Textbooks are Crazy Expensive

Doug Kari, writing for Ars Technica, on How an eBay bookseller defeated a publishing giant at the Supreme Court:

Supap’s saga started with an idea for a dorm room sort of business. Since 1978, textbook prices in the US had soared by 700 percent, but the pricing wasn’t uniform worldwide. Publishers charged more in the affluent North American market and less in other regions. They called this practice “market segmentation,” but to many it seemed like price-gouging. Supap discovered this himself: a textbook priced at $50 overseas might cost $100 in the US.

What interested me about this article is that I have some experience from the other side: I’m a textbook author. In 1989, I coauthored the first edition of Expert Systems: Principles and Programming. It was successful enough that we did three additional editions—the fourth was released in 2004—and it’s been translated to Spanish, Russian, and Chinese.

Using my royalty statement from the first half of 2011, I calculated that each domestic sale of Expert Systems generated twenty-four times more income than each international sale. That’s a huge disparity. Domestic royalty rates are twice international rates and the books are twelve times more expensive. It’s not surprising that international sales frequently exceed domestic sales by a factor of five or more.

I used figures from 2011 because that’s the last year I received any royalty income. My publisher filed in 2013 for chapter 11 relief under the bankruptcy code. They’ve since reorganized, but I have to wonder if their pricing strategies are the root of their problems.