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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.
I imported my math book for my freshman math class last year from England. I bought it from a big UK bookstore (I think it was Allwell) and I paid something like $45 shipped for it to the US. Same edition as the one the bookstore had. Same ISBN number. Hardcover, etc...all in all, identicle to the one I would have bought at the bookstore on campus. The bookstore (and all US bookstores) sell that book for $120 or so, even used it's $80 at the bookstore.
I hate textbooks....99% of the time they are total ripoffs. The only textbooks I own that I think are useful I saw in the college bookstore, and bought used on half.com for my own personal use-not needed for any class.
I live in New Zealand, and textbooks here cost about half price in retail shops than they would to import them from the US. In one of my papers a couple of years ago, the lecturer's recommended textbook was only available in the US and cost around $NZ230. Typically, a textbook here will be around $NZ100. Because of this huge cost, hardly anyone bought the textbook, even though the lecturer had arranged a deal where we wouldn't have to pay for shipping. Most of us were very surprised to hear that the situation was the same for most textbooks (ie, about twice the price in the US for exactly the same book).
For example, tuition alone for undergraduates at Harvard is currently $26,066 a year as compared with $1,840 at Oxford University.
I guess we British students should stop moaning so much.
American publishers sell their books cheap in third world with the pretext that the students can't afford expensive text books. However, the truth is that they are doing dumping and hurting the local publishing industry. If you can get K & R C programming book for less than $2 in India, why would any Indian professor write another book on C? The only way to prevent such dumping is to send back these books back to US and that would teach a nice lesson to big publishers here
I bought mine K&R C book and many other books from India and good to hear that others too are getting the word out.
The trade barriers that exist based upon national borders allow companies to practice alternative pricing schemes. Obviously, people are willing to pay the higher book prices in the US.
Those who are smart enough to figure out a way to evade it just won. Those who don't, lose.
HBI's Law: Frequency of calling others Nazis is directly correlated with the likelihood of the accuser being Communist.
The only piece of this that really surprises me is that the kid was able to sell enough books to make up for the overhead of shipping. One would expect some guy selling books to be cheaper than the on-campus store. No rent, not utilities, and no customer service. What happens when, say, someone who bought from this kid finds that half of chapter 6 is missing? He's out of luck. Theoretically, at a book store (I know, I know, university books stores are reknowned for "you bought it, you deal with it" attitudes), you could return it for a whole book.
This kid has become an active participant of our free market economy. Identify a product people want or need (the book), identify a way to cut the cost to that customer (resale and no guarantee), and do business where the customer already is (outside the class where the book is needed).
If you would like to be a leader with a large following...drive slowly down a windy two-lane road
Hurray, but whilst you're on Amazon UK just take a look at the price of CD's and DVD's, that's enough to make your eyes water.
Books are one of the few items exempt from the universal 17.5% sales tax imposed by your friendly British Government, much unlike 85% fuel tax or being left with $50,000 worth of debts when you leave Uni after your parents have paid 40% tax all of their working life.
the printing and binding is often pretty bad.
Most of the students from South America and Asia bring these books from home, and often they are essentially softcover photocopies. Still worth it to get a $120 book for $20, as long as you don't need it for a life-long reference.
Both prescription drugs and books -- 10x the price in the USA than anywhere else.
Wrong, perhaps but isn't "frightening" a little over the top?
What I'm listening to now on Pandora...
as i recall from my days at uni the profs holy grail was book publishing, alone or with jointly with other profs. publish or perish and all that.
thus there is a small market for these very specialised books. the average joe is not particularly interested in theory and practice of microwave antennas, etc.
my upper level courses all averaged about $100 per course in textbooks...and that was buying them used. everyone i knew sold them back at the end of the semester and hoped they did not have a new edition out, rendering our books worthless.
we also had a number of independent college bookstores up the street, they were kind of cool because they would buy our books back if they were in use at another campus, the bookstore didn't do that, as i recall.
it's giving me the heebie jeebies just thinking about all the time and money i spent in college, my parents gave me about $10,000 and I had $21,000 saved up from a job, plus i worked a ratty part-time to get through. never had any financial aid or grants. i ran up about $7,000 on credit cards, too.
overall i think my 6 years cost me $68,000 here in california but it was worth it now i have it all paid off, twice that amount in liquid assets, a house, motorcycle and two year old truck (all free and clear) and a fun job working on linux stuff so i guess it worked out.
