[comp.text.tex] Economics & publishing

wpg@mendel.acc.Virginia.EDU (William P. Gardner) (08/26/90)

In article <584@array.UUCP>, colin@array.UUCP (Colin Plumb) writes:

>> And what's with the price?  I have oceans of photocopies of books that
>> are worth $20 to me or so, but not the $60 that's being charged.  I
>> believe I can assume that printing a book is cheaper, per copy, than
>> photocopying it.  So where does the extra $40 go?  Is editing *that*
>> expensive?

And <414.26d69db9@venus.ycc.yale.edu> responds sensibly:

>It's not cheap.  But you've missed an important point:  While the
>marginal cost of a printed book is much lower, you have to first pay
>large startup costs.  On a small run, they dominate the total cost of
>production.  That's one reason there are still many different printing
>technologies in use:  They differ along at least two dimensions, one
>being quality, the other being their trade-offs of fixed versus per-unit
>costs.  Unfortunately, the highest quality remains associated with
>either high fixed costs (traditional quality printing technologies) or
>high per-unit costs (small-press hand-run operations).

The publishers are also trying to reappropriate revenues that are lost
when people photocopy their books and their sales decline (see Colin's
original posting).  That is, they charge a lot, knowing that there
market is primarily libraries, and that each library copy represents
many photocopies.  See articles by Johnson and Liebowitz in the 1985
Journal of Political Economy -- or ask a publisher.  Of course, when
they raise prices they generate more photocopying and fewer purchases,
forcing them to raise prices once more.  It's all fine, until the
libraries go broke, which is predicted to occur sometime in the next two
weeks.... This doesn't mean Colin is wrong to photocopy -- I do it too
-- it means that this system was fundamentally changed with the
invention of the xerox machine.

>As a result of this high fixed cost, book prices have an inverted
>supply/demand curve:  If the demand is low (various specialty books),
>the only way to recover the fixed cost is to price the small number of
>copies that will be sold very high.

Exactly.

>Traditional publishers have always viewed it as a kind of social
>obligation to publish all those books that didn't make very much.  

The academic publishers I have met are decent people, but they do intend
to run profitably enterprises.

>Considering the quality of the typical self-typeset, self-illustrated
>book I see out there, I wish editors would spend MORE time on these
>books.  (Then again, I see all-too-many poorly-editted books that did
>NOT come through the self-publishing route.  And of course there are
>always the high-quality self- published books.)

Maybe the very best books have always been self-published (William
Blake?), but I agree that neither self-publishing nor ``you `typeset' it
and we print it'' seems to be working.  I think that professional
publishing will continue to be essential, even when documents are all
electronic and circulate only through the networks.  But the copying
problem get even more difficult then.  Which means, I think, that TeX,
wonderful as it is, is only a way station to something very different.

By the way, I have cross-posted to comp.text, this doesn't seem to be a
discussion of TeX.
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