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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.