the good old days: free textbooks from publishers

[apl68]

They don't actually make all that much per book, once the revisions, printing costs, permissions, development and layout costs, etc. are all figured in.

The urban myth that they're soaking students is not really founded in fact.

Books cost a lot, I agree, but that's because they cost a lot to make.

The whole system is indurated, which is why online materials will eventually be the only sustainable means of publication.

M.

Yeah, I don't buy it. A calculus text costs $240 to purchase, and I don't know what kind of permissions are necessary for such a text. Maybe printing in full color is expensive, but they could have used a cheaper greyscale process and reduced the cost of the textbook accordingly.

Springer charges just $25 for a print on demand copy of my $110 600 page research monograph, and the print quality is truly no worse than the regular edition of the book. So, I'm still struggling to see what goes into the $240 per calculus text which is sold in ridiculously high volumes.

I can perhaps understand small university presses specializing in low volume research monographs struggling, but I have absolutely no sympathy for the large commerical publishers.

I don't know the economics of textbook publishing, but I do know that printing costs for a physical book are usually a relatively small part of the overall price--unless it's a small print run.  So if some common textbooks are indeed coming out in regular, pricey new editions that usually incorporate minimal changes, then I'm inclined to suspect profiteering.

At any rate, going to e-editions only isn't likely to save much money in the long run.  The circulating e-books that libraries buy for their patrons are not a bargain, that's for sure.  They usually cost more than the same title would cost for an individual purchaser AND they are usually metered so that they go away after a certain number of checkouts--in other words, we're not really buying them, we're only leasing.

[kaysixteen]

Obviously STEM is different, but your grandfather's Latin 101 text should be fine for his grandson today.   IOW, reprint houses should allow easy and cheap effective textbooks for any subject like this.

[mleok]

I don't know the economics of textbook publishing, but I do know that printing costs for a physical book are usually a relatively small part of the overall price--unless it's a small print run.  So if some common textbooks are indeed coming out in regular, pricey new editions that usually incorporate minimal changes, then I'm inclined to suspect profiteering.

The shift towards e-books is not about reducing publishing cost, it's about controlling access using digital rights management. A physical book has the pesky ability to be resold without any further profit to the publisher.

[mleok]

Definitely. Look online for the "international versions" of textbooks. They're way lower priced, usually paperback instead of hardcover but otherwise identical. If publishers were losing money on them, they wouldn't be printing and selling them.

Yes, I have a bunch of these international editions from when I travel to China, perfectly serviceable for one-tenth of the US price, and it's better for a student to have a slightly flimsy physical copy that they can afford to keep, as opposed to a hardcover copy that they have to resell or lease.

For that matter, when I was an undergraduate, the abstract algebra text I used was available in Singapore for a third of the US price, despite the fact that it was the exact same hardcover book sold and printed in the US, and then shipped to Singapore.

[downer]

I don't know the economics of textbook publishing, but I do know that printing costs for a physical book are usually a relatively small part of the overall price--unless it's a small print run.  So if some common textbooks are indeed coming out in regular, pricey new editions that usually incorporate minimal changes, then I'm inclined to suspect profiteering.

The shift towards e-books is not about reducing publishing cost, it's about controlling access using digital rights management. A physical book has the pesky ability to be resold without any further profit to the publisher.

True. But college bookstores would still make a fair profit from selling used books.

One of the issues for e-versions of textbooks is that often it's possible to find a free PDF of them somewhere on the net. Some sites sell the e-books for a low cost. It doesn't take much searching to find recommendations about how to do that. No one makes any profit from their distribution, apart from maybe some Russians.

[dismalist]

But college bookstores would still make a fair profit from selling used books.

If and only if the instructors assign them! The instructor determines what to buy. The student just follows orders and signs the check.

Same for pdf's. Instructor has to find them and assign them.

Instructors' laziness is turned into profit!

[Aster]

Today I got an email from one of our publishing reps, asking if I wanted any extra copies of anything sent to me.

It was a spammed email sent out to hundreds of faculty.

