Rapidshare.com

Quote :

Has anyone does this yet?

Google "Cory Doctorow experiment"

Amazon pay more like $7 and i get my $1 or near enough

Yes the scale starts at 10% but many of my books have sold enough to qualify for the top 15% rate.

Yes, lin, marketing expenses. If a teacher doesn't know the text exists, he can't recommend it for his class. Teachers don't search out textbooks, they want the books to come to them. Which is why the major pubs all have giant sales forces consisting of general salespeople and product specialists. Each has a territory and they visit every school in it each semester. Hundreds of free books are given out in this effort (some schools want dozens to give to each instructor to evaluate). The smaller pubs can't afford this, which is why a few huge ones dominate the textbook market. Profs can't require what they don't know about.

As for r and d, textbooks often involve tons of illustration costs, licensing fees, and permission fees. There's also an arms war of ancillaries, without which teachers nowadays will not adopt a text. Ancillaries include extensive test banks, solution manuals, Power Point lectures of each chapter, image libraries, Blackboard/Angel drop-in modules of the gradebook, online tests and dozens of other things. You think professors write their own tests, make their own lectures up and create the content in Blackboard? That's been de facto offloaded to publishers. At great expense to them.

CD-ROMs with supplemental materials are often made, and companion websites, at more expense. College profs are hired to review the manuscript at various stages. They don't work for free, either.

There's a textbook that describes all this, by Mary Ellen Lepionka. You might want to read it before lecturing about textbook economics.

Speaking of textbook reviews, just now my editor emailed me a pdf of the first of four final reviews my manuscript is undergoing. Made my day. Here's a portion:

17. Which books do you feel will be the chief competitors to this text? Please compare this text with them, and discuss the competitive advantages of this book.
Response: I feel there is no book competing with this book. This publication has information that other books have, but no other book has it all in one place. I have seen books that cover a chapter here and there, but nothing like this. I think this is a great book, and I would like to adopt it in my class.

Adopt it in my class ...glorious music to a textbook writer's ears.

Cory Doctorow? lol. Guess I need to spell it out. Who do you know who wasn't wasn't conventionally published FIRST (to great success), that does this?

No, LC, marketing is not higher for textbooks...it's LESS because there are less people to reach, they don't have to buy expensive mass advertising, the people who make customers buy the books are localized (i.e. work in a limited number of places, where they can be reached)
I'm not saying they DON'T spend more money on promotion (I'd beleive about anything about financial idiocy in the book industry) but that they don't HAVE to.

But again, you just don't get it. My guess is Mary Ellen also writes textbooks for money and doesn't get it, either.

In a real world market you can't say, well it costs us more to produce out product, so pay more for it. Detroit found that out. Somebody will produce it cheaper and undersell you. It's called economics. It's a private sector thing.

The ONLY reason they can charge $30 for a book that would be a $15 novel is because they can get away with it because the person who buys it has no choice. (I know, I know you have a bunch of little weirdness about how they don't really have to buy it because they could change colleges or be a waitress instead of a lawyer or whatever...but they don't wash)
So what you have is something price way beyond market value because of compulsion.
Now...and try to remember that this is what the discussion is about, not whether your buddies in the textbook/school store industry deserve the money...if you have somebody being forced to pay $30 for book that he's going to use for 8 weeks then discard because the system will require a new edition next semester because they can get away with it, and they see a chance to get it for free off some website...what do you think they are going to do? Students are very resentful about textbook prices and the whole system. I have no idea if you aware of that or want to be, but it's a fact.

Now, you've got a guy who wants to buy a copy of a favorite author that he will keep and re-read for years, or give to his mother for her birthday, and it's only $14... what are the relative chances that he will buy a pirated pdf?

That's what I'm saying. You can disagree if you want, but if so you should deal with it realistically, not from your special world of what's okay.
Ultimately it's about the market. People are choosing pirated books. Some more than others. There are reasons for it, and availability is only one of the reasons.

Cory Doctorow. Spelled C O R Y D O C T O T O W

And, in fact, he was NOT conventially published first. He came out of free books, rose to best-seller status later and every contract he writes contains his ability to make the same book available free at the same time.

Try actually looking into this crap before you start your little contradictions.

Hell, you should buy my manual just to save you time in saying things that are documentably bullshit.

Or course, you'd have to actually read it.


AND, Doctorow is just sort of the poster boy for this stuff. In fact there is a whole movement with lots of successes, lots in interesting theoretical concepts with experiments and data to back them up.

If I thought there was teeny chance that you would actually look into it, or that being informed would affect your opinions and slithery argumentation, I'd provide you with some links, but I don't think that's the case.

Basically, it's called the future. Some people are embracing and moving into it, some people are struggling to keep it from happening... and some people are just sitting there niggling about it because it doesn't sound like something they want to hear.

lin wrote:

No, LC, marketing is not higher for textbooks...it's LESS because there are less people to reach, they don't have to buy expensive mass advertising, the people who make customers buy the books are localized (i.e. work in a limited number of places, where they can be reached)
I'm not saying they DON'T spend more money on promotion (I'd beleive about anything about financial idiocy in the book industry) but that they don't HAVE to.

They don't HAVE to? Again, how will the professors know their book exists? Localized? There are technical colleges, community colleges, and universities all over the country. As for mass advertising, how much mass advertising do most trade books get? How much do your books get?

Who else ya got besides Cory Doctorow?

