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New Book Flyer
If you are just that kind of nerd, my new book on Augustine can be purchased a bit more cheaply with information on this flyer. It really is a good introduction to Augustine, and good for the veteran reader of Augustine too.
A larger version of the flyer here. Yeah, I know: It’s kind of expensive. Academic publishing does that sometimes. Don’t worry: My next book will be more affordable.
(@brianwolf)
Published in General
Why is that? I’ve always wondered why academic publishers set such high prices.
I don’t really know. If I ever knew, I can’t remember just now.
Low volume. When they were hand typesetting, it definitely made sense. Not sure now. Probably still does.
Sounds about right. Wipf and Stock can do them a lot cheaper, but their model involves publishing a lot of books.
But, doesn’t the high price contribute to the low sales volume? Perhaps they’d sell more if they charged less…
Plus, academic books tend to be high quality printing and binding, because they are intended to last.
The best guess I’ve come up with is that the titles academic publishers prefer don’t exactly jump out at the average reader. But I mostly guess that because I went to a lecture of my favorite history professor, who had a great title for a book on Škoda Works – the largest arms manufacturer in Europe after the Western countries began disarming. His thesis was that the Munich Agreement effectively gave Hitler the stick he would beat the continent with. The original title was Bounced Czechs and Broken Promises.
Suffice it to say, the title the publisher insisted on was less memorable.
That still doesn’t explain why the Kindle version is priced at $80.99. Does it have high quality bits that will last longer than all those cheap $9.99 Kindle titles I own?
Yeah, that was weird. eTypesetting maybe. Or editing. And promoting print over the ebook because of high printing costs. Guesses all.
I worked in e-publishing for a while. Publishers have a profoundly overvalued estimation of their contribution to the process.
The audience for academic books is mainly libraries. The larger libraries think they have to have a copy of most everything. Libraries don’t ask the price. They just buy. That’s also why subscriptions to academic journals are sky high. Libraries think they have to have a complete collection and don’t ask the price of an individual journal.
Textbooks are also expensive That’s because publishers know that professors who order texts also don’t worry too much about how much the student pays for his text. In fact, the higher the cost for a textbook, the more the professor makes off each sale.
I wrote four textbooks and had no input about how much my texts were going to cost, though I was always happy, for the reason above, to see a high price for my textbook.
If I had been a superior sort of person, more thoughtful and altruistic, I would have petitioned the publishers to set a low price for my texts. Alas.
It’s the old story. Individuals watch their pennies. But when purchasing is in the hands of those who don’t have to pay the cost themselves, they don’t worry about the cost.
Other than for a logic class, I manage to keep textbooks cheap. I think it has been more than seven years since I last didn’t give them an electronic textbook of public domain readings.
But it’s easy if your courses can focus on great texts.
When I taught British literature survey courses, I was pretty much limited to just a few fat survey books, all of which were very expensive. I always assumed that was because those two or three had very little competition, professors didn’t worry about what textbooks cost, and if they did care, they still had little or no say in how much the textbooks they assigned for their classes cost. (I knew the editor of one of a very popular standard text, and he had become a rich man off royalties.)
Most of the contents of these big lit survey books are in the public domain, but it would have been almost impossible for an individual professor to reduce the cost of the text by compiling all of those public domain works into a self-published publication to use in a course.
I’ve compiled a little publication for a course that used only a few public domain works, but for classes that use perhaps 120 public domain works — poems, fiction, essays, etc. — it’s almost impossible. Another complication: A few of the works that might be essential for the course might not be in the public domain. So for those works, the instructor would have to pay to use the work. And some of those works are expensive. The estate of Martin Luther King, for instance, wants a lot of money to reprint his “I Have a Dream” speech. A lot.
Maybe I should add: and easier when you cover fewer than 20 texts per semester!
I do a lot of work with University Press Audiobooks, which has brought me some titles in politics, history and military theory that I have greatly enjoyed narrating. I can tell when they are assigned as textbooks because the sales spike in the fall and spring.
Congratulations on the publication! I know how much work it is.
Whenever you see a ridiculously high price, check if the target market is purchasing with other people’s money. In this case I imagine academic works are mostly sold to college libraries.
Congratulations! Boy is that pricey. So I can’t promise to buy it. But best of luck with it.
By the way, my book club has been reading City of God. Because of its length we are breaking it up into parts and reading other books in between the parts. So it’s probably going to be a year before we finish.
The copy on my shelf says “abridged for modern readers.”
The 2020 version is only 1500 words.
And 12% of those are “lol”.
Good book club.
I won’t deny having not read the whole thing myself. (Shame on you, Mark!)
If any nerds are interested, I can certainly point to cheaper books introducing Augustine, including but not limited to one by me. And my YouTube channel covers some Augustine.