A decade late, a few thousand dollars short

[dacrunkest]

State legislators are going after college textbook publishers over the exorbitant profit margins on college textbooks. I wish they had done this about ten years earlier....


http://www.cnn.com/2007/EDUCATION/03/09/textbook.costs.ap/index.html

[Bman120]

Tell me about it, what these textbook companies have been doing is robbery.

They throw together these massive textbooks full of cd-roms and tons of links to their web sites, neither of which the professor even uses. Hell, the most the books are used in some classes is to read a few chapters that are never even discussed in class.

What they should have the companies do is scale down the interactive nature of these books. There is no need for cd-roms and massive textbook websites when professors post their class notes online more and more and the internet as a whole already has the info elsewhere. And if that isnt possible, then at least offer scaled down versions of these texts so the professors and students can pick and choose wether they want these features or not.

[dacrunkest]

I liked this quote:

"Certainly there are some subjects with a legitimate need for a new textbook every couple of years because the content changes so rapidly," Katz said. But "calculus hasn't changed in 300 years, so there's no need for a new edition of a textbook every couple of years."

[redav]

The problem exists for more than just college textbooks. The same scam is going on with K-12 books as well, and there are some other problems with that due to the govt bureaucracy--in at least my state, they were so stupid they set up a system where the govt looses its ability to negotiate or shop around.

Also, the whole argument about not being able to recoup investments is false. Look at Dover books. They get the rights to out-of-print texts and publish them in paperback, and they rarely cost more than $15, and yet, they stay in business.

With the new editions, I was told something like the authors loose royalties with each year an edition has been out, so they have to continually spit out revisions so that their gravy train keeps coming in.

And if they insist on including CDs, why not just make the entire book a .pdf (Machinery's Handbook does this) and not even publish a hard copy. They could sell it for next to nil and still be way above their cost.