<< then discard because the system will require a new edition next semester because they can get away with it, >>

Oh, yeah, there's another (huge) reason for textbook prices. Used copies. After a few years, there are more used copies than new ones on the market. Publishers don't make any money off used copies.New editions are put out to combat this. If publishers don't sell books they go out of business.

Guess what. Same goes for all books.

But real books can't make people go out and buy new editions like academic books.


Yes. localized. Yes, small numbers. You're comparing teachers with readers. a smaller number by a factor of probably hundreds. However many colleges there are (which can be piped right into by the way) but there are millions of homes and offices and stuff.

I mean use your head instead of your fly off the handle reaction for once.

There are MANY times more buyers of trade books than teachers who make students buy text books. And they are VASTLY easier to target.
No, they don't have have reps swarming all over. Trade books aren't sold door to door.
They could reach those targets much easier and cheaper. If they all got together and decided to switch from the rep system to the ways in which publishers get books into libraries, for instance, there costs would drop astronomically.
Like I say, the book industry is like a museum of idiotic models and procedures.

You just think it's spiffy because you're part of it, from both ends.

Actually it's a cluster fuck.



As I already said, there are many more than Doctorow. But it's not really worth going to a bunch of trouble to list and link because you don't read. You didn't even read up on Doctorow and figure out that what you said about him is bullshit. You're not amenable to learning. (I've noticed that a lot of teachers are that way. Seems ironic)

But tell you what. Five bucks and you can buy my manual that has hundreds of links that could hip you up to all this stuff.

But like I say, you'd have to actually read the stuff to learn anything.

By the way... find somebody who knows something about economics and tell them the reason a product costs more is because there are used ones on the market.

When he stops giggling, tell him that you were talking about a market in which buyers can be forced to buy new version of the product on a schedule. Watch out you don't get any fluids on you when he falls over laughing.

There's a whole thread (265 comments) about pirating here:

[You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]

lin wrote:

There are MANY times more buyers of trade books than teachers who make students buy text books. And they are VASTLY easier to target. No, they don't have have reps swarming all over. Trade books aren't sold door to door. They could reach those targets much easier and cheaper. If they all got together and decided to switch from the rep system to the ways in which publishers get books into libraries, for instance, there costs would drop astronomically.

If they all got together? How would that possibly work? The textbook pubs are competitors. Only one book can be spec'd for one class, and each pub wants its book to be it.

With trade books, all the pubs have to do (and about all they DO do) is send a catalog to Barnes and Noble and Borders, where the buyer orders 4,000 or whatever, of each title she wants to distribute throughout the stores. Some books lead the catalog, but most books are never advertised and languish in obscurity.

Shelagh wrote:

There's a whole thread (265 comments) about pirating here:

[You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]

What? Ebook pirating? How can that be?

Quote :

The textbook pubs are competitors.

Oh, well then they couldn't possibly get together and fix prices, could they? That NEVER happens.

And they couldn't possibly all decide to simultaneously move into less ruinous practices... that NEVER happens. Certainly nobody ever sets up standards organizations that restrict competitive practices for the betterment of all signatories.
NEVER saw that happen.

You just don't know diddly about business or econ, do you?
Hell, that's probably what you teach.

Your refusal to learn what you state opinions about, despite being shown areas to learn, and your COMPETE, TOTAL inablitity to ever admit you were wrong instead of just squirreling off into other little loopdeloops is one thing
(e.g. your ignorant bold font pronouncement on Doctorow, which if you ever wised up on, you sure as hell aren't going to admit it)

But your opinions on economics are just jaw-droppingly idiotic.

Entry of used products make new products more expensive. So presumably if you have a Ford dealship in a small town, and somebody starts bringing in used cars and selling them off a lot, the Ford deal will raise his prices to deal with the underselling? This is on which planet?

You just keep on speiling off stuff you know absolutely nothing about. Those are two glaring instances just in this thread.

But you'll just ignore them and trot right ahead.

I'd love to think you'd get students like that. Refuse to read anything but insist on lame opinions. Oh, but they can't can they: you're in control and flunk them, just like you can tell them which books to buy.

You got no clue on this crap, honey. I realize you're incapable of admitting that.

lol. You become so shrill and hysterical when challenged it's almost funny (if it weren't so sad) to watch. Sort of like a person having a mental breakdown.

You're told why textbook prices are high and you sputter about the publishers' inefficient (iyo) practices. Which is totally irrelevant. You know diddley about how they're marketed, what is required to market them, you just sputter about how they should be marketed. You don't grasp that used books affect new book sales disastrously because, unlike trade books, the only market for them are the few classes where they're required. Your Ford dealership "parallel" was utterly moronic. If Fords were only sold to people who took classes about them, the parallel might work.

And you grimly cling to Cory Doctorow as an example of -what? That everyone can successfully self publish, as was your original premise? Who knows. What a bore you are.

It's not about being challenged. I can handle challenge pretty well.
It's about having somebody spout off about things they dion't understand and refuse to learn about it or admit when they're wrong.

Now you've done another of you typical little squirrliness, tried to turn it into some personal jab... oh, you're all upset, having a braekdown.

We've seen it all before. It's probably one of those things that comes from "teacher is never wrong". Or just being an arrogant twit with no intellectual honesty.

What's messed up is that you're out there teach kids. Very messed up.

You don't have any sort of grip on the economic factors you are talking about, and try to slide off it.
You don't have a clue what I'm talking about and don't want to.

It's basically your problem, notbody elses.