
Why Textbook Prices Keep Climbing [audio] - ivan_ah
http://www.npr.org/sections/money/2014/10/03/353300404/episode-573-why-textbook-prices-keep-climbing
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ivan_ah
The main explanation given to justify $300 price tags for textbooks is the
short "exploitation window" for each title. Because of used book sales, new
book sales are eroded, so publishers are forced to jack up prices. Hm... I
like how publishers end up the victims in that story.

Also interesting is the part of the interview with an executive from a big
publishing company who seems convinced digital textbooks are the future. Sure.
Maybe. I wonder if they asked teachers what material/tools they need for
better teaching, or if they came up with the strategy on their own. I'm not so
sure "digital editions" will be very good. If they use DRM, then the reader
experience will be crap, and if they don't then piracy will hit them much
harder.

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zarify
Yeah I liked that bit about digital tools. I've spent the last five years or
so at my last two schools dealing with issues with subscription based "eBooks"
that don't play nicely with education department proxies, crappy Flash
learning objects, or are just unresponsive.

All this makes me so sad since I try to evangelise effective use of IT in
classrooms.

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neekburm
I'm really surprised that piracy hasn't been pushing them to more a more
reasonable price point, like file sharing did with music. When I went back to
school, almost every single one of my textbooks was available in some pirated
form. Sometimes one had to settle with the previous edition, which was usually
identical to the current edition with some pagination changes. It can be a bit
of a pain to get them, but it wasn't $300 per book's worth of pain.

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lukaslalinsky
Using a pirated textbook is not as easy as listening to pirated music. Paper
is actually a pretty good form for textbooks and printing hundreds of pages is
not fun, binding them in a useful way is even less fun. Sure, you can just
print out the snippets that you need to work with at the moment, but that's
not very convenient.

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Tycho
i guess with today's smartphones you can just flick through the pages one by
one while filming, and then you'll have a video you can pause at any page,
with sufficient resolution to read it.

