Inside Higher Ed: Challenge on Textbook Pricing.
“If the case Costco Wholesale Corporation v. Omega, S.A., falls for Costco (the high court heard oral arguments last Monday), the textbook publishers could see the U.S. market flooded with less fancy editions they have produced for students in poorer countries.” Wow. I never considered that angle.
Comments:
I worked for the higher ed division of Prentice-Hall many moons ago. No insight into the sales or pricing activity but I can tell you that there was a lot more than just the textbook to print.
One of our better sellers was a geography text, for which we produced something like three dozen ancillary products like a teacher’s edition, study guide, overhead set and so on. Almost all the ancillary products were provided at little or no cost to schools.
So importing the grey market student texts does more harm than just the pricing pressure.
OTOH, printed texts should be disappearing any time now in favor of digital so this is probably one of those end of era low-impact decisions anyway.
To support that position, publishers would need a dataset that indicated American students excelling beyond their international peers.
I don’t think that’s the case, and I don’t think the “ancillary products” are justified. How do you come to think of the teacher’s guide as an ‘extra??’
PS - not slamming you,Bill, just pointing out the publisher’s rationale….
I mean only that the cost of them should be taken into account, and that they wouldn’t be produced without interest from the teachers and other consumers of them. How much they help students is a different question…
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The price of knowledge, just like the wages the knowledge generates, is under global pressure.
Book publishers have been running a con. It’s over.