{"id":3163,"date":"2005-09-26T14:12:59","date_gmt":"2005-09-26T18:12:59","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.kith.org\/journals\/vardibidian\/2005\/09\/26\/3163.html"},"modified":"2018-03-12T16:53:06","modified_gmt":"2018-03-12T21:53:06","slug":"more-textbook-stuff-im-afraid","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/2005\/09\/26\/more-textbook-stuff-im-afraid\/","title":{"rendered":"More textbook stuff, I’m afraid"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Your Humble Blogger stumbled on to a topic of substantial personal interest for a few Gentle Readers, and although the discussion was fruitful, it degenerated to the point where I would be inclined to let it lie. We were, if you’ve been away, talking about college textbook prices<\/a>. Now, Jeff (among other Gentle Readers) is a prof who is responsible for choosing textbooks for his students. david is a non-traditional student at a commuter college. Lisa (who doesn’t comment nearly enough for my tastes) works for a publisher of high school texts, engaged precisely in the update\/new-edition part of the business. And Michael is a publisher whose smallish catalogue of books includes books designed to be used as college texts, and therefore could be said to have his business relying on the college text market. As for Your Humble Blogger, well, I have spent a few years in an office that dealt with students, assigned readings, and texts. Among our Gentle Readers we also have people with some experience as academic librarians (in various capacities), and I hope that some of my friends who have experience as secretaries or office managers in academia continue to read, although I haven’t heard from them for a while (sniff). So rather than let the thing lie, as is (as I said) my inclination, I think I’ll press on.\n

Before I do, though, I should say that I happen to know all of these people, and I happen to know that all of them are not only nice people, but are committed to education, both in the abstract and in the specific. All of them (I opine) could be making more money (or some<\/I> money) in some other enterprise. I don’t make the claim that my Gentle Readers really represent the full spectrum of the various players in the academic market. Nor do I make the claim that my Gentle Readers are anything particularly special. I suspect that most<\/i> of the individuals who play their various roles in the textbook market do so with good intentions and a commitment to education. Not everybody—from my observation there are people making policy for, oh, Else*cough*<\/a> and *cough*son<\/a>, sorry about that, something in my throat, who are profit maximizers and care nothing about education or knowledge. But on the whole, what I find interesting about this failed market is that even with all the will in the world, the incentives make people do things that appear crazy, and everybody gets screwed. That’s why I want to keep going, despite the temptation to high tempers.\n

OK. Since Michael declined to actually make the specific argument in question, I will try to make it for him, and I hope I will get it more or less right. I will use nice small numbers, partly to make things easier for myself, and partly to describe the situation of somebody like Michael. We can move on from there. Anyway, let’s say a small house gets a nice text ready for publishing and prints, optimistically, three thousand copies. The first year, through reasonable marketing efforts, we get it adopted at forty colleges or so, and I actually sell a thousand copies (after returns and all, which is another aspect of the wacky market, but we don’t need to get into it here at the moment). The book goes over pretty well, and the next year I get more profs to order it, say, a total of fifty. Of course, half the students (more or less) have sold their books back to the bookstore. With a 25% increase, we could estimate 1,250 students will buy the book, but then 500 of those will buy a used copy, so I will actually sell 750 this year. That’s not bad, I’ve sold out more than half my run, and at this point perhaps I’m coming close to a profit (I know, there’s a lot more to a profit than that. It’s an illustration).\n

Year three, and I doubt we’ll get more profs to order this two-year-old book, but perhaps we’ll remain stable at 1,250 students. The used-book market has 625 copies, so I will probably sell around 625, leaving me with only 675 left over. Now I have to start thinking about next year. Maybe there’s a shiny new text from a competing house, and I will drop to a thousand students, with 625 used-book copies on the market, and I can cover the rest with my stock. On the other hand, maybe I can get another few courses to adopt it, despite its age, and I will need to order another run. Whatever I do, I won’t sell more than a few hundred new books in year four. And since a small run of books will be more expensive (and three years of inflation will also make it more expensive), my profit on those texts will be very small. Raising the price presumably pushes more trade to the used books, and besides, we would rather not raise the price as high prices are a barrier for the students. The returns are going to keep diminishing, though. Frankly, it’s not worth keeping this title in print; we’ll be selling at a loss, what with the cost of storage, and taxes on inventory and all.\n

