If You Don't Eat Your Meat, You Can't Have Any Pudding

[plumtreeblossom]

One of the books for one of my spring semester classes was priced at $114.00 retail at the Harvard Coop, and the teacher specifically instructed us to buy it specifically there. Kickback? He can bite me hard. I just bought a rat-bag used copy of the exact edition of the book on Half.com for $28.00.

Occupy Adult College!

Comments

[ron_newman]

Now, for your next assignment, write an essay (or maybe a one-act play?) about this ...

[plumtreeblossom.livejournal.com]

Oh, plenty of people have written essays on this. Having previously worked in college textbook publishing, I can tell you it is pure racketeering. Publishers take what would have been a $25 textbook and tart it up with a ton of unnecessary ancillary products like CDs and websites and smack a $100 price tag on it. They also will put out completely unnecessary new editions every year, and will convince professors to adopt only those newest editions, which effectively prevents students from being able to buy used books. I am glad I am out of that industry.

[ayelle.livejournal.com]

Having also worked in educational and college textbook publishing and specifically in permissions, I feel like this is a bit of an overstatement. I've seen textbooks like that (the psych textbooks, oh god, it's exactly what you describe here) but I've also done the legwork on tracking down permissions for textbooks with many different contributors and it DOES add up without any artificial price inflation. I really disagree that the whole educational publishing industry is "pure racketeering," though I agree there are scammers in it. My impression after two and a half years in the biz (less than you, I know) is that it is not, in the end, a very profitable business and there's a lot of scrambling just to keep from going under.

The account really doesn't line up with my years of experience teaching -- I saw more of what you're talking about when I was in publishing, but on the teaching side it doesn't look like this at all. Some of it's my field, of course. In the discipline of English, our textbooks and critical editions are lucky to get new editions every ten years, by which point they're often desperately needed. And they almost never have CDs etc! I might see it differently if I taught in the sciences.

ETA. By the way, I know you were in publishing more years than me -- if I'm just flat-out wrong about this, I'd like to be educated. Got any juicy stories? Are kickbacks to professors real? My colleagues and I are all pretty convinced they're a myth. Frankly, we're lucky to get desk copies -- publishers have been cutting back! I haven't gotten a desk copy for years!

[treacle-well.livejournal.com]

I still work in college textbook publishing, and think you are unfairly oversimplifying and engaging in hyperbole here.

[ron_newman]

I didn't know, or had forgotten, that you used to work in textbook publishing. Was it Houghton Mifflin?