Electronic texts and rent-seeking publishers

Frightful Kindle | TPM:

Finally, only a few months ago, I purged a decent chunk of my col­lec­tion. And most are now in stor­age. But in our liv­ing room we have two big inset shelves where I keep all the books I feel like I need or want ready at hand. And last night, sit­ting in front of them, I had this dark epiphany. How much longer are these things going to be around? Not my books, though maybe them too. But just books. Physical, paper books. The few hun­dred or so I was look­ing at sud­denly seemed like they were tak­ing up an awful lot of space, like the whole busi­ness could dealt with a lot more cleanly and effi­ciently, if at some moral loss.

In response Dave Hoffman writes at Concuring Opinions,

It’s cer­tainly true that there’s some­thing reas­sur­ing about hav­ing lots of books in a room, but I sus­pect Josh is right that their day is end­ing. And this is prob­a­bly for the best. My books weigh me down: they make me less flex­i­ble about trav­el­ing, they take up space in the house, they are hugely expen­sive, and they are inefficient.

After not­ing some of the “rent-​​seeking” behav­ior of tra­di­tional pub­lish­ers who jus­tify, on the basis of prob­lems bind­ing large books, split­ting up said books into addi­tional vol­umes (and end up sell­ing more to a cap­tive audi­ence), he writes, “Bring on the revolution.”

Much as I too appre­ci­ate the phys­i­cal­ity of paper, I am quite fond of my (inher­ited, old) e-​​reader from Sony. I find myself wish­ing that text­book pub­lish­ers would move to the for­mat. Granted, some text­books just work bet­ter in paper for­mat, but after spend­ing $140 on a sin­gle law book last quar­ter (cost jus­ti­fied, at least in part, by it’s huge size), I couldn’t help but won­der if an elec­tronic ver­sion wouldn’t have worked much, much better.

How much of the cost goes into bind­ing such a vol­ume? Certainly there are edit­ing costs, plus author pay­ments (not huge, I’m sure), but beyond that, shouldn’t such a book in elec­tronic form be a more rea­son­able $20 — $40, per­haps? I sup­pose pub­lish­ers are scared of stu­dents sim­ply shar­ing the text with other stu­dents, but hon­estly, set at the right price, it would be eas­ier to buy it than share it, I suspect.

I won­der how long it will be before law books reach e-​​readers? Longer than it should is the only pre­dic­tion I feel com­fort­able making.