I have been around here for about four years now, and if recollection serves me reasonably well, since colleges and universities will all be starting classes in the next week, there will soon be some complaints about textbooks appearing here. These complaints are not unjustified, but I like to see them be well informed.
First, some necessary disclosure. I am the author or co-author of a couple of textbooks, so I make a little bit of money off this industry. Second, my oldest child starts college this year, so I will be giving a lot of it back.
A little basic background may be helpful. I welcome adjustments to this by those who work in the publishing industry and have more information. Book contracts vary significantly, so there is no hard and fast rule, but here is how the money might work on a textbook costing $100.
Note 1: For those who have not been paying attantion much, $100 is no longer an extremely high cost for a college textbook. One of the problems with this subject is that there is no other item I know of which people purchase a lot of for a few years, then do not purchase at all for 25-30 years, then purchase a lot of again. So, If you graduated back in 1980 and most of your books cost $30-50, then it will be quite a shock that your kid's textbooks are costing $90-150.
Note 2: The royalties recieved by an author often come in gradations, e. g. 10% on the first 5,000 copies and 15% thereafter, so I will use an average.
$47 goes to the publishing company, which produces, edits, prints and markets the book and pays for rights to content like photographs and artwork.
$13 goes to the author(s) who write the book, assist in the editing process, and produce supplematary materials.
$40 goes to the bookstore, which takes the book out of a box and puts it on a shelf. Usually, the bookstore has paid the cost of shipping, but, per book, this cost is quite small.
It is obvious from the way I have constructed the information above who I think the primary culprit is in the overpricing of books. But this also provides one avenue for saving some money on a textbook, since on-line retailers can offer significant discounts and still make money. E. g. a 20% discount by Amazon or textbooks.com still leaves them with $20 profit and has saved the buyer $20.
Now enter the real monster, the used textbook industry. A retailer can now buy that book back from the student for $30-40 and sell it again for $60-70. The bookstore, or on-line reatailer, has made another $30 (this time for taking the book from the student, putting a "used" sticker on it, and placing it back on the shelf). The problem here is that the publisher and the author have made nothing in the deal. If that book gets re-sold and re-bought two more times, then the total of the three sales might be $200, with the money distributed like this:
$47 goes to the publishing company, which produces, edits, prints and markets the book and pays for rights to content like photographs and artwork.
$13 goes to the author(s) who write the book, assist in the editing process, and produce supplematary materials.
$90 goes to the bookstore, which takes the book out of a box and puts it on a shelf. Usually, the bookstore has paid the cost of shipping, but, per book, this cost is quite small.
$50 split by the two students who sold it back.
The result of the emergence of a very well organized and aggressive used textbook industry is that after about three years, the revenues on a book for the publisher and the author start to decline rapidly. The response to this has been a shorter cycle of producing new editions, typically about 3 years, instead of the old 6-7 years a generation ago, though some are getting even shorter than that. New editions make all of the used copies virtually worthless and start the cycle over again. So, the irony of saving money by buying used books is that this is a major factor which is driving up the prices.
New editions have always been around, of course. All academic disciplines are constantly growing and changing and textbooks need to be updated. All texbooks contain mistakes and weak areas that need to be corrected and strengthened. I know how hard I work on new editions of my textbook in order to make it is good as it can be and to feel comfortable that students who buy it are getting a new product that is enough better than the old one to justify the higher average price they are going to pay.
Another (dirty?) trick that publishers use, instead of producing new editions is custom packaging of textbooks, with extras like cd-roms, workbooks, or memberships to on-line services where students do their homework assignments. These packages even receive different ISBN's than the book itself so that it is very hard to know when shopping on-line if you are getting exactly what you need for the course. I really don't like this one.
On the other side, the dirtiest corner of this business, in my opinion, are what I call the "textbook scavengers." Publishers regularly send examination copies of textbooks to professors for free. In some cases these have to be requested and can only be kept free of charge if the book is adopted for use, but larger publishers send them out unconditionally, sometimes even unsolicited. I get a half-dozen or so each year that I have not requested. I also get e-mails, phone calls and even personal visits from book buyers who know I have a stack of these accumulating on my shelf. They offer me cash on the spot. I refuse to participate in this unethical busness practice, but there must be some professors who do it. They could justify this with an environmental argument, I suppose, since the only other thing they can do with these books, aside from letting them accumulate on the shelf, is throw them away.
No doubt, some will wonder about the replacement of books by on-line content. This would make the bookstore unnecessary, and would reduce some of the costs of production, but electronic textbooks are not without problems. The persistence of the book in the tidal wave of the internet reveals what a fabulous technology books are. The publishers I talk to isnsit that the book is not going away anytime soon. This is probably a subject for another diary by someone who knows more than me.
Well, there is a lot of what I know about this issue. I am sure others can fill in the gaps. When my son buys his books next week, we will just do what we can to keep the price down, and I will grin and try to convince myself that it is an investment in his future.