Friday, August 12, 2005

book publishing in the sdmi phase: So we are seeing some tweaks on the drm rules for the college ebook scheme recently in the news [...] It would be interesting if college texts were published more directly rather than the big publishers. We did some work on the structure of book publishing (actually K12) and found it remarkably similar to music in terms of inefficiency. [...] I had a chat with one of the authors of a well known general relatively text. Looking at their costs and rewards and what the publisher did for them, it became clear that something on the order of $15 might be a fair price for an e version and $20 to $25 for a print version rather than the $109 list. Raise the price to $25 for an e version and the authors would make quite a bit of money. (Via tingilinde.) Twenty years ago, I wrote a textbook with a friend. We were fortunate to work with an innovative academic publisher, which allowed us to produce the book efficiently using TeX and price it more cheaply than competitors, so students could afford it. It sold pretty well for its narrow niche. Today, I see books of comparable length and textual complexity, obviously typeset with TeX, priced at more than 30 cents/page. Students cannot afford them. What are the authors thinking? 10:05:01 PM