Re: [uug] off-topic: textbooks

[Jacob Fugal]

<disclaimer>
This has nothing to do with the textbook price differential on a global 
scale (which the article did) but with the textbook market in general.
</disclaimer>

<apology>
I understand that some/most textbooks are more expensive than they 
should be, and I do my fair share of complaining about textbook prices, 
but really, there's a reason for a good portion of the high prices.

If I publish a popular fiction novel (a la Tom Clancy, et al), I can 
expect to sell millions of copies and recoup the publishing cost for a 
low sale price. But if I'm publishing a new Group Theory math textbook, 
I'm probably lucky if I can sell into 6 digits. I'll probably be stuck 
at tens of thousands of copies. Even if I do make it into hundreds of 
thousands, we're still off by a factor of at least ten in sales volume. 
Not all of the publishing cost is linear in number of copies produced, 
and there's a portion, probably large, which is independent of the 
volume sold. So in order to recoup the publishing cost, the sales price 
has to go up. Maybe not by a factor of 10-100, but we can see why a 
small audience math text book costs 8 times as much as the latest Tom 
Clancy novel.
</apology>

<rant>
The problem with the whole textbook situation, IMO, is that the choice 
in which books to buy is taken from the consumer and placed in the hands 
of a third party, the professor. I have no problem paying $50 for 
"Design Patterns", because I *want* to buy it and I'm willing to pay 
that much. That's the way the market works -- you can charge whatever 
people are willing to pay. But when I'm *told* what book to buy, and 
have no *choice* but to do so (because, as in the instance of my 
brother's American Heritage class, it contains worksheets that must be 
turned in in class and *cannot* be photocopies), then I don't even 
*like* it, I have a problem. The market's not working because the 
publisher doesn't set the price based on what he expects consumers will 
pay, but based on what he expects professors to tolerate when they 
choose which books to force on their students. This is invariably 
higher. The choice of the actual consumer, which should include the 
choice not to buy, has been removed from the equation.
</rant>

Jacob Fugal

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