OT Prices (was Re: Books on Translation

Re outrageous prices.......
Sylvia Sotomayor wrote:


>Well, if you really want to know... :)
>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".
Ah yes, I was in that racket too, for a few years back in the 60s (and a
very nice job it was-- leaving it for grad school was in hingsight a Bad
Career Move), before the days of inflation.  We gave away samples with
abandon-- in some cases, more were given away than were ever actually sold.
That policy has no doubt changed.

Seriously, there are some good reasons for the higher
>pricing, one of which is size of expected market. If you want to know more,
>email me offlist and I'll do my best to explain it to you.
The scholarly publishers have the bad, but understandable, habit of only
publishing as many copies as can realistically be sold to (mostly)
university libraries, with a handful left over for private buyers. The don't
expect the general public to clamor for a Tocharian Dictionary.... I know
Oxford (Clarendon) had the policy of keeping _everything_ in print, but that
may have changed too.

I managed to get a copy of Gardiner's Egyptian Grammar (which must have been
a monstrously expensive thing to produce in 1927) in its 1966 3d edition, at
a ridiculously cheap price (employee discount); but even so, I see it is
priced "63s" on the dust jacket.  Assuming the pound was around $2.00-plus
in those days, even that's cheap.

The Aust.Natl. Univ. publishes all sort of goodies on SE Asia/Pacific
languages, in quite inexpensive paperback editions, but still, in such small
runs that they're OP within a year or so.  Yet they continue to list them in
their catalogue. Most annoying.