4 ms·

"Why do we need textbooks that costs more than 80 dollars, even in the digital version. And worse, Why do we need a new edition every couple years?" Because wr

"Why do we need textbooks that costs more than 80 dollars, even in the digital version. And worse, Why do we need a new edition every couple years?" Because writing good books takes time, a lot of time. Just like writing good software. Do you want to be payed for your software? Your software as a service? Developing takes time, somebody has to pay.

electromagnetic 15y ago
Agreed, the whole ebook wars missed the point that for fiction books only 10% of the cost of producing a book is the actual printing press, another 10% might be distribution (but given most publishers had to hire new job positions for digital distribution, this didn't really go away it just got a name change). Textbook printing amounts for between 10% and 30% (depending on things like glossy paper, number/size of pictures, etc). However, given that many textbooks come with a CD and often hours of video, it could actually be a very expensive digital distribution. It's very different serving a 1MB file to 10,000 people than serving a 700+MB file to 10,000 people. One of my wife's courses came with 4 discs for administrative assistant course, her college alone had 500 students starting each semester, which means you're looking above 2gig for a textbook per student. So over 1TB per college. Granted you can easily buy that sort of bandwidth, but it's that they might have to buy 1PB of bandwidth for the sum total of a two-week period when school starts. I think publishers would likely rather keep their deal with Fedex for bulk distribution than figure out digital distribution when there's no considerable cost difference in distribution and people are forced to pay.
- aw3c2 15y ago
  Torrents. Supply a unique key with each book. Only allow one peer with that key in the swarm at the same time. Done.
  - cellis 15y ago
    Could you elaborate on this?
    - aw3c2 15y ago
      Example of private torrent trackers: Private torrent trackers work with the user having a unique string and the torrent client's announce to the tracker includes that string. If the tracker knows the string, it will a) give the torrent client information about the swarm so the user can download and b) monitor the user's traffic and update the site's account accordingly. If the tracker does not know the string it will reject the user and not tell him about the swarm. In "meatspace" with non-nerds you would probably supply the user with a preconfigured torrent client which has the ID hardcoded in it (eg give the user an URL to download the client from). Add some nice social gibberish about how nice it would be to share with others for some days/weeks, celebrate each megabyte the user uploads and hope for the best.
      - electromagnetic 15y ago
        This is true, although I highly doubt companies would take this on for the perceived fear it could be hacked, but then again this is likely the fear of going electronic in the first place (although anyone really interested in pirating a 500 page textbook would simply buy a double-sided fax-style scanner - where it rolls the page through - and simply cut off the spine of the book). A cunning use of a private tracker would be to embed a reader into the client so that non-nerds are more likely to keep opening the client to use their textbooks and simply set the seed rate low at 10kb/s so it doesn't kill peoples bandwidth and get noticed. If you make it readable in part and download in priority (first pages first, obviously), you might only have to seed >0.1% of the estimated bandwidth usage to get everyone with full books. Actually this would be an amazing way to distribute a game too. If the client is built into the game launcher, simply have the client only download the core and the mandatory tutorial. If someone goes down a certain quest path you prioritize the later portions of the quest before continuing the download of the other quests. You could also prioritize associated quests and follow on quests because you know people will complete them.
  - ColdAsIce 15y ago
    Why would you base a business on artificial scarcity? Torrents, and the distribution is solved.
  - elemeno 15y ago
    Or far simpler - Akamai Torrents are great, but most people don't know what they are and won't want to download a torrent client just to get the supplementary materials for a textbook. Using Akamai, or other similar services, means they'll just have to stick their code in and click a link.
    - aw3c2 15y ago
      That would cost a lot though. With torrents you have the chance to save some bucks (at least on bandwidth costs, the deployment/coding might be much more expensive).
sigzero 15y ago
There are a lot of good books that took time that are in the $40 range. Education is a niche market with a captive audience. That is why they are expensive.
tmh88j 15y ago
I do agree that text books containing quality material are worth their price, however, the quality of some books isn't there yet they still move plenty off the shelves. In the software industry the best software for a specific function is generaly the most widely used(microsoft office for example). Who doesn't want the best performance and best features? From my college experience, this is not the case for the world of texbooks. I took 4 calculus classes and had to purchase 3 different calculus books, all of which contained the same material. Entry level calculus hasn't changed, so why does a book need to be updated every year? If someone wrote a book that provided excellent explanations there would be no need to update it yearly and it would be so widely there would be no need to make "revisions" just to sell more copies. That's why we don't need revisions every couple years for the majority of books. Cutting edge technology books are one thing, but unless history is changing there's no need to write new editions of a 16th century European history book every year.
- ColdAsIce 15y ago
  Language changes and the world changes, the students need current examples and language they understand. Thats why revisions and new books and new examples are needed, but not at the pace which publishers lash out "editions" today, just to run after short term profits. Its a last run by publishers to it milk as much as possible before their market dries up from the influence of the digital world, where editions are a wikipedia changesets.
Turing_Machine 15y ago
"Because writing good books takes time, a lot of time." You might be surprised at how little of that $80 textbook price goes to the author (maybe 15% if you're very lucky). Given that an advanced text is unlikely to sell like Stephen King, it's not a reliable road to riches (although you can do reasonably well if you write a widely-adopted book, say one used for large freshman classes -- but even there the publisher is going to be sucking up 85% of the money). The situation is even worse with scholarly journals. For many of those, the scholars write and edit all the material for free -- then the publisher charges the scholarly community a thousand bucks a year or more for the material they've developed, often at public expense.

