A quality hardcover coffee-table book might sell from Amazon for $30-$50 or so. When I was in grad school 15 years ago, textbooks were starting to get above $100; I’m sure by now they’re well past that mark.
Why are textbooks so much more expensive than a typical hardcover book? Is competition among textbook publishers really light, or is the expense of writing and double-checking a textbook really that high? Low production volume over which to defray overhead?
Econ 101: the demand for required goods does not change much with increased pricing. Book manufacturers have noticed this fact, and take advantage of it to raise their profits.
True.
But…
Suppose you’ve got five different publishers cranking out a first-year calculus textbook, with four of them at $150 each and the fifth one at $60, all of comparable quality. The same total quantity of calc textbooks gets purchased every year, but wouldn’t one expect more of the books to come from the cheapest publisher?
I suppose the course instructor typically doesn’t care all that much which one he specifies, since he’s not footing the bill…
Do you know what the margins are on the sales of text books? If you don’t know how they have trended, then all answers here could fall woefully short.
It’s a popular question judging by Google, but I didn’t find any sort of a consensus. One bookshop claimed that a mark-up of 25% is usual, which I believe is pretty common in retail. This pdf has a graphic of where the dollar supposedly goes.
I don’t completely buy the broken market idea as college students aren’t so dumb that they wouldn’t look around for competing suppliers. I think it possibly has more to do with higher royalties due to more authors, a requirement for frequent new editions, and specialized material. I find it’s easy to pick up a best seller relatively cheap, but an 800 page illustrated non fiction doorstopper on an esoteric subject that has multiple authors tends to be pricey whether or no it’s on some prof’s list.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, authors and publishers blame the used textbook market for driving up prices as the prices on new books have to be raised to remain profitable. That may be true, but if (as the article suggests) publishers and authors issue revised editions solely to “make sure book profits will accrue to the publisher and author, not the bookstores”, it sounds like not only a rip off, but a waste of trees.
I imagine the universities get a nice cut of the profits. Besides the fact that the publishers know that the students have to buy them. Like Squink pointed out, they are required goods. They are also written by money sucking people who like to prey on poor, innocent, even more poor students.
Side rant:
I disagree with the OP on the part about double checking the books though. In college I had to buy a Statics & Dynamics book ($140). I later changed my major but I ended up having to take the class again two years later. They had already updated to the next edition. Had physics changed that much in the past two years? So I paid $150 for the new one which was practically identical. There were spots where they hadn’t even changed pictures. There were places they must have copy and pasted paragraphs. There were even cases where the answers in the back of the new book were actually the answers to the old edition’s questions.
For example, you would have a situation where question 7 in section 4.6 of the new edition is about the velocity of an object. The answer in the back is “45.6 N.” Looking at question 7 in section 4.6 in the old edition the question is asking for the force on an object, which when calculated out equals . . . 45.6 N. 
Pretty shoddy work for an engineering textbook.
It’s been over a decade since I was in the college textbook business, but here’s how things tended to work.
An introductory course (say History 101) book lists from the publisher at $75. The bookstore typically adds a 30% mark-up for the shelf. Bookprice is $97.50 to the student. Bookstore margin is $22.50
At the end of the year, the bookstore buys back the book at 1/2 list or less (maybe 25%) depending on whether they could resell the book at the bookstore or were going to sell to a used book reseller.
For the second year using a title, you’ve got new ones at $97.50 or used ones at $75.00 with bookstore margins of $22.50 and $37.50 respectively. For the bookstore, used books are a much better proposition than the new ones. Students are happy to be saving money and the bookstore is doing better with the margins.
For the publishers, this is a major headache.
Textbooks are expensive undertakings, but because students, being frugal sorts in need of beer money, sell back almost all of the books they purchase for classes outside their majors, the publisher typically has to recover their investment in the first year instead of spreading it out over a 3-4 year cycle. (also explains why there is a new edition of a book so quickly).
For example, as a book rep I go in and pitch an Intro History book to a university. If it is a new book, first year out, I get 100% new book sales because nobody else has that book.
The next fall, I may only get 10-20% of that repeat business and the year after that even less.
Personally, I thought we should have been driving prices down, but that wasn’t going to happen. Not sure what e-books will do to the business. The expected pricing by the consumer is going to be a challenge.
