Digital textbooks remain a nascent business and a tough market to enter. At an average cost of $100, textbooks command the highest cover prices in publishing, outside of only some art and coffee table books. Demand is artificially inelastic as students are indentured to cost servitude at the whim of college professors who blithely assign titles a student must own if he or she hopes to do well in a given course. Now, multiply that by 4,5, or even 6 courses per semester and you are talking big bucks.
Wired online has an article on the open textbook company Flatworld Knowledge.
Allow my to address comments made in the quote above. The $100 thing is what generates fodder for the blogs and is what students tell mom and dad. Books are resold to bookstores and the used book market. The actual cost to the students for the new book is thus $50 and $25 the first time the student buys a used book.
The difference is what one might describe as “beer money” – hence it is worth perpetuating the myth.
