High book prices drive me nuts. Especially computer books and textbooks. I am an author, and I cannot control what publishers charge for books.
In my first year athe University of British Columbia (1974), I had to buy The Little English Handbook for the English 100 class. Being German, I recorded the price on the inside front cover: $3.40
Checking amazon.com today, I see that the current edition of the book is $20.28 (including the 7% GST tax, which was not in effect in 1974). The price has increased 6x in 30 years.
The Culprits of High Book Prices
We haven't experienced 500% inflation over the last three decades, so why have book prices sky-rocketed? Part of it is higher prices for paper and other raw materials. Part of the reason is publishers pushing for higher profits. Part of the reason is economices (slow selling books need higher prices to pay for production costs.) But the real culprits are the book sellers.
Whether you buy a book from the local BookNook bookstore or from the transnational Borders chain, the retailer makes 40% or so. That's the largest profit, by far, made on the book. The distributor makes maybe 10%, the publisher another 10%, and the poor author averages 7% or less. The remainder is the cost of making and shipping books.
Making prices worse is amazon.com. You know how it boasts about 35% off or whatever? If amazon demands cheaper prices from publishers, the publishers are forced to increase the cover price.
College Bookstore Defeats Amazon
Amazon.ca and Chapters.ca are of no help in reducing prices for students. When my son was accepted for college last summer, I thought I'd be clever, and get his textbooks cheaper online. No such luck. Here's why:
- The college bookstore provides students with a list of partial textbook titles; no authors, no ISBNs, which makes it hard to determine precisely which textbook with "Psychology" in its title is the correct one -- amazon lists over 1000 such books. (We drove out to the bookstore, and furtively scribbled down the ISBNs.)
- The online book sellers either don't carry the book titles or don't have them cheaper.
- When the online book seller has a textbook that priced less, it never arrives in stock. The textbook I ordered from amazon.ca was promised "within a month" three times. After three months of delays, I cancelled the order. (That makes me wonder: when amazon claims three million -- or whatever -- books, are they telling the truth? Listing a book's existence in a database is not the same as having the book in stock.)
- The college bookstore actually has competitive prices, and we ended up buying them most of them there. We saved some money, because I had a couple of the books in my collection (classics), and in second semester my son borrowed some texts from an older student.
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