Slashdot Mirror
For Americans, Imported Textbooks Can Be Cheaper
mblase writes "The NYTimes has an article (free reg required, someone'll post the Google link any minute now) about how the Internet has trumped capitalism yet again -- the very same college textbooks used in the United States sell for half price, or less, in England. One sophomore imported 30 biology books this fall and sold them outside his classroom for less than the campus-bookstore price, netting a $1,200 profit." Wait 'til they shuffle the problem sets.
...about how the Internet has trumped capitalism yet again...
No should be: how the free market internet has enabled capitalism to trump corporate price fixing.
It often takes a couple of months for the duty bill to show up. Ask me how I know. :(
"I'd rather be a lightning rod than a seismometer." -Ken Kesey
At least until he's trumped by the powers of communism (lawsuits by the school or the textbook becoming illegal to import under the DMCA)
No boom today. Boom tomorrow. There's always a boom tomorrow. - Cmdr. Susan Ivanova
Average college tuition is up 40%
Textbook prices have gone up as well.
My paycheck, however, has most certainly *not* gone up 40%. Sad to say that average CEO compensation has gone up 17% over the past year.
No wonder people are importing books.. they can't afford to buy the stuff here!
First medicine for the sick and elderly, now college textbooks. Why are Americans pushing profit margins up for these companies by paying higher prices than other prosperous countries?
The Internet, if anything, empowers capitalism even more precisely because of this kind of thing. The Internet enlarges the market, making it possible to compete at a level like never before by eliminating geographic boundaries (to an extent) and reduce localization of markets.
Why do these kinds of exclamations make it into the story anyway? I thought there were editors for these things....oh wait, this is slashdot, nevermind.
This is a rather long essay I wrote a while back on the subject, so bear with me on this.
Deep within downtown Seoul, on the bottom floor of one of the city's innumerable high-rises, is the Kyobo Bookstore, the largest of its kind in Asia. Along the West wall of this 2.3 million title shopping center is a selection of English books, and a selection of college textbooks larger than that many American campus stores. A visiting American student majoring in for example mathematics would be astounded upon browsing the selection, not because of the wide variety of books available, but because the exact same book which he or she spent over $120 on for the previous semester is available here for $30.
Many of the business practices of the textbook industry are well known, if only subconsciously, to all college students. The nearly oligarchical cartel in the textbook industry drives the price of schoolbooks to unreasonable levels, between three to five times fair market value for equivalent non-scholastic texts in North American school bookstores (even though they can be purchased cheaply overseas), by means of a captive student population who does not have a choice in which textbooks they much purchase and price-control mechanisms such as frequent yet marginal revisions to short-circuit any used book market and "value-added" features such as subscription-based Internet site access, partly so as to satiate an expectation of high profits by textbook authors in an over-saturated industry.
The fact that textbooks are extremely expensive is difficult to debate. A quick browse in Amazon.com's textbook section shows that the average price for the top five books in each of their categories, is currently $89.47. Only one book in their top Mathematics section is sold for less than $99--and that book is only available used (Amazon). Since it is not uncommon for professors to require more than one book for a class, the financial burden on students can easy top five hundred dollars per semester. Furthermore, the cost of textbooks severely outpaces inflation: the United States Department of Labor indicates that the wholesale price of textbooks has increased 65 percent in the past decade, nearly six times the average increase in producer prices on the whole (Hubbard). In contrast, it is quite rare to find a hardcover book online or at a physical bookstore, even technical in nature, that retails for over $45.
The traditional method for students to offset these costs is the used book market, usually also facilitated by the campus bookstore. However, the industry has several methods of short-circuting this market. Most obvious is the frequent revisioning of textbooks, with as little as six months between versions, make previous versions economically worthless because even if the changes are as mundane as rearranged exercises (not uncommon in math and physics texts), publishers will stop printing the older edition, forcing professors to switch to ordering the new editions or risk alienating students who cannot find used copies of previous editions. or adding in "value-added" items such as CD-ROMs, magazines, or Internet Web Site access which are rarely used by instructors but serve to prevent used book sales.
In an effort to get instructors, departments and school boards to adopt a text, publishers go to great lengths to entice faculty. Perhaps one of the most ridiculous instances of textbook publishers trying to win instructor favor was an attempt to woo Richard Feynman, one of the most prominent physicists of the 20th century and a professor at the California Institute of Technology. Mr. Feynman was offered some 300 pounds of textbooks to review and recommend, and the promise that "We'll get someone to help you read them." One book he was asked to review was blank ("We just need a recommendation"), and when he delayed for several days (allowing a bidding war which cost the publisher two million dollars), Feynman was offered gifts ranging from fruit baskets to an all-expense-paid tou
-- the opinions stated above aren't those of my employer. in fact, they're probably not even my own. you know what, ju
I inherited a friend's old college textbooks from the 1960s and I was surprised at how small they were. They were the size of normal hardcover books, not the gargantuan monstrosities that I see in the local college bookstore.
Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
I always had a skeptical view of the university bookstore until I worked there!
...///...
"The practice of selling U.S. products abroad at prices keyed to the local market is longstanding. It's not unusual, it doesn't violate public policy and it's certainly not illegal. But publishers are still coming to terms with the dramatic change in the law."
