Quote:
Originally Posted by Steve Jordan
The switch from printed books to e-books is obviously going to be an expensive, disruptive and possibly profit-sapping process, which only makes current publishers extremely reluctant to change: If you were a publisher, would you willingly go through the extra work of creating an e-book that you could only sell if your printed book had to be cut to 50% of its price? Heck, no.
It's possible that what America needs (and what, thanks to the digital age, it is finally feasible to have) is a central, nationally-used, nationally-supported academic publisher for all schools.
So a national agency, under the wing of (or supported by) the Dept of Education, might be required. This tax-supported agency would produce educational texts that corresponded to the educational standards of the country, produced in e-texts that would be provided at no additional cost to all students when tuition was paid (or perhaps even available at no additional cost to all Americans).
There could still be traditional ed publishers, producing printed texts (or specialized e-texts) for those schools that sought a higher standard than the national one, and whose students were willing to pay higher fees for the privilege. But the new standard would be nationally-standardized free e-texts (read on student-optimized readers or laptops), provided by taxes, and used by most schools in the nation.
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I'm all for that as long as my taxes don't get raised, I'd vote that bill right down if its coming out of my pocket. I paid my dues in college, I'm not paying someone elses now as well
What would be a fairer way to organize it would be for the industry to restructure. It'd be better off for publishers to spin out their manufacturing divisions (if they have one still, I haven't looked into this) so their fixed costs related to the textbooks goes down. Now they would not need to worry about maintaining the cost of a factory so the cost of paper back books would be somewhat similar to ebooks (yes they need to pay the standalone manufacturing firms but they also need to pay scanner companies, the main difference should really be that there is a huge sunk cost in a factory). Now the manufacturing companies will be the hub for all publishers (there would likely be a few of them, maybe 2-3) and they would be able to take advantage of the increase in volume of books running through their factory and run more efficiency (i.e. lower costs to publishers). I think publishers would rather hide behind their "paperbacks cost more than ebooks" mantra than to do something like this because there is probably a big profit margin on textbooks that they don't want to lose either way.