[IP] Re: why books are expensive

[David Farber <dave@farber.net>]

________________________________________
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.





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