On the other hand, if we can put out a joke-update, with a shiny new cover and copyright date, it’ll both hurt the used-book market and make it easier to market (get reviews, get people’s attention at conferences, etc.), and we might be able to print another three thousand and sell them, with the same numbers as we had before. Or we could bundle it with a stupid workbook or a useless CDR. It’ll keep the book in print, and although the first year of students will have to pay new-book prices (or use the library or share or whatever), the alternative is to let the book go out of print and that’s one fewer option for the prof. It seems silly to make a second edition without a serious update, but the subject matter of the book hasn’t actually changed in four years, and we like the book and would like to keep it in print.\n

Now, there are a lot of reasons why this doesn’t scale up to Mc*cough* Hill<\/a>. For one thing, having massive capital to draw on means that a big house can make bigger initial runs, and even with the tax on inventory, that should shift the break-even point further out. Also, second and third runs will be bigger, too, which also shifts the break-even point on the first edition. There are other economies of scale in marketing, in standardization, in warehousing, even in the intellectual property end. Still, there may well come a point where the second edition of a good text is no longer making money due primarily to cheaper competition from the used-book market, and the choices are essentially (a) let the book go out of print, (2) keep printing and selling the book at a loss, (iii) put out a joke new edition with a shiny new cover, or (last) invest in an actual upgrade with a lot of new content. That last one seems preferable prima facie<\/I>, but when the book is on, say, abstract algebra, and it was a good book, is there any actual benefit to fucking with it? And as far as barriers to education or even getting a degree, (iii) appears to Michael, and I must say to me as well to be preferable to (a), and I understand that (2) is not going to appeal.\n

This is not to say that I think that all companies are holding out until the last possible year to bring out the new editions. I think it’s quite likely that somebody in financial for Enormous Publishing House looked at the bump in revenues that follows a new edition and said “Why the hell are we waiting around for the revenues to dip to nothing before we get that bump? Let’s get that bump every three years!” But I have no evidence on that point. Neither, I must say, does the GAO, which put out a report that purported to discuss that matter. I think it’s worth studying, and I think it’s worth studying whether we want to institute policies at the federal level that might push that break-even point further out for all publishers, or just for smaller publishers. I don’t know that we do want to institute such policies, I should say, but I think it’s worth examining them, if we want to do something about the failed market. Again, I’m not sure if we do. We have lots of failed markets, and I don’t see us doing much about them. And, as irilyth points out, subsidies to prop up the ability of students to pay for, thus to prop up the cost of new or used books doesn’t seem to be the answer, at least long-term, as those costs raise the barrier, and thus the dependence on such subsidies.\n

I’ll also add here that I certainly understand the frustration of the prof who is forced to choose between just ordering the new edition of the text at greater expense to this year’s students (such expense being to the benefit, in large measure, of next year’s students), or attempting to bully the bookstore into buying up last year’s edition (at less profit for them), or arranging to have students buy the old edition on bookfinder (which they won’t, the lazy sonsabitches), or switching to a cheaper, perhaps inferior, book and writing another damn new syllabus. I also understand the frustration of the student who is in an irrational market, looking at the new expensive text and wondering why this year<\/I> had to be the year when the students have to pay.\n

The whole system is screwy, and it is screwy in large part because books retain their value after use. If we did have a system where books disintegrated after a year, or where a student only leased the book from the publisher, or where resale was illegal, or anything like that, we would have a much more sane and much<\/I> more annoying market. Nobody wants that. I’m not sure what people actually want. To look at the positive side, though, the problem, in essence, rises from the fact that we have lots of people attending colleges who can not really afford to spend $750 a year on textbooks. Those people are successes of our system, not failures.\n

chazak, chazak, v’nitchazek<\/I>,
-Vardibidian.\n<\/p>\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Your Humble Blogger stumbled on to a topic of substantial personal interest for a few Gentle Readers, and although the discussion was fruitful, it degenerated to the point where I would be inclined to let it lie. We were, if…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":7,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[201],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3163","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-navel-gazing"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3163","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/7"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3163"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3163\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":17540,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3163\/revisions\/17540"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3163"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3163"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3163"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}