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Irisi posted:On an entirely unrelated topic, I would like to know why recommended texts for university/college are so expensive. I just bought two midwifery textbooks and paid £70 quid in total. I felt a bit sick handing over all that money, especially when I know that in 4 years time they'll bring out new editions & I might have to get them too. Why can't they make them available in e-book format & charge us poor students less? They aren't necessarily making anyone much money, because they don't sell many copies. Say you've got a print run of 4000 copies, and after four years you have to pulp any remainder and bring out a new edition. The cover price on that 4000 print run has to pay for: - Author advance/royalty, maybe 7.5% of receipts (don't know about academic) - Bookseller discount, anything from 35% at your local bookshop to 80% if you're buying through Amazon. (Yes, Amazon get an 80% discount from the publisher.) - Print costs, pretty high if the book is full of photos or colour. High print cost and low print run = crippling unit cost - Production costs, also high if the book is full of diagrams and charts and numbers that have had to be painstakingly double checked - Salaries, heating and light at the publisher's office (if a book doesn't make any contribution to that, the publisher goes down) So on the £35 you just paid for a textbook, the publisher gives away maybe 55% in retailer discount on average. That leaves around £17 to cover author costs, image costs, freelance costs like designers, proofreaders, indexers, running costs including salaries, print costs (which could easily run to £3 per book or more for this kind of thing), and the small profit without which the publisher is just not going to bother to do it in the first place. Obviously these costs apply to everything, but you can imagine that when you're printing 30,000 copies of a mass market paperback, and expecting to reprint at 10,000 without changing a thing beyond the copyright page, your unit costs are very small. (You are really getting gouged when you pay £6.99 for a Dan Brown p/b, in terms of cost to the publisher vs cover cost.) If you have to make a new edition every few years, your unit costs are huge, and you have to price accordingly. This is also why travel guides are so absurdly expensive. I completely agree that all travel guides and academic texts should go electronic, though bear in mind what that will do to the costs of texts for people who don't have/like/can't afford e-readers. The London Deanery (NHS UK) has been giving out e-readers already loaded with medical textbooks to junior doctors and apparently it's been really successful. I'd expect that kind of thing to become the norm in the West soon. But again, where does that leave places that can't invest in that kind of technology? (This is not an apologia for publishers and obscene cover costs, we operate on a retarded business model and have only ourselves to blame. Just an explanation...) Shonagon fucked around with this message at 10:07 on Mar 4, 2010 |
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Mar 4, 2010 09:53
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therattle posted:My question then would be why so many very specific textbooks are needed, especially at relatively introductory levels? Why write your own first-year economics textbook (with the corresponding low print run and high costs) when there are plenty out there that would probably be 95% as good? Wouldn't you try to be the recognised expert in the subject, and the guy getting the royalties, rather than just telling people to buy someone else's book? Of course a professor would want to pimp their own texts. The real question is why universities don't lean on flagrant abuses such as the above. (Out of interest, how many of those texts were printed by the university publisher?) Hah - my ex studied philosophy at Oxford, with a highly renowned ethicist, who set all his own stuff as required reading for the course and, when asked a question, would reply, 'Let's see what I think about that' and flip to a relevant page in one of his books. Ethicist. I'm not defending the practice at all, I think some of the stuff above is disgusting abuse. I just wanted to point out that academic textbook prices aren't set at £35 purely because the publisher knows people have to buy them (though there's always an element of that in any pricing strategy); poo poo costs money to make, too.
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Mar 4, 2010 14:56
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Dr Scoofles posted:Actually, in Norwich city centre you can stand at the entrance of one large, 2 floor Waterstones and look over the steet at another large, 2 floor Waterstones. They both stock the exact same books. I don't undestand the logic behind that. It's been Waterstones policy for years to have central buying and central ordering (hey, it worked for Soviet Russia!), hence their setting up of the Hub (central distribution system), which fuckedupness was a major contributor to the disastrous Christmas the book trade just had. Its purpose is apparently to make them able to sack all the knowledgeable and inspiring booksellers, replacing them with minimum wage drones, to remove the only competitive advantage terrestrial bookshops have over Amazon; to ensure that Scottish bookshops are full of English textbooks (yes, this happened); and to bankrupt the publishing industry by automatically returning all titles after three months on the shelves and then automatically reordering them again. Oh, also, we've just been told that the super techie Hub can't read barcodes if they don't take up 1/8 of the back cover. The good news is that apparently, having just spent literally millions on the Hub, Waterstones are now changing policy back to individual ordering in shops, allowing managers to buy local interest books and ensure author events are stocked, letting shops do their own window displays and other such goodies. Here's hoping we all survive till then.
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Mar 16, 2010 13:20
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Dramatika posted:I just started 'The Lies of Locke Lamora' and loving it so far. From what I remember, I think Scott Lynch pulled a GRRM... is this correct? Should I just get it into my head now that I am never ever going to know how it ends? As of March this year, Republic of Thieves was 90% complete and delivered to the publisher, but my source wasn't holding her breath for the other 10%, and nor should you. But if it is possible to drag the book out of him, his publishers will...
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May 31, 2011 13:43
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