I recently encountered a very peculiar situation.
If a bought a specific textbook bundled with an ebook it would cost me $110 new. The book is not offered alone. The ebook is a 6 year license.
If i purchased the ebook only it would cost me $128 and come with a one year license.
I know there must be a rationale for such pricing, but I cannot come up with it.
The rationale is that they’re trying to gouge people and will keep attempting to do so as long as they think someone will fall for it and/or they can get away with it.
“Price anchoring” is a relevant concept here. An issue with goods (and particularly services) like these is that you, the consumer, have no idea what they should cost. If sellers offer a single option at a single price around $110, you might think, “Hmm, that seems like a lot of money.” If instead they offer two items, one clearly better than the other and cheaper than the other, you might think “Hey, this basic product is apparently worth about $128, but they’ve managed to offer me 6x the license and a real book, too, for only $110. I like that.”
Your example is tied up with the book/ebook transition and marketing strategies of the publishing world in general, but I won’t speculate there. Anchoring (which is everywhere) certainly seems a part of the story here.
Textbook publishing is notorious for the various ways they gouge their customers, and this is just another example. In the past, they would put out “new” editions every year (sometimes without any input from the authors involved) to keep people from buying used books. And faculty members get their copies free, so they don’t have any idea of how much their students need to pay.
It’s a matter of having a captive audience: once a book is assigned, students have few options.
To be fair, textbooks are more expensive to develop – they usually have a lot of photos and have to pay for rights to material they’re reprinting. They also have difficult publishing schedule: all the books have to be on hand in September and the amount of overstock can be higher than other books. Due to the timing of the spring term, they run afoul of the Thor Power Tools decision and thus have to pay taxes on their stock. Print on demand helps, but there’s no way you can print all the textbook orders to fit the short time frame when college bookstores are ordering them.
The high price of their ebook editions is partly to pay for the costs of the paper books – printing and storage and taxes.
In the example you cite, they are using the cost of the ebook to pay for the losses for the hard copy edition, and also prefer you buy the hard copy.
Maybe the university wants the option of physical textbooks in students’ hands (to avoid the “my iPad died” excuses). Six years (non-transferable, obviously) means you are also maybe less likely to sell the physical book but you should be done with the book by then -graduated or drop out. I wonder if they have physical to eBook tie-ins, like pages that say “click here in your ebook for material not in the paper book” Odds are there will be a new version within 6 years and the book will be obsolete.
When I was a faculty member, I was acutely aware of how much my students had to pay for texts. Also, although I was technically entitled to a free “desk copy” of a textbook that I had set, as an adjunct (like half or more of the contemporary university teaching force in America these days) I was routinely not even aware whether a course would even run until a couple of weeks before it actually started. Thus, as publishers will not issue a free desk copy until they have evidence that the text has actually been set for a course, and as, in practice, it would take at least a month for a publisher to process a request for a desk copy, and actually send it out, in reality, if I wanted to know whether a textbook would suitable for a course of mine, I had to buy it beforehand with my own money.
The alleged privileges of tenured or tenure-track academics are not actually enjoyed by most of the people who teach most students.
But yes, textbooks are priced as they are so so that publishers can screw as much money out of students (and libraries, and faculty) as they possibly can.
Very likely. It may well contain no new information, or only a minimal amount, but the material will have been rearranged so that the teacher is forced to to insist that all students buy the new edition, just to ensure that everybody is (literally) on the same page with their set readings.
Textbook publishing is one of the most corrupt businesses in the world. When I took calc in 1955, I paid $2.50 for a book that cost $5 new. Fine. Then today a calc book should cost $50 new. And you should be able to buy one used for $25. Of course, every year or so, they “revise” them mainly by shuffling the problems aroung to make the old edition useless (to get the assigments from). Instead they generally go for $150 and are pushing $200, some of them. And if you take a dozen calc books and take the covers off you couldn’t tell one from the other. Oh the other point is that while mathematical typesetting used to be very expensive (penalty copy it was called), nowadays the authors generally have typeset their own manuscripts.
True story. About 25 years ago, I was assigned to teach a medium advanced course (number theory). I would have liked to use the text I used in 1957, but it was out of print. So I looked at five books that seemed suitable and decided I would choose the cheapest. This was before email was available (except between universities) so I wrote letters to the five publishers asking what was the price. Two of the publishers ignored me, two of them sent me the information, and the fifth…wrote back that that information was proprietary. I chose the cheaper of the two who answered the question.
