Quote:
Originally Posted by McDoof
And on a tangent...
In an ebook environment, there's no reason for academic books to be so obscenely expensive anyway. Used to be that the limited run made the printing a financially questionable process. Now online texts can be digitally reproduced but the prices remain high. It's a tradition, I guess.  |
On the contrary, I am a textbook author myself, and it's textbooks which always will be expensive because they are expensive to produce.
It doesn't matter (in a sense) what novels say. With a textbook, it has to be factually correct. All reputable publishers employ a panel of experts in the field to review and offer comments on the manuscript of a textbook. Textbooks are, generally speaking, also very expensive to typeset, since they generally contain many more pictures, diagrams, etc, than do novels.
Add to that the fact that a textbook has an enormously smaller audience than a novel. Sales of 10,000 copies would be pathetic for a novel, but fantastic for a textbook. Not only, therefore, is the textbook inherently more expensive to produce, but the UNIT cost is also higher, due to the lower sales.
All these factors conspire to make textbooks expensive. It's just simple economics I'm afraid - (good) textbooks will always be expensive, and the savings to be made from producing textbooks as eBooks rather than pBooks are considerably lower, due to the significantly higher cost of publication.