No should be: how the free market internet has enabled capitalism to trump corporate price fixing.
Very true, what I would be interested in is how much import duty the bloke had to pay. It is one thing that I sometimes forget when importing to the UK.
My aunt used to be a managing editor for HBJ, which publishes a lot of textbooks. The whole thing is a scam. They make sure text books are "revised" every year, usually by changing one line (thats right) and calling it a new edition.
Publishers like HBJ make money hand over fist on textbook sales.
CDE open sourced! https://sourceforge.net/projects/cdesktopenv/
I'm teaching some introductory humanities courses and every semester I receive a big pile of unsolicited desk copies of textbooks that would never consider using. It seems like our department mailboxes are stuffed full of mysterious FedEx packages from publishers whenever I show up at the department. The books are printed on crappy paper with terrible binding.
But it gets worse. It's at the point where we have textbook pushers roaming the halls and crashing my office hours. I kid you not! Instead of watches lining their trenchcoat, they try to "hook me up" with desk copies of textbooks that I don't need.
Of course, what they don't tell you in their pitch is how much the students are being charged for their books. The idea appears to be: Why should I care when they're free for me? Out of curiosity, I checked. A shoddy (both in content and construction) 140p small paperback textbook which was being offered to me would cost almost US$80 for each of my students. That's about $70 more than a paperback novel of comperable size and print quality. Of course, the cost of all the sleazy hard selling the publishers do gets passed on to the students.
I imagine that people complained. I didn't formally (I did recently throw a pusher out of my office somewhat undiplomatically). To appease us, publishers have stopped imprinting desk copies as such, foregoing the familiar "evaluation copy, do not sell" markings. Colleagues of mine are just selling these things back to the bookstore where they reemerge as used textbooks for the following semester (apparently, some professors somewhere do teach from that crap). I think I will sell mine as well, but I initially felt dirty about it, because strictly speaking, all those unsolicited and unwelcome gifts were paid with the money of my students. So I decided that I will throw my students a "textbook feast" at the end of the semester. I'm serious, I'll be able to buy quite a few large pizzas.
Another reaction to all this unpleasantness: for the first time, I'm teaching a class with no textbook at all. All the readings are "on reserve," which is handled through online PDF's that I encourage the students to print out. It's a lot of printing, but only of the stuff they have to read, and they would have to do some of it anyway, since there is no anthology that has all the readings I want to cover. It's worked out great, and I want to encourage others who are in my position and have this option to follow suit.
I compared one book I needed for this quarter with the listing at the UK site and I noticed this.
Pretty soon books will be like DVD's, and will have a region code to ensure they're only available where the corporations want them to be.
"Nothing exists except atoms and empty space; everything else is opinion." - Democritus
You have to file a tax return if you make over USD 3500. However, it would be fairly easy to hide this income since he didn't pay any tax on it to begin with.
It often takes a couple of months for the duty bill to show up. Ask me how I know. :(
Can you expand on this a little? I'm interesting in seeing what sort of costs go into have things imported from overseas.
"I either want less corruption, or more chance
to participate in it." -- Ashleigh Brilliant
Of course there's a huge conflict of interest here. Personally, I use my own texts in my classes, but I address the conflict of interest issue by making the books free for downloading as a PDF from my web page. I'm sure some publishers would have a problem with that, but if it's just your own course notes, then there's really no excuse for not allowing your own students to download them for free, or photocopy them. And, uh, even if you wanted to, how could you stop them from photocopying them?
Find free books.
They teach you this in econ101, it's called price discrimination. If you can judge exactly what each person is willing to pay and then set that as the price, you will maximize your profit. You can easily show this using some "area under the graph" explanation. The classic example is the movie theater ticket prices. The operators know that there are some people out there that would like to see the movie, but not for the full admission price. So they offer senior citizens a $2 discount, for example. They have realized that senior citizens, as a group are willing to pay less for things, and because it's easy to categorize people by age, it's easy to set prices that take advantage of this. The ultimate goal of discriminatory pricing is to be able to set each price for each ticket individually, based on some omniscient knowledge of what that person is willing to pay.