[mleok]

One of the issues for e-versions of textbooks is that often it's possible to find a free PDF of them somewhere on the net. Some sites sell the e-books for a low cost. It doesn't take much searching to find recommendations about how to do that. No one makes any profit from their distribution, apart from maybe some Russians.

Even before e-books, it was possible to obtain scanned copies of physical textbooks...

[dismalist]

One of the issues for e-versions of textbooks is that often it's possible to find a free PDF of them somewhere on the net. Some sites sell the e-books for a low cost. It doesn't take much searching to find recommendations about how to do that. No one makes any profit from their distribution, apart from maybe some Russians.

Even before e-books, it was possible to obtain scanned copies of physical textbooks...

And before that there was copying by hand. They could even have been illuminated.

[dismalist]

And there's this other thing, US copyright law.

As a general rule, for works created after January 1, 1978, copyright protection lasts for the life of the author plus an additional 70 years. Before then it was 56 years max from application [28 + 28 upon renewal].

The point of copyright law is to encourage innovation. It's very difficult to conceive of an innovator being encouraged by copyright to create after his or her first innovation, as the discounted value of the monies after 30 - 40 years go to zero. And it's difficult to continue to innovate after you're dead. Must be the current holders of the copyright, gamblers and rent seekers all, who benefit.

"Most copyrighted works become commercially worthless within a decade or two. But a small minority of famous works from the 1920s and 1930s were still generating significant revenues in the 1990s. Retroactively extending copyright terms meant an enormous windfall for the companies and families that owned the copyrights."

More reasonable copyright law would even help academia, for undergraduate education is not as innovative substantively as some would like to think. There is plenty of use for the commercially worthless copyrighted works of 10 to 20 years ago.

[apl68]

We've had an unusual number of local students wanting our library to get their textbooks for them.  We can't do that, since if we did it for one we'd have to do it for everybody, and we don't have that kind of budget.  The best we can do is try to give them an idea of where they can get the best deals.  A staff member with a daughter currently in college has found that Amazon has good rental deals for some items.

[Vkw10]

I don't know the economics of textbook publishing, but I do know that printing costs for a physical book are usually a relatively small part of the overall price--unless it's a small print run.  So if some common textbooks are indeed coming out in regular, pricey new editions that usually incorporate minimal changes, then I'm inclined to suspect profiteering.

The shift towards e-books is not about reducing publishing cost, it's about controlling access using digital rights management. A physical book has the pesky ability to be resold without any further profit to the publisher.

The librarian on our textbook affordability task force spent some time discussing e-texts with us. Most literary works and works with a broad non-academic market either aren't sold in "lendable" versions or are sold with digital rights management (DRM) that significantly limits number of downloads. Most e-books that are intended to be used as textbooks aren't sold in "lendable" versions; when they are "lendable", the publisher often charges $1000 or more for the "lendable" version. The $120 math e-textbook bought on Amazon isn't lendable, because it can only be used on a device registered to the buyer's Amazon account.

E-textbooks are rarely less expensive for students, too. Renting e-textbooks may be less expensive than buying, but they aren't cheap. And custom print editions from the big publishers are usually impossible for students to sell, so they don't really help with affordability.

[apl68]

I don't know the economics of textbook publishing, but I do know that printing costs for a physical book are usually a relatively small part of the overall price--unless it's a small print run.  So if some common textbooks are indeed coming out in regular, pricey new editions that usually incorporate minimal changes, then I'm inclined to suspect profiteering.

The shift towards e-books is not about reducing publishing cost, it's about controlling access using digital rights management. A physical book has the pesky ability to be resold without any further profit to the publisher.

The librarian on our textbook affordability task force spent some time discussing e-texts with us. Most literary works and works with a broad non-academic market either aren't sold in "lendable" versions or are sold with digital rights management (DRM) that significantly limits number of downloads. Most e-books that are intended to be used as textbooks aren't sold in "lendable" versions; when they are "lendable", the publisher often charges $1000 or more for the "lendable" version. The $120 math e-textbook bought on Amazon isn't lendable, because it can only be used on a device registered to the buyer's Amazon account.

