Re: Books on Translation

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