Anyway, this applies to the textbook industry as well. The publishers have realized that they have two sets of customers that are easily segregated, and so they can set different prices for these different groups of people. They've discovered that Americans are willing to pay a lot more for books, perhaps because as a group the American college students tend to have a lot of money to throw around. (Note that I'm not saying that college kids are all rich, just that if you're going to college you likely have enough money to support the many thousands in tuition, or you have loans and financial aid... either way you are spending a lot of money on education.)
Anyway, they've determined that as a group Americans are willing to pay more than people in those other countries, and therefore it makes perfect sense to charge more. Part of this I'm sure is due to different standards of living, and all the other stuff they use to justify it. But in the end it just boils down to the simple fact that if you can divide your customers into groups based on what they're willing to pay and then set prices accordingly, you will maximize your profits.
And thirdly, the prices used bookstores pay students for used books are peanuts compared to what you get for selling the book outright to the next student. The one time I couldn't sell a $70 textbook, I took it to the campus bookstore's book buyback thing and they gave me $12 for it and then it was on the shelf for $52.50 again.
If I buy a new book, I can sell it to the next person for 70-75% of the retail price. If I buy it used to begin with, then I usually sell it for $5 less than what I paid, or if I barely put any wear on it, then I sell it for the price I got it for. So it works out to about $5/semester/book for me.
As to the issue of publishers changing the edition to avoid used book selling, professors at my university are smartening up too. They generally give out assignments/reading pages etc. for both the new and the old edition. I've heard a rant or two about how numerical methods (at a 2nd year university level) only changes once per 100 years and new editions are only for the reasons you mentioned.
The market for selling textbooks to students has IMO turned pure evil and I try to short circuit it in any way I can short of outright theft. (And I won't photocopy books either.) I just don't buy their new product unless I *know* I can't get a used one anywhere or I will want to keep the book for myself in the long run instead of selling it.
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.
There's WikiBooks, which is planning to do that. They have some content up (under the GNU FDL, IIRC) - not complete books yet, but some of it looks pretty good. There are probably a few other similar projects.
I'm not sure why they're cheaper, but I compared the prices of the books I bought this semester to the prices on BookCentral.com (the website listed in the NYTimes article) with my school's bookstore ( http://www.book.uci.edu/ ) and my books were 40-50% cheaper from the bookstore. These are new, US edition books.
Go figure.
Sig!
I can just hear a prof saying something like, "Oh, by the way, don't buy a used copy of the text for this class. The content has changed significantly from last year."
Time-Mirror got bought by Tribune Corporation a couple of years ago. Tribune sold off the subsidiaries that didn't fit with their core identity of news media so I have no idea where that particular subsidiary ended up. My guess is it doesn't matter. On the other hand, I know of at least one prof who required his own text book and then refunded to the class what he made on them buying it. Some people are fair but don't count on it.
They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither safety nor liberty.
Ben
That's nothing compared to India. There, many publishers of standard textbooks publish the same book at a steeply discounted price. This is to match local standards of living (the same reason for the much-discussed salary gap).
c ma y2k.htmlb ib/cs.html h tm
I saw such classic CS books as K&R and UNPv1, published as "Eastern Economy Edition". The Indian person who owned the books said that they were bought for the equivalent of around $5 each! They are softcover, printed on really cheap paper (thin and not pure white), and generally produced as cheaply as possible in order to meet the low price. The page size is also reduced.
http://www.niyam.com/writing/iconoclasts/niyama
http://people.csa.iisc.ernet.in/~siddu/
http://www-scf.usc.edu/~india/newstudentletter.
I was jealous, and wished I had been able to get books at that price during school. The content is exactly the same! Too bad there isn't an Amazon.co.in....
Dr. Demento On The 'Net!
At Oxford it was unheard of for a prof to require their own textbook; they generally provided a reading list of about 30 or so books for their courses, most of which could be found in the college libraries or the Radcliffe Science library. Occasionally they listed their own books, but again these were readily available in the libraries. And for the rare cases where books were either so hard to find in the libraries or so useful that every student pretty much needed one there was a thriving second-hand market in textbooks organised both on college notice boards and by the book shops in town.
The practices I'm reading about here sound just about as dishonest and immoral as the ones Feynman wrote about in "Surely you're joking?"
"'I pass the test,' she said. 'I will diminish, and go into the West, and remain Galadriel.'"
- JRR Tolkien.