E-textbooks are rarely less expensive for students, too. Renting e-textbooks may be less expensive than buying, but they aren't cheap. And custom print editions from the big publishers are usually impossible for students to sell, so they don't really help with affordability.

The staff member I mentioned above told me that some of her daughter's textbooks, like composition readers and math class problem books, are custom jobs put together by the instructor.  I've seen a couple of these.  Those items wouldn't be re-sellable.  I don't think we've been able to GIVE away examples that have been donated to our library.

Wonder how widespread this custom textbook idea is now?  All I can recall seeing when I worked at a university was the photocopied course packs of supplementary readings that some instructors put together.  We had a staff member at the Interlibrary Loan department whose main job was doing copyright clearance on course packs.

[AvidReader]

It is common in my experience, which has mostly been community colleges and regional state schools. Two or three past schools used "custom" Little, Brown Handbooks, and my most recent uni had a custom composition textbook assembled by members of the department. I have hated every one of them. At one uni, "custom" meant they added "instructor-written" grammar exercises at the back of the LBH (funnily enough, these and the answers were widespread on the internet); at another, they deleted all the (useful, IMO) bits about audience and how to write for academia and pasted the university's (readily available) grading scale in the front. My most recent uni's custom composition textbook did not have any guidance for writing or even citing but was a collection of news and other articles taken off the internet and sometimes lightly edited with some paper prompts suggested; it was genuinely the worst textbook I've ever had to use, though the fact that all the sources were available online meant that I could have students go to the relevant online articles when they (invariably) failed to bring the textbook to class.

I don't know the costs of the past books, but the retail cost for the most recent one was over $300, though students could rent it through the university for about $50 and only paid full price if they didn't return it (or returned it late). When I expressed surprise at the cost, I was told that the dept. got a kickback from the publisher for each rented copy and that we used that money to furnish dept. classrooms.

AR.

[apl68]

It is common in my experience, which has mostly been community colleges and regional state schools. Two or three past schools used "custom" Little, Brown Handbooks, and my most recent uni had a custom composition textbook assembled by members of the department. I have hated every one of them. At one uni, "custom" meant they added "instructor-written" grammar exercises at the back of the LBH (funnily enough, these and the answers were widespread on the internet); at another, they deleted all the (useful, IMO) bits about audience and how to write for academia and pasted the university's (readily available) grading scale in the front. My most recent uni's custom composition textbook did not have any guidance for writing or even citing but was a collection of news and other articles taken off the internet and sometimes lightly edited with some paper prompts suggested; it was genuinely the worst textbook I've ever had to use, though the fact that all the sources were available online meant that I could have students go to the relevant online articles when they (invariably) failed to bring the textbook to class.

I don't know the costs of the past books, but the retail cost for the most recent one was over $300, though students could rent it through the university for about $50 and only paid full price if they didn't return it (or returned it late). When I expressed surprise at the cost, I was told that the dept. got a kickback from the publisher for each rented copy and that we used that money to furnish dept. classrooms.

AR.

Copyright clearance fees can mount up in a hurry on bespoke article collections like that.  It can run into several dollars per article, per copy printed.  Our CC guy used to tell me stories about profs getting sticker shock when he told them how much some of the articles they wanted to include in their course packs were going to cost.  Sometimes they could keep the price down a great deal by deciding to do without a few of the priciest ones.  Some profs acted like they just didn't care what it would cost the student.  Still...$300, for one comp book?  In the 1980s I don't believe I ever spent $300 on books in a single semester, and all my class texts were real, honest-to-goodness books.  It would have been much higher had I been in the natural sciences.

Now and then the CC guy at our old job found a rights holder who was happy to let an article be used for a course pack for free.  Once he called what he thought was a rights holder, only to find that it was the original author's son.  Junior put him in touch with Senior--who was very senior indeed by that time.  Senior chatted with him for a bit, and was then happy to authorize use of his article for free.