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Re: Books on Translation

From:Amanda Babcock <langs@...>
Date:Wednesday, January 15, 2003, 20:46
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. Amanda