Shaw comments -- whether prices are excessive.

[David Farber <dave () farber net>]

________________________________________
From: Mary Shaw [mary.shaw () gmail com]
Sent: Tuesday, July 08, 2008 9:14 PM
To: David Farber
Subject: Re: [IP] whether prices are excessive.

Dave,

Some further thoughts in response to various replies.  Perhaps I should note that I speak both as an author of 
technical books and textbooks published by the usual suspects and as an author/publisher of regional guidebooks for 
which I do everything down to writing the check to the printer.

1. The retailer's share:  Yes, I was describing the brick-and-mortar retail model.  The retailer has to pay rent, hire 
staff, keep physical copies in stock (and someone has to pay shipping on the stock), deal with shoplifters and 
shop-worn goods.  Electronic distribution clearly change the model. Even online sales allow amazon and others to offer 
deep discounts.  Publish-on-demand seems to be gaining a foothold for small print runs; last time I checked the 
publish-on-demand prices with online fulfillment by the printer appeared to be in the same ballpark as retail prices 
for books and mortar, maybe a little higher (or with smaller margin to the author/publisher).  I did not intend to 
suggest that electronic distribution would eliminate this cost, but the sources of cost -- and therefore the 
proportions -- will certainly change.

2. The wholesaler's share: To the extent that this is warehousing and tracking unsold copies and assembling shipments 
to individual stores, electronic distribution would change this, possibly by replacing the conventional 
wholesale/retail function with a different, direct-to-the-consumer function. Again, the cost model will be different.  
But even for physical books, textbook fulfillment could, I think, be streamlined. You know pretty much who will want 
the textbooks at course registration time, at least a month before the course starts. The market is pretty big. I've 
thought for a long time that there ought to be a market opportunity for streamlined packing and delivery specialized to 
that market.

3. The publisher's share: Just as there's a difference between a program and a software system product (recall that 
Brooks says two factors of three are involved), there's a difference between the course materials I prepare for one 
course and a textbook, especially a textbook backed up by instructor's manuals.  The publisher provides credibility 
(that is, the imprimatur of being selected for publication), editing to improve the quality of the product, marketing 
to get the books seen by potential instructors.  The publisher also takes the financial risk of investing in the 
initial setup: the editing and formatting/typesetting and the cost of the first print run. I have found publishers 
reluctant to make initial print runs larger than a few thousand, because they don't want to have a large stock of 
unsold copies.  Only a small fraction of the textbooks sell tens of thousands of copies.  Don't underestimate the value 
of editing, especially for students who have grown up on flashy interactive media and have high expectations for 
production values.  Are publishers trying to get high margins? Sure, they're in business.  However, I have not 
personally encountered the pressure to revise for the sake of a new edition that others have reported, though.

4. The printer's share: Yes, electronic transmission of pdf files would change the character of the market. I do not, 
however, believe that it would eliminate the cost of putting ink on paper. The paperless office has not yet arrived, 
and I believe the most likely outcome would be to transfer printing costs to the universities' printers, a much less 
cost-effective way to get the ink onto the paper.

5. The author's share: It would be nice if altruism made free high-quality materials available, but I'm not sure that's 
realistic.  I believe there's hope for getting instructors to make their course materials available, but see the 
remarks above about the difference between handouts and products.  It takes a great deal of effort on the part of both 
the author and the editor to get a presentable textbook that will work for students other than the author's students.  
I believe strongly in open access to the research literature, but I'm less confident of the success of free 
distribution of textbooks.  In the research case, grants have paid most of the cost of writing the papers.  In the 
textbook case, the university has paid the cost of developing and offering the course, but usually not for the 
additional effort of producing the textbook.  A few years ago I was part of a group that wanted to share the effort of 
developing course materials (just that, not textbooks) in an emerging area in the style of open source software.  It 
was a small community with shared interests, and some material was shared out -- but I never saw much use and revision 
by others.

Other textbook models:   Several years ago freshman biology texts got really huge. Most courses would use the first few 
chapters, plus half a dozen or a dozen of the other several dozen chapters.  I believe that the publishers started 
producing university-specific editions, with all the commonly-used chapters plus a tailored subset of the rest.  The 
advantage was keeping the price down; the disadvantage was limiting the resale audience.  With electronic publication, 
it's easy to imagine variants on this. Note, though, that the author and publisher costs don't go down (and may go up, 
because you have to worry about dependencies between the optional parts.

Another model is to use a collection of small books or monographs, each presumably re-sellable. This probably increases 
the total cost, and it forces the instructor to think about choosing compatible books for the units -- using the same 
terminology and notation, for example. This alternative is related to "course packs", bundles of reprints often used in 
advanced courses.  There is a long history of copyright and fair use issues about these that I won't go into, but my 
experience is that students find it challenging to be faced with different authors' voices every day.

In the end, I think we should be looking for another textbook model. In addition to requiring a new model for 
distribution of materials and reasonable compensation for the people and companies involved in creating and 
distributing the material, this will require some careful thought about who bears the responsibility for integrating 
the various parts of the content.

Mary Shaw



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