Ravil wrote:Hah, thanks guys. Hope you enjoy.
$30 seems high; it's pretty reasonable for a book from an academic publisher, believe it or not. Many university press books go for $90-100 apiece, when they know that the main audience will be university libraries and the author's family, who will buy it no matter what it costs. They put the price way down (comparatively) on this one because they expect to be able to move copy.
Yeah, I understand the economics on it, "economy of scale" doesn't exactly exist for most academic texts, many of which will likely at best move only a few hundred copies at best, a few more will get into the thousands, but only a small number of them progress much beyond that point(usually because some instructor makes it a required text for a particular class). So once you start factoring in costs for printing, storing + distributing printed copies, in addition to the costs of doing the copy editing, they have a lot of cost to try to recover in what is likely to be not very many book sales(knowing they're selling to a market that will happily pay top dollar also helps inflate prices, of course, that likewise makes them more willing to take the risk of printing in the first place).
The high markup for the e-book is simply annoying because it largely bypasses the printing/storage/distribution part of the equation which has been a lot of the overhead previously, as it bypassed all but the cost of doing the copy edits to make sure its legible as an ebook, which is a one time cost(reprints, on the other hand, are recurring costs). Of course, they'll rationalize it by claiming that 1 ebook sold means 1 less hardcopy likely to be sold, which isn't necessarily the case. There are plenty of books out there that I'd prefer to have both forms of, electronic is nice because of speech to text and portability, but having a physical copy has value in and of itself(they can't just revise the hard copy, or pull it from my library entirely(I've had it happen once already), also I can resell or pass along the hardcopy, ebooks on the other hand....). But we're dealing with a new market, and generation gaps on top of that market, as I'm sure plenty of people our age or younger that think nothing of simply having electronic copies of most books these days and those who want a hard copy to be odd.
Course text books that are such by design fall into stranger categories because of costs likely associated with "testing" the book at various schools before wide release, the matter of there often being multiple authors and editors involved, and an insane number of manhours being thrown at them. Not quite sure how authors get paid for those, but I'm sure their pay structure is a bit different then more traditional books, which drives their price up, even if they sell hundreds of thousands of copies.
