SCSU Scholars welcome your comments. Offensive material will be deleted.
I'm inclined to concur on the characterization of pricing as driven by perceived inelasticity. Consider color. Your typical introductory economics paperback has lots of color (and those annoying sidebars and marginalia, but that's for another day.) Now consider the Morning Sun series of all-color train picture books, which have a much smaller press run (the setup costs favor the textbook publisher) and a much lower price (trainspotters not generally being recipients of grants or loans or Daddy's plastic.)
Makes you wonder what a fair price for the Times should be set at by a fair minded group of individuals? Or is that already the price.
I just completed a graduate economics course. I noted three variations of the text being used by students. One was the U.S. edition (hardcover, glossy pages, colorful graphics), which sold for $120. One was exactly the same as the U.S. version exept for a graphic on the cover saying "not for sale in the United States." It sold for $60. The third was a softcover edition. Content was exactly the same, just paper quality was not as good as the other two. This book sold for $30 and was supposed to be sold only in Asia. To the best of my knowledge, the students using the $30 book did not receive an inferior education because their book was of "inferior" quality. If these less expensive versions exist, why can't universities insist publishers make them available? Then, let the market decide!
Hint: ABEBooks will often have an earlier edition for a fraction of the newer edition's price. Editions do change from year to year, but (except for math textbooks) it's almost always close enough for the average undergrad.
Another painful truth is most of these textbooks go unread. Students will buy a textbook, study the first chapter or two and then never pick them up again. The reason is the student will learn they are unnecessary. The average professor will give lectures that cover all the material and study guides which tell students exactly what will be on the tests. Basically, professors themselves remove the requirement for heavy studying (and remove the requirement for excellence) by doing such things.
This was true for me as a liberal arts major. I'm certain the hard sciences (physics, chemistry, mathematics) are different. But then again, I found myself not studying from my textbook at all for my Chem/Math/Econ classes.
This is less than a real market, however, because many of the buyers make purchases with other people's money (parents, grants, loans-they-don't-see-as-real-debts). Moreover, there is no competition: a class you must take has a text you must buy, and there are no other options.
What to do? For the government, nothing. Schools can decide they want to go the 'we're a cheaper school' route in order to attract certain students, and adjust their book plans accordingly. Book companies might drift to a trade paperback print-on-demand style, but only if it makes more money (not less).
But it is what it is. These are highly specific texts with a very small audience. Return business from the same purchaser is zero. And FWIW, book expenses for my daughter are less compared to my college years in the early 80s. Her fall total was under $400, where I routinely spent more than that in 1982, not counting for inflation.
We'd love to. There are many books we want to reuse. But they go out of print and we cannot get enough of them restocked; the bookstores cannot get them. LF can explain this to you if he chooses.
How about reusing the same textbooks for more than one year? How much variance is there is an intro to Econ book? Opportunity cost is opportunity cost.
Commenting by HaloScan