What does publication actually cost? I once reprinted a book I had co-written. It had been published and sold 1800 copies, then reprinted and sold 800 and then the publisher declined to reprint it again and returned the copyright to us. A local university press agreed to reprint it and it was arranged that I would supply camera-ready copy (although I offered them a pdf file, they didn’t want to get involved with printing. The press actually arranged that I would meet directly with a rep from the local commercial print house they used. So I met with the guy and we agreed that they would provide a plastic cover and would bind it with sewn bindings in signatures; I didn’t want glued bindings. The entire cost: a one-time setup fee of $3200 and then $5 a copy. So a printing of 800 copies went for $7200, that’s $9 a copy. And for 1600 copies, it would have been $7 a copy. That was the entire printing cost including cover, printing, and binding. That is what books cost even in small editions. Or that’s what they cost in 2000.
While there may be some truth to many of the comments made here, there is also another issue that is not being addressed.
Many years ago when I was a faculty member, I wrote a textbook that was an average seller in the college circuit for a few years.
It took me about 2,000 hours to write.
In total, the money I received for this book during its lifetime worked out to about two cents per hour.
So, from an author’s perspective, you do not make much money writing a text book. The royalties your receive would pay for the bus ticket to the airport, and maybe lunch, but it certainly wouldn’t pay for a holiday in Tahiti.
Given this, the comments about price gouging should be tempered a bit to reflect the huge effort involved in writing and producing a text book.
The price gouging is not coming from the author(s), who are arguably being gouged as much as the students.
Actually, I always marvel at how complex and difficult textbooks seem to be. However, as Polar noted, it is not the authors getting rich. There are extensive secondary rewards for writing a book, predominantly academic cred.
What killed me was the discrepancy in price.
As an interesting aside, the school had listed their textbooks with ecampus. For a number of the science books, this has caused a number of problems. First, since one of the teachers recommended the ebook, a number of parents bought that instead of the bundled package. Subsequently the teachers gave out individual login information to each student to access the ebook, and the parents who bought only the ebook are outraged that everyone else got it “free” although the both were clearly included in the bundled price.
Then, to add to the confusion, for several other science books, ecampus listed both the physical book, and separately, the ebook, as required, and some parents bought both. Now ecampus is telling it is there tough luck. A call to the ecampus “help line” brought no relief. I am sure there are people to contact at ecampus that would instantly recognize and correct the problem. Any suggestions as to who to contact at ecampus (I am sure this has happened to others before, so maybe specific information is out there).
I can think of a few WAGs:
The two editions (printed book and ebook) are marketed by different departments, each of which set their own price without consulting with the other.
The $128 ebook comes with some sort of extras (e.g. access to additional online material) that the $110 book doesn’t.
The $110 book is priced lower to compete with the used copies of that book that are currently flooding the market.
The ebooks are the same. At least according to the listings. It specifically says, on this one page, that if you buy the bundle you do not have to buy the ebook.
I am guessing different departments not talking to each other. Sounds the most plausible.
Especially now that you could convert anything to a scanned copy or photographed copy, and keep it on an iPad easily for nothing. How long would it take someone to set up a camera and stand, photograph the pages in sequence, and store them as a camera roll on the ipad? This would be even cheaper than the $5 textbook I made in 1984 by copying the pages of a textbook for 5 cents a spread. (To be fair, that textbook was back ordered and never showed up for the duration of the term, so quite a few people did this.)
At the other extreme, my Stats prof had written a book with progressive levels of detail that could work as the text for first, second and third year courses - all of which he taught, oddly enough. So he must have been getting a decent cut - unless his massive ego was the explanation.
I assure you that nobody writes a calc book unless he hopes to make a killing. The are essentially undistinguishable. There is a reason for that. A good friend wrote a book on discrete math. It was going to be different from all the others that he felt were deeply flawed. He offered it to a publisher who sent it to 25 referees. And they pay those referees, often as much as $200. The results were 25 reports (maybe I exaggerate) that said this book has to be changed to be like all the others. He abandoned the project.
There are lots of profits to be made but they rarely comes back to the author.