I appreciate your practical comments. This particular caught my eye:
>"Previously I used Epp's book [1] which in my opinion is an outstanding book but regrettably is $280.44."
This is extortionate. What is the justification for a book being priced at nearly $300? This is one book of how many a student will need that semester? Are school's getting a piece of this as well? Is this why such a racket is permitted?
Sorry I know its tangential to your original comment but I would be curios to hear anyone's feedback, especially someone from Europe or elsewhere. I wonder if this pricing is specific to the U.S.
> This is extortionate. What is the justification for a book being priced at nearly $300? This is one book of how many a student will need that semester? Are school's getting a piece of this as well? Is this why such a racket is permitted?
That is a bit high for textbooks, most textbooks are usually "only" in the realm of $80-160. That said, math textbooks are usually far more expensive than others.
The excuse given for high prices is that there is a strong used book market for college textbooks, as most students sell off their textbooks at the end of the semester, so from the point of view of the publisher, they see only one sale in 5-20. Of course, publishers discovered that the "cure" for this is to release new editions of textbooks with minor updates (most importantly, reorder the questions in the question banks!) every few years to kill off the used textbook market and haven't lowered their exorbitant prices to compensate.
As an undergrad, I did have one semester where my total book costs were about $1000. Most of the semesters, they were more like $500.
Oh, and the prices usually go to lining the publishers' pockets. Not the authors', not the schools'.
I spent a little time working at Pearson on a textbook project, and yeah, they're pretty profitable, but the up-front costs are enormous. The production budget for the biology book I worked on was $10 million. And that was for a book that would be widely used at the high-school level.
For a math book like this, I'd guess they spent more like a million getting it done. I wouldn't be surprised if it was $50-100K just for the typesetting.
There is something more than just high production costs going on, though, for math books. Consider Apostol's "Calculus". Volume I new is $150-270 on Amazon. Volume II new is $160-270.
These were first published around 1961. A second edition of Volume I was published in 1967, and a second edition of Volume II in 1969. There have been no further editions. The schools that use Apostol today are still using those late '60s second editions.
They were about $20 per volume when I bought them in 1977, which is equivalent to about $80 per volume in today's money.
A book that cost $20 in 1977 and was made to the same standards today--some paper and binding quality, etc.--would probably have to cost at least $100 today retail. Unfortunately, costs for paper and printing have outpaced inflation generally. Most trade books now are printed very cheaply--the paper and binding are crap.
I estimate the "fair" price of a textbook to be around $50-80; math (particularly calculus) is a textbook price I consider to be more naturally expensive, since they tend to cover more material. Your estimation of decades-old textbooks costing about $80 in today's money seems to vindicate that viewpoint.
>"The excuse given for high prices is that there is a strong used book market for college textbooks, as most students sell off their textbooks at the end of the semester, so from the point of view of the publisher, they see only one sale in 5-20."
Right, and couldn't they make up for this by issuing e-Textbooks with lower prices that would much higher volume in terms of sales?
Also I believe the book stores themselves are in this farce, as large percentage of the bookstores are not run by the schools but private companies such as Barnes and Noble and Follet[1]. So they are making out in this scheme as well.
Perhaps those of us who seek to make money from entrepreneurial activities should instead wonder at the business skills of people who are able to extract $300 from their customers for a book?
> A central tenet of capitalism is a competitive market though
It's true that a lot of the defense of capitalism that was ginned up (long) after the system was described and named by its critics involves invoking all kinds of hokum about markets which are both free and competitive which not only has nothing to do with anything in the history of capitalism, but isn't even all that internally consistent because of the tendency toward monopoly in unregulated markets where producers experience economies of scale (and in some other common cases.)
But this is a (deeply flawed) rationalization of capitalism, not its foundation.
> The market will bear it and the market has no choice to bear it are two different things.
With textbooks, there is a choice: go without (either taking the class anyway or not.)
That your perceived cost from going without is higher than the cost of paying for the book is, arguably a sign that the book is priced correctly for value. You seem to think that the book "ought" to be priced by cost to produce as they would be in a perfectly competitive market, but that's very often not a feature of real markets. The pricing is based on conditions in the market, which is very much a real -- if very much not an ideal -- market.
Do you actually believe the things you are writing? No, going without a text book is not actually a viable choice if you want to pass a class is it? Are you just trolling?
>"You seem to think that the book "ought" to be priced by cost to produce as they would be in a perfectly competitive market"
Nowhere did I articulate that sentiment at all. There is plenty of room to make a tidy profit without resorting to punitive pricing, even in a captive market.
>"Previously I used Epp's book [1] which in my opinion is an outstanding book but regrettably is $280.44."
This is extortionate. What is the justification for a book being priced at nearly $300? This is one book of how many a student will need that semester? Are school's getting a piece of this as well? Is this why such a racket is permitted?
Sorry I know its tangential to your original comment but I would be curios to hear anyone's feedback, especially someone from Europe or elsewhere. I wonder if this pricing is specific to the U.S.