Textbook costs: An author’s side

Comments:

• Liviu says:

  August 24, 2006 at 9:23 am

  Hi,

  I read the post and it’s the same old argument used by the music industry or the pharma industry that in buying their products you actually “buy the failures that made one suceess out of a hundred” too.

  While this argument has some merit, the devil is in the details as usual, so I would not take at face value anything said by an industry in its own interests; the sad examples of misdirection and outright lying by this or that industry are too numerous and well publicized to recount here. What I liked though in that post is introduction of some ideas to improve things.

  The easy legal access to cheaper identical foreign market editions of many textbooks, the wealth of free information on the net and the work of groups of teachers and students in many places to create their own local manuals on the web starts to have an effect…

  Liviu
• pond says:

  August 25, 2006 at 10:24 am

  I notice he writes, ‘i have nothing against ebooks, i wish my textbook were offered as an ebook’ Good for him.

  His main query is, ‘why do textbooks cost so much?’ And he goes on to blame college bookstores, without offering any figures on where the money for first sale goes to.

  But I do notice one interesting thing that distinguishes textbooks from most other segments of the book publishing business: according to Mr Grabe, it seems a lot of money goes into marketing the book – hiring professors to review initial chapters, hiring others to review the completed manuscript, sending out free copies to professors around the country to entice them to require the book for their classes.

  Mr Grabe also comments that the textbook publishing industry is incredibly competitive, which is not exactly true as it is in other publishing areas. Textbooks are sold on a sort of quasi-monopoly system. The readers do not get to compare intro psych textbooks and pick one they like (maybe one criterion would be cover price?) – rather, the professor picks the text that all his students are required to purchase. Intro Psych is likely to have huge class sizes and is offered at just about every college and university, so it may turn out for a large school that the psych faculty as a whole determines that Psychbook A will be the standard text for all the classes of Intro Psych at the school, no matter who gets assigned to teach it. One small group of faculty thus determines what 1,000′s of reader-students must purchase. And we must note that these faculty members do not pay to purchase the book, in fact they got their copies for free from publishers eager to be selected as the required text. Indeed, there are no few professors who choose their own books as the standard text for their classes.

  Thus there is a disconnect between who pays for the book, and who decides which book must be bought. There is also a fierce competition among publishers — not to appeal to the readers and purchasers of the books, but to the demand-economy professors who assign the text to their students.

  I imagine that if school departments had to pay for the texts themselves, and provide the books to the students for free (as part of tuition fees), that there would be rather more downward pressure on textbook prices.

  Under the current system, there is usually none.