Quote:
Originally Posted by HarryT
If a publisher decides that, in order to make it economically viable to publish a textbook, they need to generate revenues of $100,000 from it, and they know that only 1000 people are likely to buy it, they have to get $100 per customer. The point about textbooks is that they are of very restricted interest - you won't sell more copies of a molecular biology textbook if you reduce the price from $100 to $20, because the average "man in the street" doesn't give a damn about the subject and wouldn't want the book if you were to give it away free. For the people who actually need it, they'll still need it whether the price is $20 or $100.
It IS a scenario where there is genuine (not artificial!) "scarcity", but the scarcity is the size of the customer base, not the number of books available to sell to them.
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I think this is a good point, Harry, and I can appreciate the direct connection between textbook piracy and driving up prices; thank you for phrasing it this way. I think, though, that there is room for negotiation (between users and publishers) in a couple of places, given your description.
First, there's the idea that the publisher
decides how much to charge because it determines what is economically viable; under circumstances where the publisher is seeking to do more than break even on the costs (which themselves may be variable), the profit margin is arbitrary and I don't think that the publisher necessarily has to have the sole right to determine what it is. This is especially important, I think, where competition between publishers is reduced due to the rarity of a particular subject area: the flip side of your example above is that, if the publisher expects that only a thousand people will buy the book and knows that their professors don't have any viable alternatives (as has been the case with, say, my Sociology for Educators in Canada textbook), prices suggest that the publisher has acted to take advantage of its monopoly. One of my professors during my teacher education year told us about his experience of being required to buy a single, two-hundred page, narrow-interest, business-education text for over $1000.
Leading into my second point, although in the above example it may be difficult to tell where the production-cost:demand ratio ends and the monopoly begins with the information I have, the proliferation of print-on-demand publishing and open (non-copyright) content are making the first half of the equation obsolete. A textbook can be produced as a one-of or 30-of to the exact specifications of a teacher or professor, using information content that does not need to be paid for (say, content made available under
CC by fellow educators in the field), at a cost that makes the sale of traditional textbooks look atrocious. I've mentioned
Baraniuk before, and if you've got twenty minutes to watch the video link, he explains this model much more effectively than I do. This model makes $20, hard-cover, high-quality, completely legal textbooks possible, and they're in use right now.
I appreciate that this does not address the illegality of pirating traditional textbooks. However, I think that the advent of textbook piracy and the advent of open-source, print-on-demand textbooks come out of the same thing: the proliferation of digital duplication and access. My textbook costs were $500/year when I started university, seven years ago. This year, they were about $60, and the volume of assigned reading I'm doing is much, much greater. The difference is digital transmission and the increased photocopying by my professors of their own, published work (which is effectively
CC publishing). Compounded by adoption from my generation of educators in "the West" and by "developing" countries who have far more to gain from cheap educational reasources, it's very clear that this is going to become the dominant publishing model of our time. For that reason, I see textbook piracy as a growth pang, rather than an atrocity of intellectual theft or selfish contribution to a cost spiral.