Quote:
Originally Posted by leebase
How many more such books do you think the author will sell at $5? It's a niche market and the author has to make his money on fewer people. Take away that high price and you'll find almost no such books will be produced.
Lee
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Let's start with $30-$60 (depending on the volume etc.) instead of $150 and I'm already very pleased.
You need to buy about a dozen of those books for one year at university so that makes a lot of difference to the students.
You're absolutely right that the price has to be higher because it's a smaller market but why on earth do publishers need to make a considerable profit for those kind of books. Why not settle for a small profit? Just enough to keep the company going. Compare the prices for different publishers and for different decades (while correcting for inflation) and draw your conclusions. It certainly doesn't help that most scientific books nowadays are being published by just two publishers: Pearson and Elsevier.
I'm a reasonable guy, I understand that the authors need to be compensated for their time and that's fine to me. I realize that a publisher has to make a small profit because it sometimes needs to invest to keep the company going. I'm more than willing to pay fair prices for music, video and books, as much as I can afford (buying some and downloading others is a fair policy in my opinion if you can't afford to buy more) but the prices have to be realistic.