

[David Farber <dave@farber.net>]

________________________________________
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
>
>
>
> -------------------------------------------
>



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