electromagnetic 15y ago

Agreed, the whole ebook wars missed the point that for fiction books only 10% of the cost of producing a book is the actual printing press, another 10% might be distribution (but given most publishers had to hire new job positions for digital distribution, this didn't really go away it just got a name change). Textbook printing amounts for between 10% and 30% (depending on things like glossy paper, number/size of pictures, etc). However, given that many textbooks come with a CD and often hours of video, it could actually be a very expensive digital distribution. It's very different serving a 1MB file to 10,000 people than serving a 700+MB file to 10,000 people. One of my wife's courses came with 4 discs for administrative assistant course, her college alone had 500 students starting each semester, which means you're looking above 2gig for a textbook per student. So over 1TB per college. Granted you can easily buy that sort of bandwidth, but it's that they might have to buy 1PB of bandwidth for the sum total of a two-week period when school starts. I think publishers would likely rather keep their deal with Fedex for bulk distribution than figure out digital distribution when there's no considerable cost difference in distribution and people are forced to pay.

aw3c2 15y ago
Torrents. Supply a unique key with each book. Only allow one peer with that key in the swarm at the same time. Done.
- cellis 15y ago
  Could you elaborate on this?
  - aw3c2 15y ago
    Example of private torrent trackers: Private torrent trackers work with the user having a unique string and the torrent client's announce to the tracker includes that string. If the tracker knows the string, it will a) give the torrent client information about the swarm so the user can download and b) monitor the user's traffic and update the site's account accordingly. If the tracker does not know the string it will reject the user and not tell him about the swarm. In "meatspace" with non-nerds you would probably supply the user with a preconfigured torrent client which has the ID hardcoded in it (eg give the user an URL to download the client from). Add some nice social gibberish about how nice it would be to share with others for some days/weeks, celebrate each megabyte the user uploads and hope for the best.
    - electromagnetic 15y ago
      This is true, although I highly doubt companies would take this on for the perceived fear it could be hacked, but then again this is likely the fear of going electronic in the first place (although anyone really interested in pirating a 500 page textbook would simply buy a double-sided fax-style scanner - where it rolls the page through - and simply cut off the spine of the book). A cunning use of a private tracker would be to embed a reader into the client so that non-nerds are more likely to keep opening the client to use their textbooks and simply set the seed rate low at 10kb/s so it doesn't kill peoples bandwidth and get noticed. If you make it readable in part and download in priority (first pages first, obviously), you might only have to seed >0.1% of the estimated bandwidth usage to get everyone with full books. Actually this would be an amazing way to distribute a game too. If the client is built into the game launcher, simply have the client only download the core and the mandatory tutorial. If someone goes down a certain quest path you prioritize the later portions of the quest before continuing the download of the other quests. You could also prioritize associated quests and follow on quests because you know people will complete them.
- ColdAsIce 15y ago
  Why would you base a business on artificial scarcity? Torrents, and the distribution is solved.
- elemeno 15y ago
  Or far simpler - Akamai Torrents are great, but most people don't know what they are and won't want to download a torrent client just to get the supplementary materials for a textbook. Using Akamai, or other similar services, means they'll just have to stick their code in and click a link.
  - aw3c2 15y ago
    That would cost a lot though. With torrents you have the chance to save some bucks (at least on bandwidth costs, the deployment/coding might be much more expensive).

sigzero 15y ago

There are a lot of good books that took time that are in the $40 range. Education is a niche market with a captive audience. That is why they are expensive.

tmh88j 15y ago

I do agree that text books containing quality material are worth their price, however, the quality of some books isn't there yet they still move plenty off the shelves. In the software industry the best software for a specific function is generaly the most widely used(microsoft office for example). Who doesn't want the best performance and best features? From my college experience, this is not the case for the world of texbooks. I took 4 calculus classes and had to purchase 3 different calculus books, all of which contained the same material. Entry level calculus hasn't changed, so why does a book need to be updated every year? If someone wrote a book that provided excellent explanations there would be no need to update it yearly and it would be so widely there would be no need to make "revisions" just to sell more copies. That's why we don't need revisions every couple years for the majority of books. Cutting edge technology books are one thing, but unless history is changing there's no need to write new editions of a 16th century European history book every year.

ColdAsIce 15y ago
Language changes and the world changes, the students need current examples and language they understand. Thats why revisions and new books and new examples are needed, but not at the pace which publishers lash out "editions" today, just to run after short term profits. Its a last run by publishers to it milk as much as possible before their market dries up from the influence of the digital world, where editions are a wikipedia changesets.

Turing_Machine 15y ago

"Because writing good books takes time, a lot of time." You might be surprised at how little of that $80 textbook price goes to the author (maybe 15% if you're very lucky). Given that an advanced text is unlikely to sell like Stephen King, it's not a reliable road to riches (although you can do reasonably well if you write a widely-adopted book, say one used for large freshman classes -- but even there the publisher is going to be sucking up 85% of the money). The situation is even worse with scholarly journals. For many of those, the scholars write and edit all the material for free -- then the publisher charges the scholarly community a thousand bucks a year or more for the material they've developed, often at public expense.