[IP] Re: whether prices are excessive.

[David Farber <dave@farber.net>]

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From: Dennis Allison [drallison@gmail.com]
Sent: Tuesday, July 08, 2008 11:22 AM
To: David Farber
Cc: ip
Subject: Re: [IP] whether prices are excessive.

For IP if you wish:

Mary makes the case for electronic textbooks.  She breaks the textbooks cost into segments (retailer 2, author 1, publisher 1, printer 1, and wholesaler 1) and then assumes a $60 price for the text--a bit misleading since textbooks frequently cost a lot more than that.  (Hennessey and Patterson lists at $85, 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.



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