That’s a good link that silenus provided. I’ll single out the following paragraph, and comment on it:
Initial cost of the book’s development: I would think it would be much easier to write a coffee table book than a textbook. It must take a lot of time and effort coming up with good charts, graphs, diagrams, illustrations, applications, and problem sets for each section of the book.
The potential size of the market: Of course, the fewer people who buy your book, the higher the profit margins have to be, so this would be a major issue with less widely-used books.
The cost of marketing the book to potential faculty users and sending out “complimetary” copies: It’s common practice for publishers to send free “desk copies” of their books to faculty members who will be using them to teach from, or who are considering using them, or even who the publishers suspect might consider using them at some point in the future. As a college teacher, I’ve been sent plenty of unsolicited books. In recent years, it’s become increasingly common for publishers to send out "Annotated Instructor’s Edition"s, so that the profs won’t resell these books and dilute the market, and to provide postage labels so faculty can return the books they don’t plan to use, and to provide electronic rather than printed copies for potential adopters. I hope this will enable publishers to keep their costs down.
increasingly, the number of ancillary materials provided with the text: A textbook that used to be just a book now is often available with all sorts of extras: student solution manuals, videos, testing software, tutoring software, data sets, and other supplementary goodies on CD-ROM or DVD-ROM or online. These cost money to produce. Sometimes the publishers bundle them with the textbook; other times, they charge extra.
Here’s my perpective as a course instructor:
I do care about how expensive textbooks are, and it seems to be getting increasingly worse. When I choose between different textbooks, I usually try to consider price, though it often takes a bit of digging to find out what the price is. But quality is important, too. If students are going to be spending that much money anyway, I’d rather they spend $150 on a good, usable textbook than spend $140, or even $60, on a crappy one.
It can also be a major PITA all around to change textbooks. If I switch to a different text for a particular course, I have to redo all sorts of things about my course. And students are using a different book from their friends who took the course last year (or even from themselves, if they have to retake the class for some reason). And if I like the book I’m using now, whose flaws (if any) I know about and can compensate for, it’s safer to keep using that than to switch to an untried new text.
So, a text that used to be not too expensive keeps getting re-adopted year after year even if the price keeps creeping up.
A trend I’ve noticed over the last few years is increasing reliance on online addons to the book. Doesn’t add much functionality, but they’ll gouge you for $50 to buy an access code if you bought a used book.
This has been a favorite rant of mine for years. First off, neither the instructor nor the university makes one cent from textbooks, so forget that argument. The authors do well, when the book is widely adopted but it is the publisher that makes out like a bandit. And makes sure there is new edition every year or so so used sales won’t cut into the market.
The basic reason seems to be that the people who choose the text typically pay no attention to the price. (Similar to prescription drugs?) Once I was about to teach a course for which I could have just as well skipped having a text, but a text is a good source of problems and the students feel uncomfortable with no text. So I wrote to five different publishers, asking what the price was. Nowadays, I would just google it, but this was probably about 20 years ago. Two of the publishers answered with the price (and I chose the cheaper of the two), two didn’t bother answering and the fifth said that that information was proprietary(!!). WTF, the price is a trade secret?
Calculus books took a sharp climb in price when they introduced four-color printing. But is there any evidence that that makes a better calculus book. Calculus hasn’t changed in 200 years (almost no book uses Robinson infinitesimals, although that would be a different book). I see no reason the book I used 55 years ago (by someone named Bliss) that I bought second hand for $2.50 wouldn’t be perfectly usable today. I think there are also online books that are free.
About 10 years ago, I had a book reprinted. It was graduate text level and while 1800 and then 800 copies had sold over about 7 years, the original publisher declined to reprint it a third time. So I found a local university press that was willing. We did 800 copies. The local printer they used charged a one-time setup fee of $3200 and then about $5 a copy for printing, so that the entire 800 copies cost $7200. That included printing (from camera-ready copy I provided), binding (in sewn signatures) with a plastic cover that they produced. It was sold for $45 a copy, postpaid anywhere in the world. At the time, that was about $33 US. It is still available.
A few years ago, I met a woman who told me that her father was writing a calculus text. I exclaimed without thinking, “Just what the world needs, another calculus book.” She was offended and explained that her fathers book was going to be different from all those others. I bit my tongue and said nothing. But I know what would happen. He would produce this text thinking that this one would be different from all those others that are essentially clones of each other. He would send it to a publisher, who would send it to 25 (this is not an exaggeration) referees, each of whom would insist on changes. All those changes would be in the direction of making just like all those others. Either the man would make the changes, in which case my comment was justified, or he would refuse in which case it would not get published. He could try self-publishing, lot’s of luck.
