Quote:
Originally Posted by fugazied
To be fair, most academic texts have a very limited market. It's not like they sell many of these books to the general public, theres only a few thousand students each year for some of the books. But yeah, very expensive and very hard for students to obtain.
Technology like e-books should bring the cost back to something reasonable.
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Yes, it *should*, but the early signs are it won't make any difference at all in the US market. They are simply pricing printed and ebooks at the same level. How long before academic authors simply start self-publishing? That's the route I'd be taking. It would serve the academic publishers right.
I've heard publishers in the German academic market have been embracing the obvious discounted pricing model much more readily, although my source for that is purely anecdotal.