A quick note on Ebooks
Some people are saying products like the Kindle, or One Laptop Per Child 2.0, or Sony EReader will be great for college students. They use the argument that college books are too expensive, and by making them into an ebook, people will be able to save money and spend less on their text books.
This is wrong. Not in an ethical sense, but in a sense of “that won’t happen”. Why? The price in textbooks is not based on the product it’s printed on, but the information inside. Textbooks use the same paper as regular, hard cover books. Are printed the same way. Yet cost in some cases 10x as much. This isn’t because of how it’s distributed, but rather why it is and where it is.
Also- so far ebooks are NOT cheaper than regular print books. They are practically the same price (if not more in some instances). I just really don’t think that in the future, electronic text books will cut down on the price of any book.
that’s exactly the reason i didn’t buy half the books when i was at college. i always get this sense when new tech is in the media that companies are just grasping at straws or farting at them or something, like everybody wants to find the next big thing and cash in on it. i guess thats the whole point of business anyways, but how many times can you re-package the same thing to be sold again and again?
ah i should stop i feel like i would start to rants about too much completely unrelated items and somehow try to convince everyone to do something blasphemous while typing nude. noooood
benny
Hey nood man- email me or something!
[...] Paul Jessup says that e-books aren’t going to cut down on prices of regular books [...]
Counterpoint: While it’s true that textbook prices are driven up not by the cost of materials but by the information inside, this doesn’t cover the whole truth. Textbook prices also have a great deal to do with price gouging by the bookstores that sell them; at most college bookstores, a used copy of an edition (regardless of what condition the book is in) costs more than a new copy of the same edition purchased straight from the publisher.
Of course, most college students don’t buy direct from the publisher because they aren’t aware that they can and/or don’t know who the publisher is and/or prefer the all-in-one ease of walking into the bookstore and handing the clerk your schedule over tracking down each individual book online. However, if e-textbooks become more common, then it will become easier for the publishers to sell them directly, for example via the compare prices functions used in online bookstores. So even if the prices of the textbooks weren’t reduced at all and the e-books were sold at 100% of the print price, textbooks would still be functionally cheaper, since people would be more able to circumvent bookstores’ doubling of the MSRP.
Yes, this is true- but I don’t think they would be drastically cheaper. Not enough to make it an argument.
There certainly would be more effective ways to reduce textbook prices. That was actually a topic I addressed in a marketing class when I was in college, and eBooks were more of a footnote than a main point of the thesis.