OT Prices (was Re: Books on Translation)

On Wed, 15 Jan 2003 15:48:40 -0500 Amanda Babcock <langs@...> wrote:

> On Wed, Jan 15, 2003 at 09:59:13AM -0800,
> Sylvia Sotomayor wrote:
>
> > My day job consists of persuading professors
> to adopt the textbooks my
> > employer publishes. And one of the many
> pricing criteria seems to be "whatever
> > the market will bear".
>
> Yes, but I note the market in question is one
> where the people making
> the purchasing decisions are *not* the ones
> spending the money.  Believe
> me, the prices I paid for physics textbooks
> when I was in college *were
> not* based on what I could afford (in this case
> "paying" and "purchasing
> decisions" were even further apart - the
> professors chose the books, I
> bought them, my parents paid for them :)
>
> In other words, this is not a classical free
> market.  There is no
> competition at the student level - we can't
> choose to take the same
> class with a cheaper text, or at a different
> university.
Very true. It's a captive market, and so the prices are higher. Some of my
profs do ask about pricing, but since every textbook publisher looks to the
competition to set prices, we all end up within $10 of each other.

-Sylvia


--
Sylvia Sotomayor
kelen@ix.netcom.com