[nekokami]

Although many of these arguments (e.g. scarcity) are repeated over and over here at Mobileread, there are a few interesting aspects specific to textbooks that have turned up here.

Originally Posted by Dumas

On a side note, is it really your position that the size of the customer base determines the price of textbooks? I would be interested to hear from other forum members where they have found that the price of their textbooks was directly related to their relative class size. I have not found that to be the case in my personal experience whatsoever.

I'm not sure what your experience in textbook publishing is, but to the best of my knowledge, HarryT is spot on that the market for most textbooks is limited. Not by local class size, but by usage across the potential market. The scarcity is one of customers.

Originally Posted by HarryT

Because you can probably find lots of good and free information on the web about, say, economics or business. I don't think you'd find it so easy to find such information about electromagnetism or quantum mechanics. You can find good individual articles, yes, but putting it together in such a way that it teaches the subject from start to finish would be very difficult.

I disagree; I'm in the business of curriculum design, and I do this all the time. In fact, many professors I know end up assigning more than one textbook for a class not because they want the students to read all of each of the books, but because they want students to read part of one and part of another. I think this is one of the main causes of new textbooks being written, especially in the "hard sciences." If it were easier for a professor to select specific chapters of books for a custom textbook, fewer new textbooks would need to be written. Also, often textbook changes are confined to the insertion of a new chapter or two. Why should students have to pay for a whole new print run just to get those chapters? The content of the rest of the book hasn't changed, so the technical editors don't need to review that part. This is clearly a system that could be streamlined.

Originally Posted by DMcCunney

I'm not sure it's possible for it to exist outside of a capitalistic framework. People will create the content, and need to be compensated, and others will manufacture and distribute it, and need to be compensated. Where does the money come from, and how does it get distributed?

I'd expected more imagination from you, Dennis. Anything can exist outside of a capitalistic framework. Certainly textbook publishing could. It already does. See http://www.wikibooks.org/ for just one example.

Originally Posted by DMcCunney

And "community authorship" leads you into the morass that Wikipedia sometimes becomes. I'll use Wikipedia (and do daily), but with distinct reservations and grains of salt, depending upon the topic, because I don't assume that the view most commonly held is correct, nor that facts can be determined by committee.

I think the science-related pages suffer much less from problems in this area than some of the more sensitive contemporary topics. Most pages on Wikipedia tend to be pretty self-policing, and checking the Talk tab and revision history gives you a good idea of problems that may exist with the content there, which is more than you can say for most other sources (including print sources).

Originally Posted by Danny Fekete

The answer, in practise, is peer-review, and is the same principle which bolsters confidence in the truth content of academic publications (where each individual reader isn't in a position to test proposed, new information for him or herself). This leads to consensus about what's true and what isn't; this is truth by committee, and it drives a great deal of what we consider to be knowledge. It's the basis of Connexion's "Lenses," which help educators sort through the available content when designing the open-content textbooks I've been talking about.

Interestingly, what Wikipedia and its related projects are doing is a form of peer-review. And also interestingly, the process of journal peer-review is how most groundbreaking research (the kind that could lead to a new textbook revision) is validated... and journal article authors are not paid anything like textbook authors... and reviewers usually are not paid at all. And my access to electronic copies of journal articles is included with my graduate tuition.

If some enterprising organization were to make an easy-to-use way for faculty members to select chapters of existing books plus journal articles and save the results so that students could be assigned a POD or ebook version of the compilation, for a price competitive with existing textbooks, I think it would change the market entirely (and for the better). These compilations could combine open textbooks (e.g. Wikibooks), paid chapters from publishers, journal articles as subscribed to by the university in question, and even content authored by the faculty member. If desired, a department could set the content via a curriculum committee, and faculty members could be given the option (or not) to make changes to the list, working from the "master" collection. I think that would serve the interests of faculty members, students, and authors of truly valuable original content, while covering the real costs to publishers and opening up the market to fair competition.