Answer: I have received many variations of the question, why are textbooks so expensive?
I spoke with textbook consultant and author Chris Johnson about this and came up with these four main reasons.
1. It takes dozens of editorial staff such as authors, editors and designers to make a textbook vs. say just a handful for a book like “Fifty Shades of Grey“. More staff means more costs and salaries to pay. Supplemental texts that your professor assigns will typically be cheaper as they will typically have just two or three writers and editorial staff. Notice this when you buy books this semester. The big, fat textbook will be $150 and the supplemental books will be in the $20 to $40 range.
2. Textbooks sell fewer copies vs. a mainstream fiction title like “Shades“. Chris estimated that textbooks sell in the thousands, maybe the tens of thousands per year if it’s a popular text. That means it takes the publisher longer to recoup the salaries for the aforementioned dozens of editorial staff.
3. Textbooks are larger and weigh more. They require more paper to print a copy and they are more expensive to ship.
4. Textbooks contain knowledge that is much more valuable then a typical fiction bestseller. Going even further, I’d say that you want textbooks to be expensive. Textbooks contain inside knowledge, of great value to any enterprise you take. The focus and rigor, the accurate representation of the specialized world of knowledge it covers, is not available to everyone. When and if new textbooks become cheap then we will lose the focus and quality, and it’s knowledge will become, questionable. It takes resources to put together true knowledge such as that contained in a textbook.
Amazon and Ebay have made it vastly easier to obtain a cheap used textbook allowing you the best of both worlds. Especially if the new edition of the textbook is just a copyright refresh which Chris explained as an edition that has minimal changes, put out mainly to extend the copyright time period that the publisher holds.
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