Subscribe to RSS 2.0£130 for a book
I'm a very nerdy person. Very, very nerdy. I hope that's not shattering too many fond imaginings, but you deserve the truth. I will occasionally read textbooks for fun. There, I've said it. Of course, I tend to favour standard college textbooks - the broad overview kind that will be on the reading lists of every English-speaking university in the world. They cost twenty to forty pounds for great slabs of carefully-curated info, with heaps of pretty pictures. And because I bought one of those, Amazon are suggesting I might like to buy an interesting-sounding* title in a slightly more niche area. But it's £130 and I baulk at that.
*to me at least
Now I get/understand/grok the volume-related economics of these things. Standard introductory college textbooks with their 'international editions' cost a fortune but they're designed to ship in their hundreds of thousands. Try to do the same amount of work on a title that will sell two thousand copies a year and the unit price would need to go through the roof to make it economically viable. Then again, glance at one of these nichier titles and you'll see it's a very different animal to the standard college intro textbook. Pages of text instead of hundreds of glossy diagrams - no CD-ROM and interactive website. So it's not as though teams of illustrators, designers and layout gurus are working round the clock on them - and I doubt that they have to be shopped extensively around educational boards for comments, checking and sign-off either.
So why the giant price tag? If I worked out that the only way to make a book profitable was to bump the cover price to three figures, I'd almost certainly abandon it. So that leads me to wonder why such things are commissioned in the way that they are. Who is it who will pay £130 a time or more for books? For most academics that would mean paying more for a shelf of books than for the car they're driving. So is it just university libraries and companies into research for whom one or two hundred pounds per book is acceptable? The title I'm talking about is a bit over 200 pages with an 8-page colour plate section, so we're not talking Gray's Anatomy here in terms of illustrations and content.
The sums of money involved seem so high that you'd think it would make more sense for a consortium of university libraries to club together and commission a couple of hundred technical titles per year. Approach authors directly, then hire a few people like Anna (=Snowbooks' secret weapon) to tidy up their manuscripts, typeset them and design covers, and then maybe POD print them as you need them. Because they're academic titles you could get them checked for technical accuracy using a peer-review approach. Seems like you'd save heaps of money, and the lower price-tag might even allow for even more esoteric topics to be covered.
In the meantime, I'll wait until this £130 title appears in a dump-bin at Blackwells for £4 in a year or two.
Comments: 7
Rob, I used to work for an academic publisher, subscriptions for some of whose extremely niche publications sold for thousands of pounds, and at the very most these titles were monthly publications of not more than 150 pages or so (though some were much shorter and of a much smaller publication frequency). This was truly niche knowledge for global experts in the field, I suppose, and thus had a tiny subscriber base.
Posted by: Neil on February 11, 2011 12:18 PM
The only thing I can say is that you all are lucky on the other side of the pond. I'll be surprised if I bought a single textbook throughout my whole college career that was less than $120. Every year my textbook bill was astronomical, some years close to $1000.
I know pounds are worth more than dollars, but my point is that textbooks over here are a great deal more expensive than they seem to be over there, if 130GBP is high-end.
This is why I think e-booking textbooks is the best use possible for e-books.
Posted by: KatharineC on February 11, 2011 12:58 PM
I couldn’t agree more with Katharine. Why is it you can Google gossip for free and yet have to pay so much for knowledge?
Posted by: Darren on February 12, 2011 12:36 AM
I saw last week that the Blackwells bookshop at Brookes University (which is in the same building as the library) now rents textbooks to students by the month. Staggering.
Posted by: Helen on February 14, 2011 09:25 AM
Surely, with the ever-evolving internet and the introduction of the whiteboard in schools and universities, the paper-based textbook is a little 1999 on it? I would have thought that much of what could be contained therein could go quickly out-of-date - especially with a subject like IT?
Posted by: WayneSimmons on February 14, 2011 11:27 AM
I teach English to doctors and medical specialists - last week one of my students told me he had just bought a medical textbook (in English)from Amazon UK for ONLY €300 - he was chuffed - the same title in Spanish bookshops is priced at €400 - the equivalent of one-sixth of his monthly salary.
Posted by: Haarlson Phillipps on February 16, 2011 11:03 AM
Rob- I am a professional publisher and I think the main point here, as you and Neil have alluded to, is that we are niche publishers, with far smaller audiences than those in the trade. A print run in the several thousand is substantially larger than our usual run. Not only that but our books are lovingly and expensively produced- given the more academic and sometimes esoteric nature of the subjects covered, some of our books go through many edit and proof stages. We are also very careful about the final finish of our books. The production costs, even before printing, are therefore high and our profit margins are not large. But we do it to produce something that will add value and that our customers will not only find useful but will enjoy reading. And luckily, they seem to. And the whole point about going electronic only actually misses the point- all the editing, proofing, layout, design functions are still needed for an electronic version. And depending on the nature of the information, there is no need for the content to go out of date- some of our titles are still selling strongly fives year down the line. That is not to say that publishers can ignore the challenge of the future of digital and we are not, but they do not need to be mutually exclusive.
So perhaps our market is markedly different from yours. In the meantime, I hope publishers, large and small (such as us), continue to commission new interesting titles that customers want and actually enjoy.
Posted by: Sian O'Neill on March 1, 2011 01:42 PM