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$243 for Sony e-book on Balzac’s short fiction? But wait! How about the $6.4K Kindle nuclear engineering e-book?
May 8, 2009 | 9:46 am
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By David Rothman
If you were a scholar, would you or your cash-strapped academic library pay $243 for Sony’s DRMed e-book version of Balzac’s Shorter Fictions: Genesis and Genre?
Even if the publisher is the prestigious Oxford University Press and the reviews are glowing?
The p-book version featured at Amazon goes for $299.00 new, just $56 more. You can buy other copies via Amazon for $186.40 new and used paper codies for $50.48 on up.
Length of the paper edition is 370 pages, which means that the e-book version is selling for the equivalent of 65 cents a page.
The probable excuses
Oh, I can see OUP saying, “We provided wonderful editing for a respectfully reviewed, low-demand item, and it’s worth every penny. Didn’t Modern Language Review say that the book ‘is the best English-language book on Balzac to appear for at least a generation’?”
But is it possible that such a stellar book, in both E and P, would lead to an Amazon sales rank of better than #5,281,358 in paper format if Oxford dropped the price a tad?
In case you’re curious, the author is Tim Farrant, who is or has been a “Fellow and Tutor in Modern Languages, French” at Pembroke College at Oxford University.
I wonder what Dr. Tarrant and certain other scholars are thinking about the extravagant prices that their titles are going for? Also, what are the lessons for e-bookdom as a whole? And for academia? Is it possible that the quality of scholarship would rise if Oxford and other publishers used the new medium to make books more inexpensive?
Will Amazon’s new textbook-optimized Kindle DX widen the market for Shorter Fiction once it is available in the K format? The DX itself sells for $489. Still, technology isn’t free and the $489 is far less than double the price of a single e-book—the Sony edition of Balzac’s Shorter Fictions.
There are much higher e-book prices than the one for Shorter Fictions, by the way—for example, $6,431.20 for the Kindle edition of the admittedly specialized Selected Nuclear Materials and Engineering Systems (part 4), listing for $8,039 in hardback from Materials Science International—the publisher is Springer. (This book was previously mentioned on TeleRead by Chris Meadows.) But the Balzac example stands out because its audience is in the humanities—hardly the best-funded area of scholarship.
Meanwhile thanks to Mike Cane, thrifty bibliophile, for spotting the Balzac e-book.
Reminder: In case you didn’t pick up on it already, Oxford University Press is the real culprit here—not Sony or Amazon.
Also of interest: Steve Jordan’s just-posted item on the Kindle DX, which includes discussion of book prices.
Technorati Tags: Oxford University Press,Balzac
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Comments:
(sigh)
You said it yourself:
Textbooks are priced at a level to recover the costs of production over the number of copies they expect to sell. While a textbook on nuclear engineering is admittedly a smaller market than a Balzac textbook, any textbook is going to have a relatively tiny number of sales compared to a mainstream novel, let alone a bestseller. Lowering the price is not going to increase sales beyond the number of people who would normally buy textbooks, either.
The labor costs of production are also going to be higher on a textbook than on a typical novel – if for no other reason that the people putting them together are typically higher-paid professionals. (How much does it cost to hire a nuclear engineer?)
So – higher costs, lower sales volume. Nothing mysterious about that at all.
But Travis, that’s $6.4K for a textbook. If the audience is so small, why isn’t the professor overseeing a wiki or whatever? The good news, if you follow the link Chris inserted, is that the material is also available via free PDFs. Apparently, because of this, few copies are sold. But even if that’s the case, then why can’t someone more cheaply reproduce the PDFs, for which the authors are not getting compensation?
As for the Balzac textbook, it is specialized—but not that that specialized. It isn’t as if Balzac is a minor writer. Assuming volume is so low, maybe the marketers have been dozing.
Thanks,
David
Point of order: not free PDFs, but accessible PDFs if your institution pays for the (undoubtedly quite expensive) abstract service that they’re available on.
Er. Let me try this again since it appears to have completely failed to get through.
Textbooks are not mass-market books. They have an inherently limited audience and will not sell significantly outside of that audience, no matter how far you drop the price. Balzac may be a great author, but the number of people who read him outside of a literature class is small, the number of people who’ll read a critical analysis of him smaller still. Go out onto the street of someplace other than a college town and ask how many people have heard of Balzac? 1%? 0.1%? 0.01%? I’d be willing to bet that you could drop the price to $10, and it wouldn’t increase the sales by more than a few percentage points – not even remotely close enough to make up the loss in revenue.
Textbooks are not mass-market books, part II: They are not written to try and catch the general public’s interest, on speculation as it were. They are written to fill a specific academic need, by experts who expect to be paid well for their time. Why isn’t the author “overseeing a wiki or whatever”? Because it takes them a lot of effort to assemble the material, and they’re not going to do it for free! Expertise costs money and experts expect to get paid when hired to do a job.
