From: mkant+@cs.cmu.edu (Mark Kantrowitz)
Subject: Re: High Prices of Math Books. I am pissed.
Organization: School of Computer Science, Carnegie Mellon
Date: Fri, 25 Dec 1992 00:53:26 GMT

In article <92Dec24.175829est.47880@neat.cs.toronto.edu> gh@cs.toronto.edu (Graeme Hirst) writes:
>This misses the point of the original posting, which was this:  Some
>publishers (e.g., McGraw-Hill, Prentice-Hall, Addison-Wesley, and other
>names with hyphens) will make the *same* book in different bindings at
>different prices in different parts of the world.   In particular, they
>will sell a cheap paperback edition only outside North America, while
>insisting that North American customers buy the hardcover edition at a
>much higher price.

That's usually a marketing decision, nothing more. For some reason
hardcover sells better in the US. It is also more likely to get reviewed,
which means they sell more copies.

Forget about the paperback/hardcover distinction for the moment.
Suppose we had a publisher who only produced paperback. For a press
run of 1,000 copies of a 200 page book, you're looking at printing
costs of between $5,000 and $10,000. (I assume the book is perfect
bound and uses a relatively cheap paper.) Phototypesetting will cost an
additional $1,000 ($5 per page). Preparing the manuscript for
typesetting will cost at least $2,000 ($10 per page typing and
formatting). More complicated formatting will cost $50 an hour,
though. Editing will cost $3,000. Marketing will cost $2,000. Then
throw in a reasonable margin of 30% for publisher and 30% for
bookstore. Also, you've got 15% royalties for the author. This gives
you a total consumer cost of about $35 a book. 

But may esoteric math books don't even reach a press run of 1,000
copies. With small press runs, the fixed costs of camera prep and such
will overwhelm the marginal cost of printing an extra book. (And on
some presses, you can control the press run only to the nearest 500 or
1000.) And the costs of producing a book can often run much higher,
because we didn't even include storage costs, costs of the publishers
facilities, costs for longer books and so on. All in all, the prices
they charge for textbooks are quite reasonable, especially considering
that some of the books they print don't even sell out their first
press run, causing the publisher to lose money.

The only way I can see to cut costs significantly is to get paper out
of the loop. It is very cheap to copy electronic data. The books would
have to be encrypted, to prevent modification of the contents, and
have some controls on unauthorized copying. If we had the books stored
on fileservers at college bookstores, with the bookstores remitting a
fixed royalty to a central clearinghouse, the cost per book to the
student would be under $10. The author would get a small royalty, as
would the clearinghouse, with the bulk of the money going to the local
bookstore. Bookstores would have to advance some of the royalties, to
keep them legit. For people who prefer hardcopy, the bookstores could
print out the book on the spot for an additional fee.  

The biggest problem with this kind of scheme would be getting it
started. There would be resistance from both bookstores and authors.
Bookstores would not want to invest in the equipment, and authors
wouldn't want their texts to be sold through this channel until it was
well established. Software for reading and printing the books on
Macintoshes and IBM PCs would be comparatively easy. It might actually
be easier to get libraries to invest in the equipment, if it came
complete with several free books and allowed consumers to read the
books online before deciding to buy a copy.

I'd guess it'll be 15-20 years before anything like this becomes
widespread. The Sony Databook costs too much, and even the American
Heritage Dictionary/Thesaurus, which runs $99 for the professional
edition (11mb), is still a bit too pricey. 

--mark



Xref: sparky sci.math:17421 sci.physics:21770