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Annoyance With High Cost of Materials

  Tags: Low budget
 Language Learning Forum : General discussion Post Reply
33 messages over 5 pages: 1 2 3 4 5  Next >>
patrickwilken
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Germany
radiant-flux.net
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 Message 25 of 33
19 October 2014 at 5:20pm | IP Logged 
rdearman wrote:


Actually it is because the cost of media material is the least significant amount of investment. Most of the money a book publisher spends is on employee costs not printing. The cost of authors, editors, line editors, fact checkers, lawyers, accountants, cover designers, graphic artists, researchers, etc make up over 95% of the production cost of a book and the actual material is less that 1%.

So if you want a cost reduction you'd have to have a quality reduction as well.



But that's not to say that books are always as cheap as they can be.

I used to work for a major academic publisher, and one day we had a talk from a senior guy who worked in the textbook side of the business. It was eye-opening how he described the market (students) as basically a group of suckers (I think he literally said 'bunch of suckers') who would pay insane costs for a book (largely because this comes out of a student-loan/parent's money) and feel grateful when they could resell the book at a fraction of the cost the next year.

I don't know if that applies for language textbooks as well, but there is no doubt that the publisher I worked for charged as high a price as the market would allow, and because students actually are willing/able to pay much more than some other segments of the population they were able to get really high returns.

Edited by patrickwilken on 19 October 2014 at 5:24pm
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rdearman
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United Kingdom
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 Message 26 of 33
19 October 2014 at 6:14pm | IP Logged 
@patrickwilken - True, I was mostly speaking of fiction books rather than non-fiction textbooks. Don't have a lot of experience with those.

WOuldn't it be good if everyone here were to assist fixing the language textbooks on WikiBooks and giving some free MP3 dialogues and downloads? I think HTLAL textbooks could be a brilliant! A lovely opensource set of materials we could point people to instead of the highly priced commercial versions or the old 1960's FSI stuff.

:)
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Juаn
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Colombia
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 Message 27 of 33
19 October 2014 at 6:36pm | IP Logged 
patrickwilken wrote:
But that's not to say that books are always as cheap as they can be.

I used to work for a major academic publisher, and one day we had a talk from a senior guy who worked in the textbook side of the business. It was eye-opening how he described the market (students) as basically a group of suckers (I think he literally said 'bunch of suckers') who would pay insane costs for a book (largely because this comes out of a student-loan/parent's money) and feel grateful when they could resell the book at a fraction of the cost the next year.


Imagine what they would charge if they didn't face competition from used copies, old editions, and international versions, as would be the case with digital-only distribution. Whenever I need a university level textbook, I always purchase an old edition as the price of new ones are indeed exploitative.

The students referred to in your post are wisdom incarnate when compared to those who patronize ebooks.
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Serpent
Octoglot
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 Message 28 of 33
19 October 2014 at 7:03pm | IP Logged 
Way to insult much of the forum...
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patrickwilken
Senior Member
Germany
radiant-flux.net
Joined 4532 days ago
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Studies: German

 
 Message 29 of 33
19 October 2014 at 8:05pm | IP Logged 
rdearman wrote:

WOuldn't it be good if everyone here were to assist fixing the language textbooks on WikiBooks and giving some free MP3 dialogues and downloads? I think HTLAL textbooks could be a brilliant! A lovely opensource set of materials we could point people to instead of the highly priced commercial versions or the old 1960's FSI stuff.


Open source language learning textbooks would be amazing. :)
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rdearman
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United Kingdom
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 Message 30 of 33
19 October 2014 at 8:25pm | IP Logged 
Serpent wrote:
Way to insult much of the forum...


Huh?
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Serpent
Octoglot
Senior Member
Russian Federation
serpent-849.livejour
Joined 6596 days ago
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 Message 31 of 33
19 October 2014 at 8:31pm | IP Logged 
I meant this:
Juаn wrote:
The students referred to in your post are wisdom incarnate when compared to those who patronize ebooks.

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Juаn
Senior Member
Colombia
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 Message 32 of 33
19 October 2014 at 8:37pm | IP Logged 
I have not insulted anyone - basic economics has.

You cannot complain about the price of something, and then favor a system of delivery that guarantees the seller a perfect monopoly.


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