Textbook publishing is like a lottery. A few books have gigantic sales and make enormous profits and the rest languish. If someone would pay me enough, I would write a calculus book that could be circulated by the math societies for free online or for print-on-demand. It is an easy task; just take any one of the many books and copy it (in your own words). They all copy each other shamelessly anyway and there is no way they could sue with clean hands. And I think I could write better than most of them.
So, lock-in (hard for instructors to change textbooks), monopoly power (within each class), and inelasticity of demand (students need textbooks.) Another feature is that textbook publishers are piggybacking off of the government subsidy for education, which means that more kids are in college than would be otherwise, giving them a bigger market.
The cost of education has risen like nothing else. Just look at computers. 10 Years ago how much would a 10 Meg hard drive cost? Now a days storage and memory are cheap as hell yet advanced graphing calculators are still a couple hundred bucks. You could almost get a netbook for that. All computer prices have dropped except calculators that still have shitty green LCD screens`
I have no problem with paying authors a royalty, but for sweet jumping jesus sake, as algebra or trig actually changed much in the past 50 years? Art history? Did someone paint a moustache on Mona Lisa or something that we need a new picture of her? Did someone find Venus de Milo’s arms? Has anatomy changed all that much, new bones in the human foot? You can print addenums like in legal reference books for what it is wort, so you get a different suppliment every year for 5 years or so and then print up a replacement one, no need to print a new book every year for most any class.
Thank you. I get sick of my students accusing me of deliberately choosing expensive textbooks because they think I get a cut. And our CC gets only a small amount from our bookstore’s contract (the bookstore is not a function of the college, it’s an independent agency leasing space in our building).
When I choose textbooks, I do try very hard to be aware of the cost. But if the best textbook happens to also be the most expensive, tough - I’m trying to teach content here.
My personal opinion is, that US students are getting ripped off. Most textbooks in my area of study (biochemistry) are more expensive in the United States than in Germany. I’ve compared it a few times in the past and the american version was always significantly more expensive than the international edition of the same textbook.
One big difference is, that in Germany there are usually no required textbooks. The students can decide themselves which textbooks they really need, which ones they loan from the library and which ones they don’t ever look into. I’ve only ever bought those book, where I thought there was a chance I would look into them even after I finished the course.
As far as I understand, in the United States it is common to have exercises from a textbook, etc… so that you cannot really take the course without buying the chosen textbook.
Quoth Dave Hartwick:
The students are plenty smart, but they’re not the ones choosing the textbooks. Even if you can get a book that’s just as good or better than the one the prof assigns, that’s not going to be much use when the homework assignment is problems 2, 5, and 7 from chapter 3.
Quoth Hari Seldon:
Unless, of course, the professor is the author, or the university is the publisher. Some professors write their own texts because they don’t think any of the other texts cover the material they want to cover, or don’t cover it as well, and they want to help their students (I had a math class once where the prof self-published a book because it was actually cheaper than a standard textbook, that way). But there are also profs out there who put a turd between two hardcovers, charge hundreds of dollars for it, and then require it for their course, just as a way to pad their pockets.
Not all textbooks are expensive, either. When I took orbital mechanics, the professor told us on the first day of class that there were two good textbooks to choose from on the subject, and so he assigned the one that only cost $28.
Speaking of Calculus (or any Math)
Mark my words…but what will happen in the future is that using Calculus as an example…is that a Calculus textbook will go online as part of a colaborative effort amongst math faculty/math peeps and so will evolve into a kick ass Calculus book that will be essentially free. Much like ‘R’ is for social statistics software.
I think this is the way of the future and the textbook publishers will howl!
Back when I was teaching a chemistry course, I received plenty of unsolicited “review copies” of chemistry textbooks from publishers hoping we’d switch to their text. I actually did like one of these unsolicited textbooks better than the text I was using, but there was no way I was going to switch because it would be such a pain to restructure my course. Nevertheless, during the five years I taught that course, I received a complimentary copy of just about every introductory college-level chemistry textbook on the market.
When I later switched to teaching physics, I needed to quickly pick a textbook for my course, so I went on a number of publisher’s websites to request a review copy of their particular text. I received a dozen or so expensive textbooks in short order.