Just you wait - I wager that new laws and publisher licensing rules will be created that manages to severely curb such importation. Heck, it works with prescription drugs: "oh, the drugs are unsafe in Canada!". Bullshit!
Congress is all for screwing all of us. Freakin' fascism is back.
When I went to UNC in 1989, in-state tuition was something like $300/semester, plus maybe $100 worth of books. (Math books were expensive even then, maybe $250 for a semester of books by senior year).
You guys today are getting totally raped by the Banks & Credit lenders -- they're the ones conspiring to launch you into life $100,000 in debt and spend the rest of your life that way. You bitch about Haliburton and the oil companies -- but it's the Equifax/Visa/&c.s of the world that are your true enemies.
It's not so much that Brits throw in an extra vowel, as Americans started taking out vowels over the past hundred years or so. Having to adopt to a new spelling is kinda annoying, though in some cases the new spelling makes more sense (aeroplane vs airplane). Despite the advantages, however, I'd really prefer to keep the original spelling; partially out of historical interest.
Its a catch-22 situation. Save money by buying used books when available, this drives up the cost of new books you have to buy.
When I was in school I was able to witness the "birth" of a textbook. I learned that students are in part responsible for the high prices. Textbook publishers try to recoup their costs (advances, manufacturing, marketing, etc) in the first year since there is a severe dropoff in sales for later years even when the text is still in use. This is due to the sale of used books, the publisher/professor gets nothing from these sales.
I wonder if the British bookstores buy books back and resell them in later semesters?
I sure don't get any kickbacks for "forcing my classes to use 'upgraded' textbooks". I've never heard of such a practice. These days, I'm lucky if I can even get the publishers to follow the traditional practice of sending me a free desk copy for evaluation purposes; more and more often, publishers want me to pay for the text before I consider creating a captive market of 40 student customers for them.
I share your anger about the problem of publishers charging unreasonable prices for textbooks. If I could find a low-priced textbook which is a reasonably academically sound choice, I'd choose it. Unfortunately, for every course I've ever taught, all of my choices have been overpriced. So what I'm forced to do is to make the best tradeoff I can between picking the most academically suitable text vs. saving my students as much money as I can.
The only other option I see is to create my own inexpensive in-house textbook, but this is a huge amount of effort; it's much easier for me to simply use a prepackaged text. Producing my own text would be easier is if someone in my field would organize a single, well-ordered, referreed online repository of open-source chapters, exercises, etc. If such a thing existed, and if the college infrastructure existed so that I could just hand off my camera-ready pages and have the bound text effortlessly appear on the bookstore shelf without my having to rassle with copying, binding, and pricing details, then I'd consider putting the extra time into doing this.
However, unrefereed course packs don't count as publications, and if you don't have enough publications, you don't get tenure--simple as that. If I spend time creating a cheap alternative for my students instead of writing research articles for peer-reviewed journals, then I'm significantly reducing my propects for my own survival. Those are the pressures I'm responding to.
It would be nice if students organized and lobbied the administration to change their tenure evaluation criteria on this point. If it helped us to get tenure by creating inexpensive in-house texts, more of us would be doing it. Unfortunately, I don't foresee students doing this; the point is probably too abstruse from the perspective of students who never come into contact with the tenure process.
Since I think copyrights are legitimate ways of protecting IP, I don't think that textbooks from China should be allowed to be sold here, unless of course all of the authorization has been obtained to print/reproduce the materials.
The siutation with UK books doesn't bother me, though, b/c there is no governmental regulation in the picture and it's up to someone to ship the books, attempt to sell them, etc.
For Pharmaceuticals, one must consider the following:
The US is the bigggest market for new/costly drugs. Pharm companies formulate their strategic plans based on a certain amount of profitability. In order for a new drug to make sense (financially) the company has to consider the fact that only 5% of the drugs they research end up becoming useful pharmaceuticals, and that the FDA's regulatory process can take several years and costs a lot. Since a US patent can last for only 20 years, there are very specific circumstances that lead to the constant creation of new drugs, and gray market drug importation on a large scale would alter those circumstances such that fewer dollars would be invested in new and innovative drugs.
From a purely economic standpoint, this should be allowed to happen, so that American consumers can accurately assess the role of the FDA in new pharm. development. The problem is, people only see what's there, and the promotional materials released by drug companies would spin any new drugs as the latest innovations, the underlying truth would be that due to the diminished profit potential less money was invested in research and less progress was made at creating pharmaceuticals to fight disease.
I suppose my thought on the issue is that the Canadian government is effectively cheating by imposing a price ceiling, and all of us in the US are being charged for Canadians' pharmaceuticals. If it were up to Canada, there would be far less incentive for drug companies to create the new drugs that we all benefit from. Since Canada is a government, it could nationalize the formulas for key pharmaceuticals, and no inventors would ever be compensated for their work.
If market forces are allowed to function, then gray market drugs would be illegal, and one by one all nations would impose price ceilings, and the gray market would adapt and drugs would be imported from wherever the ceiling was the lowest.
The problem is that this is not a situation of true efficiencies, as in importing widgets from the place that can produce them most efficiently, this is a situation where governments are able to coerce pharm companies through price controls, and by preventing price signals to invite new inventors to the pharm. industry, they handicap its ability to meet consumer demand through new innovation.
Amazing magic tricks