Quote:
Originally Posted by DMcCunney
Unfortunately, the profit margin is not all that arbitrary.
The usual error is asking "How much profit can we make?" The correct question is "How much profit do we have to make, to remain in business?". The answer is simple -- enough to equal the marginal cost of capital. And sometimes that number is higher than the best the most profit we can make estimate of the company, in which case they have trouble right here in River City.
And even assuming there is "room for negotiation" between customer and publisher on the profit margin, how much difference do you expect that to make in the price the customer pays? I suspect it will be far less than you might hope.
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"Negotiation" as I meant it may take the form of piracy or shared purchasing and photocopying. Anything that impacts the decisions this sort of publisher makes is part of that broad sense of negotiation. The metaphor could be extended to imagine potential buyers as a union (where they get organised, as Geekman had hoped, I suspect), collectively bargaining against the price of textbooks. Again, though, I think this is becoming moot with open education publishing ascendant.
Quote:
Originally Posted by DMcCunney
Textbooks are a special case of publishing. As Harry comments, they have much higher production costs, a limited market, and in some areas, fast obsolescence. (Last years hot computer title is this year's bargain table item.)
Textbooks in digital form will help because you won't have printing, binding, warehousing, and distribution costs, but they still won't be cheap.
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They can be $22 for a hard-bound engineering textbook with no warehousing costs. I'd pay shipping. That's still cheap enough for me.