(The so-called “free copies” Chris mentioned? They came from a subscription service, meaning they were paid for by Stanford and other universities via that academic subscription – and from what I’ve heard, those subscriptions are not cheap, $20,000-60,000/year or more. Those were not “free copies” to the university. And I would be shocked if the authors were not receiving compensation from the subscription service.)
But publishing something for $243 is hardly ‘publishing’ at all. I know nothing about Tim Farrant, but I assume that he actually wants people to read his book. And if he is a typical academic author of non-fiction, he already knows that he won’t get back anything like adequate remuneration for his time spent writing it. On the other hand, given his position, it is reasonable to assume that the materials used in the book have already brought him income in the form of lecturing and tutoring fees. He would almost certainly have been better off releasing the book on Lulu for a small price — or even for free — and relying on the sales to increase his profile and promote his scholarship for other services. He is unlikely to have made less, and he had a chance of making much more.
Unfortunately, major publishers still have a high and undeserved level of prestige. As the co-author of a book which is in the hands of a major publisher, I have learned the hard way just how little they do to deserve that reputation.
(arghs in frustration)
Let me try this one last time, and see if it gets through. (gets out clue sledgehammer)
TEXTBOOKS.
ARE.
NOT.
MASS.
MARKET.
BOOKS.
Period.
Do textbook authors want people to read their books? Yes! They expect people to read their books as part of an academic curriculum, which is what they are designed for. They are not written for general leisure reading, but for professors to use in a classroom setting. Not surprisingly, this tends to limit their market to students. The vast majority of textbooks are bought because they are picked by the people designing a course – not from generating grassroots demand for them among students. Textbooks do not play by the rules of general-market sales. Why is this so hard for people to understand?
And no, someone who writes textbooks is not a ‘typical academic author of non-fiction.’ Textbooks are not written ‘on speculation’ (as I specifically pointed out above) with a hope for getting sales and royalties from the general marketplace; they are ordered for production for the specific student market, which is both limited and can be estimated with far greater precision than the general population. Textbook authors do not, from what I know, expect to ‘get back anything’ from writing a textbook, in the sense that a mass-market author does; they expect to be paid a commensurate fee for the work up-front, in the same way a freelance author gets paid up-front for writing a software manual.
In a way, it’s kind of like role-playing games, which sort of live in a strange grey area between mass-market books and textbooks.
A role-playing game book is a very technical document, providing a set of rules to follows and supplemental material to use to achieve a desired outcome. Not too much unlike a textbook, which is also rules to follow and/or supplemental material to achieve the outcome of education.
But are most people going to select a tabletop role-playing game from their bookshelf and sit down with it for a little light leisure reading? Nope. (Well, all right, maybe some hard-core gamers will, but not most people.)
As a result, the market for role-playing games is limited to that subset of people who are seeking to produce that desired outcome. It’s a pretty small market now that everyone’s playing video games.
And while role-playing game books don’t cost in the hundreds of dollars like textbooks, it is not uncommon to see them going for as high as $40 to $50, especially if it’s a really thick book (like Nobilis 2nd Ed. or Spycraft 2nd Ed.). Just the three most basic books of D&D 4th Ed. will run you $100.
Members of a certain class of gamer frequently and vocally complain about these high prices, and consider themselves justified in downloading pirated copies because RPG publishers are “price-gouging”. (Not at all unlike those textbook scan and download sites I’ve heard about, come to think of it.)
They don’t understand the economic realities of the situation: fixed costs being what they are, gaming publishers have to charge high prices if they want to recoup their investment in publishing the books. Just as textbook publishers do.
Mr Butler? My heart goes out to you.
May I suggest a simple metaphor?
A formula 1 car has the same number of wheels as Toyota Camry. It has an engine and a gas tank just like a Camry. A seat and steering wheel and pedals, more or less like a Camry. But if you put a Camry driver inside an F! racer he won’t know how to effectively drive the car.
(Might get himself killed, too.)
Egalitarianism is all good and well, but there is no subsitute for actual brains and skill.
The number of people who can actually benefit from a Critique on Balzac or a Nuclear engineering text book is *NOT*, repeat; NOT constrained by the pricing or accessibility of the content but by the prerequisite skill and training needed to appreciate and actually use the material.
Going back to F1:
Racing cars cost millions of dollars because the total R&D costs (not. cheap.) must be amortized over a production run of almost nothing. Anything divided by nothing is going to be a really big number (third-grade math, right?). Building them by the thousand will only lead to a parking lot full of unsold cars. (Just ask Chrysler where that leads you.)
Fair enough, guys?
Now, Mr Butler, please stop banging your forehead on the wall. (The neighbors are complaining.)