Text Books will be more expensive

[NT1440]

If it lets to use pdf files I will get one as soon as they come out!

There are plenty of pdf readers in the app store now, so yes, it will read pdfs

 

[JayLenochiniMac]

A scholar never sells his or her books.

 

[JonboyDC]

looking at the prices at other e-books on the ibooks store it seems that they go for about the same price as new physical copy.

Hardcover best sellers go for $20-$25, and the iBooks price looks to be $15. So the price of the ibook is 60-75% of the price of the physical book.

I know the economics of textbook publishing are different (because the books tend to include lots of third party material that must be paid for), but there's no reason not to expect some price reduction for the electronic version.

 

[MTI]

A scholar never sells his or her books.

Of all the people that "matriculate" . . . want to wager that the term "scholar" only applies to less than 1%?

 

[Steven.nevets]

i still have most of my textbooks from first year, because I actually use them. an "Introduction to..." book is perfect for reviewing for more complicated classes.

I have also never made notes in my textbooks. maybe since i'm in science and math I don't need to, but it's never been something I've wanted to do.

both of those points mean iBooks is perfect for me. (as long as it comes to Canada soon...)

 

[jc1350]

<sarcasm>
I guess times have changed. When I was in school, we took notes in actual notebooks. 100 - 200 sheets of paper bound together with a spiral wire or a 3-ring binder and have as many pages as we needed. It was amazing. They were cheap enough we could have one for each class. It was a lot better than scribbling in the small margins of a text book.
</sarcasm>

I don't think the lack of note-taking is a valid criticism, but the prices of school books have always been a complete rip-off. But it's not just the school's book store. A local book shop in my college town tried to sell texts cheaper than the school's store, but the publisher and distributor prices were so high, you may have saved a few bucks (less than $5), but nothing to really send a message to anyone involved in the money grab.

Electronic versions SHOULD be cheaper because the publishers don't have the costs of paper, hard covers, binding glue, printers, ink, electricity for the printers, warehouse space for the printers, warehouse space for the storage, shipping boxes, delivery trucks....I could go on. Maybe the electronic books will be cheaper. Until it's in use or a publisher announces prices, its all only speculation.

 

[mrgreen4242]

the argument that somehow textbooks would be more expensive is a bit absurd. for one, your argument about students buying books and returning them isnt that great because most school dont even give you 1/4 of what you paid for the book so in some case its not even worth it to return. i bought an $80 book last semester and went to return it and they wanted to give me $5 dollars for it. if textbooks came out on this thing or kindle publishers could save a lot of money on printing fees etc. even if they charged $20-30 for a book d/l itll be worth it to me. i rent my books from chegg now instead of buying. i loose out on the return money but its fine because i get books cheap and the money i would get back is so minimal it doesnt even matter. the only reason i might not use textbooks on the iPad is due to no multitasking. if there was a way to have the textbook on half the screen with pages on the other half for notes etc than itd be worth it. itll be a pain in the butt clicking back and forth every 2 seconds between the text and pages or the web. hopefully they come up with a way to multi task at least 2 programs w/ OS 4.0

Too bad that $80 book wasn't a writing manual, I bet it would have shown you where the shift and enter keys are and that "don't" is not interchangeable for "doesn't".

In all seriousness, though, the textbook market is goofy, and I suspect that the iPad won't save anyone any money. There's no competition in that market. The instructor/department who picks the book has no real motivation to pick a less expensive text, so you HAVE to buy what they dictate. As such, there's no option to "vote with your wallet" for publishers who opt to make inexpensive eBooks available.

Also, while in your example you weren't able to recoup much of your cost (likely a new edition was being published, making your less valuable) this is not always, or even often, the case. My experience is that use books are about 75% of the cost of a new copy, and you can sell them for anywhere around 25-50% of the new cost. This often lets savvy (and admittedly lucky) students buy books for about 25% of the cover price, a level which I seriously doubt we'll see in the iBook or Kindle store any time soon.

this term I actually bought a textbook from the kindle store, and saved about $50 on it compared to my school's bookstore. it was significant enough that I decided it was worth it. I can easily see saving about 25% from the iBookstore, and adding the convenience of only having this device instead of massive hardcover books is all I need to convince me to buy all my books on the iPad.

ps the book was "Introduction to Thermodynamics and Statistical Mechanics" by Keith Stowe, if anyone is curious, or wants to fact-check me

The 25% you saved is eaten up by the fact you can't resell it, though. And even though you can (must) keep it indefinitely now, there's a very real chance that you won't be able to easily open the file up in a decade from now. Additionally, most books are simply not worth keeping after the class is over (engineering, programming, and math books are usually the exception, if you intend to work in a related profession... and a good writing handbook is always handy, but you only need one of those, ever).

Hardcover best sellers go for $20-$25, and the iBooks price looks to be $15. So the price of the ibook is 60-75% of the price of the physical book.

I know the economics of textbook publishing are different (because the books tend to include lots of third party material that must be paid for), but there's no reason not to expect some price reduction for the electronic version.

There's already a few places doing eTextBooks and the savings are nowhere new 6075%. More like 10% or so, and usually the selection is limited to books which are already fairly inexpensive. Regular books have to compete against one another. If Steven King and Dean Koontz both release a book in the same months and one is $40 and the other $20, people will often just go for the cheaper book. Similarly, if there's a "Dummy's Guide to the iPad" and an "Everything You Need to Know About the iPad" and one is $10 and the other $40, which will you buy?

Textbooks on the other hand don't work like that. I could release a $5 Calculus textbook and even if it's very good students will still have to buy the book their school/department/instructor dictate, with relative pricing having no impact on the purchase.