Comments on: Textbook Torrents Makes Long Awaited Comeback

By: Textbooks Cheaper

Textbooks Cheaper — Mon, 02 Feb 2009 06:51:27 +0000

They are offline again

By: gay

gay — Tue, 30 Dec 2008 03:53:28 +0000

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By: Lorelei

Lorelei — Sat, 09 Aug 2008 23:14:00 +0000

“My Aunt is in the process of co-writing a textbook with three other authors for an entire nation at the moment. She’s already a senior lecturer at a college, but took this up as a summer holiday project. It’s more difficult than you think.

And as a first time author, she gets 10p for every book sold. That’s it. There’s no end pay, no bonus. It’s purely from sales.”

Frankly, it sounds like the problem is with your aunt. She wasn’t forced to sign the publishing contract (which details the royalty rate). If she couldn’t negotiate better terms for her share of the royalties, then she should have declined. It’s also not uncommon for an author on a first edition to get a lower-than-usual royalty rate. After all, all the risk is on the publisher. The author loses no money if the book doesn’t sell. Generally, the royalty rate increases with subsequent editions, if the book sells well. (Most textbooks are on a 3- to 4-year revision cycle.) And if a given textbook does exceptionally well, then the author has the leverage next time around to bump up their royalty rate.

Did your aunt have a lawyer look over the contract before she signed it? Like any contract, I’d imagine, a publishing contract is pretty complicated. Royalty rates are variable. Often, there’s one rate for the first, say, 5,000 copies sold. A different rate kicks in above 5,000 copies. Too, royalty rates can differ depending on whether (and how many sold) they are sold domestically (i.e., in the United States) or internationally. And too, and perhaps most importantly, is whether any royalties are paid based on the LIST price of a book, or the net price, etc. Any author should have a lawyer meticulously review a contract before signing it. Because once you sign in, there’s no going back and changing things.

By: Lorelei

Lorelei — Sat, 09 Aug 2008 23:01:30 +0000

I can understand students’ frustrations, but having worked in the textbook publishing industry for 20 years, I can also see the publishers’ point of view. The more outlandish claims that textbooks are hugely overpriced is often just that, an unfounded, exaggerated claim by people ignorant of the publishing process. It costs a *lot* of money to make a textbook. First is the cost of developing manuscript. That includes getting market reviews by students and faculty and experts in a given field or authors who have already published in a given field. You do this to flesh out what the content of the book will be. What’s lacking in existing textbooks, incorporating new information and advancements in a given field. Those people have to get paid. Sometimes just the upfront “manuscript preparation” part alone can cost several thousand dollars. Then you have to set aside art development money. And that ain’t cheap either. There’s paying a photographer (and often models) for a photo shoot for the photographs you see in books. Or paying someone else a royalty to use existing photographs (stock photos, for instance). Illustrations? Someone has to create them, and that costs money. You pay anywhere from a few hundred to several thousand dollars for each individual illustration. Art creation costs can run from a few hundred to a hundred thousand dollars per BOOK, depending on how complex the art is. There’s money needed to get permission from other publishers to re-use their material in your book. For a first edition, there are often development costs, and those costs can run into the upper thousands. Once you have all the manuscript, then you have to have someone copyedit it. That costs money. Then you have to pay someone to typeset all of it. That too costs a LOT of money. (The cost of paper alone is nearly obscene.) Then the proofreading costs. Next, printer costs. Warehouse costs. The costs involved to hire someone to create a cover design. For someone to write the copy that goes on the back cover. I would say the average textbook, the budget for one is probably anywhere from $20,000 to well over $100,000. And most books probably need to have a profit margin of around at least 27% or the publisher won’t make any money on the book, and then what’s the point of publishing it at all? All of the books I’ve worked on over the years, for discussion purposes here, say the unit cost for a book (i.e., what it costs the publisher to make and produce that book) is $15.00. The book will be priced at $60.00. So that’s a $45 profit per book. Sounds good, right? Until you figure back in what it costs you to get wholesalers and distributors to buy your books. And what if the book doesn’t sell a lot of copies? Unsold copies are returned to the publisher, so the publisher absorbs those costs, which can be huge if a book tanks.

Many college campus bookstores jack up the price on textbooks over what the publisher sets, so that they make a profit too. And they can charge anything they want. So a lot of the time, people should be blaming their campus bookstores, not the publisher.

Where I have a problem with the ever-increasing cost of books is in how the process of making them has changed. Almost all publishers outsource as much of the work as possible overseas. Where before they paid, say, am experienced U.S. copyeditor $20 an hour to copyedit a book, now they can get an Indian person to do it (and generally it’s someone with very little to NO experience in publishing) for $2.00 an hour. Publishers are realizing huge savings by offshoring a lot of the work, but they sure aren’t passing that savings on to consumers or to their own employees. That is what irks me. But half the reason (savings aren’t passed on) is most publishing companies are publicly held. And shareholders aren’t happy if they don’t see the value of their stock going up, up, up. Often unrealistically so. (Too, publishers, like any business, pay monstrous money in health insurance for their employees, which is a whole ‘nother discussion.)

So the next time someone wants to complain about the cost of a textbook, stop and think about all the variables involved. Where do you think the money in your 401K comes from? Stocks in companies like book publishers. And stocks that don’t keep increasing will be dropped (in turn, people buy less stock or sell off their existing stock, which brings the value of the company down, etc.)

I think the entire commerce system needs to be modernized. If we don’t, and if we don’t institute a fairer, equitable distribution of profits and wealth, future generations will pay the price, even more than we’re paying. And that’s a sad and preventable thing.

By: parkside701

parkside701 — Fri, 08 Aug 2008 23:10:34 +0000

Cool I need a site like this. I need to start reading some text books to be really become intellectually intelligent instead of using google all the time to look smart.

By: Anonymous

Anonymous — Wed, 06 Aug 2008 17:40:55 +0000

“And as a first time author, she gets 10p for every book sold. That’s it. There’s no end pay, no bonus. It’s purely from sales.”

And the goal should be to get her share increased greatly, and the overall price reduced too.

Someone is making a lot of money from your aunt’s hard work and compensating her well below what she deserves. That is the basis of capitalism, unfortunately.

By: MPAA

MPAA — Wed, 06 Aug 2008 15:49:57 +0000

Lol…torrent beer n_n.

I love you torrentfreak.

By: Izkata

Izkata — Wed, 06 Aug 2008 13:33:19 +0000

Dang… I’ve searched for my textbooks every single semester and not only never found them, but never found this site, either!

By: V.A.

V.A. — Wed, 06 Aug 2008 12:59:32 +0000

Textbook publishers and many university professors are to be blamed for this state of affairs regarding college / university textbooks.

Textbook publishers make a lot of profitablemoney on these textbooks, and many students just keep struggling with higher tuition prices, and exorbitant textbook prices.

Sometimes professors require that the poor student buy an expensive textbook, and it’s hardly used–except a few chapters.

Now these big publisher companies and some author professors see P2P as an intrusion to their profits.

Well, in a sentence, welcome to the world of P2P in the 21st century.

By: Anonymous

Anonymous — Wed, 06 Aug 2008 09:48:29 +0000

“@21 tracker servers do not host copyright material and it is not absolutely necessary to remove a torrent upon receipt of a take down request because it is not yet possible to copyright a torrent. of course this only applies if the tracker is hosted in a country where bittorrent is legal and i was speaking from the tracker operator point of view. as you correctly infer, bittorrent as a protocol is not illegal anywhere”

Yeah, I knew that and I knew that you knew that – I just wanted to make sure that the general TF reading population knew that :)