Archived posting to the Leica Users Group, 2010/02/05

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Subject: [Leica] iPad and textbooks
From: jimlists at spectare.com (Jim Laurel)
Date: Fri, 5 Feb 2010 08:32:43 -0800
References: <3694213.69631265383906729.JavaMail.root@sz0102a.emeryville.ca.mail.comcast.net> <916B730B-9D39-4D0C-8727-C017524378A9@usjet.net>

What's the difference? They're still selling content. Paper, no paper...what 
does it matter?

Let's say a publisher sells a book to a student for $100. They make $100 
less whatever it cost to physically produce the book and distribute it to a 
book store. The book is then re-sold say, 5 times. The publisher gets 
nothing out of that deal. Now let's say the publisher sells the content as 
an e-book for $50. If they make even two sales, they are ahead of the game 
as compared to paper, because of the drastically lower distribution costs.

This is, of course, assuming that there is some way to prevent books from 
being copied which is probably not a good assumption.

Why would publishers would allow it?  Because their market will demand it 
and by not doing so they risk becoming irrelevant.



On Feb 5, 2010, at 8:02 AM, Robert Meier wrote:

> Why on earth would textbook publishers grant Apple the rights to make 
> their books available on the ipad?
> 
> 
> On Feb 5, 2010, at 9:31 AM, rickfloyd at comcast.net wrote:
> 
>> 
>> 
>> My kids undergraduate texts books are $500 - $600 per semester.  That's 
>> about $125 to $150 per book on an average.
>> 
>> 
>> 
>> 
>> ----- Original Message -----
>> From: "Spencer Cheng" <spencer at aotera.org>
>> To: "Leica Users Group" <lug at leica-users.org>
>> Sent: Friday, February 5, 2010 10:20:21 AM GMT -05:00 US/Canada Eastern
>> Subject: Re: [Leica] iPad and textbooks
>> 
>> 
>> On Feb 5, 2010, at 9:41, Lawrence Zeitlin wrote:
>>> Why so many college textbooks at $50 a pop? Many colleges, including 
>>> mine,
>>> look for a magic number in evaluating professors for promotion. Our 
>>> college
>>> counts the number of papers published in academic journals as a major 
>>> index.
>>> Three peer reviewed papers equal one textbook. Judging from personal
>>> experience it is quicker, and often easier, to write a textbook for
>>> undergraduate courses than to do the research for a substantive paper.
>>> Naturally the publishers want to sell co-pies of the books that they 
>>> print
>>> so the professors are encouraged to require all students to buy the 
>>> latest
>>> edition of the book. The iPad, using books accessed from the internet, 
>>> will
>>> kill that market. The colleges will be forced to use a different metric 
>>> than
>>> "Publish or perish."
>> 
>> $50 a pop? Not even when I went to school a longtime ago. :)
>> 
>> Engineering and computer science textbooks are more likely to be 
>> $100-$200 today. I've bought a technical book for work once that was 
>> about $1/page.
>> 
>> Publish or perish still applies though. How else will they judge if 
>> someone is worthy of a professorship?
>> 
>> If I am in school today, I would happily buy anything that would allow me 
>> not to carry around 5Kg of paper every day to/from class. I have computer 
>> so an extension like an iPad would not be a problem.
>> 
>> Regards,
>> Spencer
>> 
>> _______________________________________________
>> Leica Users Group.
>> See http://leica-users.org/mailman/listinfo/lug for more information
>> 
>> _______________________________________________
>> Leica Users Group.
>> See http://leica-users.org/mailman/listinfo/lug for more information
> 
> 
> _______________________________________________
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Replies: Reply from red735i at earthlink.net (Frank Filippone) ([Leica] iPad and textbooks)
In reply to: Message from rickfloyd at comcast.net (rickfloyd at comcast.net) ([Leica] iPad and textbooks)
Message from robertmeier at usjet.net (Robert Meier) ([Leica] iPad and textbooks)