Currently a sales rep for a major textbook publisher, at least for another month…
Why are books so high?
First off, the bookstores have a 25-30% mark-up on the new text from the publisher. This covers their freight and overhead. The eFollett website has some more information on this from the bookstore’s perspective.
The used book market is even worse. Texts are bought from students at anywhere from 10-50% of the new book price to the bookstore depending on edition status and if that text is still going to be in use at the school. These texts are then usually put on the shelf at the same price as the bookstore is charged for a new book.
That paragraph looks confusing. In real numbers…
New book price from publisher to bookstore: $72
New book price from bookstore to student: $94
Above example sold by student at buyback: $20
Used text back on shelf in bookstore: $72
Used books are a great deal for the student and the bookstore, but horrid for a publisher. I think we make it worse because our reaction is to raise the price of the text to cover fewer sales for the life of the edition. Raising the price only betters the used book deal. I think we need to re-read our own econ and business books but I’m not in charge. But I digress…
From the publishing side of things, books are expensive to produce. Costs for creating and publishing a text can run into the millions of dollars. Not only are we publishing the text, but the professors are demanding Instructor manuals, printed test banks, computer test banks, power point, overhead transparencies, websites, videos, distance learning courses, and more. And don’t forget the student ancillaries, especially the study guides and multi-media CD-ROMs.
Each of these items must be budgeted for, authors found, and editorial and production teams created. Many of these items are very expensive to produce and we provide these free of charge to each instructor in the course. For one of our History of Art texts, the slides alone cost us, the publisher, almost $500 when we provide them to an instructor.
So the overhead involved is one factor. The second factor is the used book market. In a one semester course, say freshmen english, we might sell 3000 copies of a new text for the Fall Semester. With buybacks, that number will drop to less than 1000 copies in the same course the following fall. Essentially we have to recover our total cost of prducing the text within the first year of sales for an edition.
No insider tips on saving money, but some advice when buying used books. Always open to the preface and look for a section that describes the basic student package included with the text. Make sure that any items listed as shipping with the main text are packaged with the used book. The biggest problem is software and CD’s we package, especially with the language texts, not being returned with the text so the next student whou purchases the book is missing an essential component. When buying a used text, make sure that stuff is there because we, the publisher, usually won’t sell those items separately. And if we do, we price them so that buying them outside of the package will cost more than buying the text new.
