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From: Reid Bookman <notmy@real.name>
Newsgroups: alt.binaries.e-book.technical
Subject: Re: WSJ: Textbook Sales Crater As Students Seek Cheap - Often Pirated - Alternatives
Date: Fri, 29 Aug 2014 22:05:19 -0400
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On Fri, 29 Aug 2014 15:29:02 -0400, Gone Postal
<gone_postal@it.doesn't.exist> wrote:
>Perhaps pay-per-chapter books might be a way for publishers to break
>out for e-books. Just as in the old way CD publishers used to sell
>only complete CDs and adapted to the mp3 craze (eventually) by
>breaking out CDs by song so you can buy what you want. I think that
>book publishers could break out chapters of books online to buy
>individually for those not taking the courses but who might be very
>interested in the Introduction and maybe a chapter or two. I would
>certainly consider buying such if it were reasonably priced.
>
>Thoughts?
>
>GP
Interesting you should mention the introduction and first few chapters
of a book. Several publishers are now putting the intro chapters
online for free. I found this while trying to find a book I needed
(but couldn't afford because it was overpriced, among other reasons).
I Googled the name of the book and added filetype:pdf and found the
first six chapters right on the publisher's site.
I would never buy it anyway because it is a Wiley book, one of the
companies involved in the attempted takedown of this newsgroup last
year.
The real solution is to lower the price.
What the publishers had over the past decade-plus was a monopoly (or -
as the economics textbooks posted here would call it - a cartel:
several oligopolistic companies conspiring to simulate a monopoly). A
cartel breaks in much the same way as the textbook cartel has broken:
loss of pricing power due to increased competition. The Wall Street
Journal article even points out FREE ways of getting the same
material. You can't beat free!
Not to bore anyone here with more economics and finance, but the
outsized portion of operating income the publishers generated with
textbooks is also an example of how they took advantage of the fact
that there were no close substitutes to textbooks. Goods and services
with no close substitutes tend to have a very inelastic price
elasticity of demand - which means the price can soar without much
decline in demand. That is no longer the case. They must lower prices
or continue to deal with lower revenues from textbooks as more
students use cheap/free substitutes.
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