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From: matloff@bizet.Berkeley.EDU (Norman Matloff)
Newsgroups: sci.math,sci.physics,comp.edu
Subject: Re: How to beat the high cost of text books!
Message-ID: <17738@agate.BERKELEY.EDU>
Date: 4 Dec 88 00:02:06 GMT
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Reply-To: matloff@iris.ucdavis.edu (Norm Matloff)
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In article <17553@agate.BERKELEY.EDU> matloff@iris.ucdavis.edu (Norm Matloff) writes:

In response to a posting which mentioned some reasons why the high
prices of textbooks might be justified, I had said:

>Yes, these SOUND LIKE reasonable explanations for the high price of
>textbooks.  But oligopolistic market structure is a much better explanation.
>The plain truth is that publishers "have students over a barrel"  --  the
>students MUST buy the books, and so the publishers can to a great extent
>charge what they want.

>Here is a little experiment you can do to see this:  There are a great
>many softcover books on "Unix for programmers" on the market.  Most are
>intended to be sold to nonstudents, but the one by Paul Wang is aimed
>as a textbook for university courses.  It is of very similar content to
>other books, but is considerably more expensive (check this yourself).

In case anyone is interested, I just checked a few.  Wang's book was
around $38, but most other books which were similar in content were
around $25.  Wang's book was intended for the textbook market, while
the others were intended for the general market.  It definitely does
appear that publishers are conscious of the fact that students must
buy the **assigned** text for the course, i.e. no alternate choices,
and thus will to a great extent be willing to pay whatever the
publisher wants, and that the publishers are taking advantage of
this.

   Norm