Posted by Dr. Raj Murthy in Internet Distribution, Kindle
4 comments
A 70% royalty sounds extremely generous to me. I don't see that happening unless Amazon becomes a publisher and pushes its textbooks past the establishment. It will depend on the schools and their uptake of such mediums. My feeling is that book publishers will salivate at a way to reduce costs (hence increase profits). They'll probably reduce prices because this will most likely reduce the used book market (and the lost sales from that). Let's face it, the publishers know they have a captive market. They don't have to do a thing if they don't want to.
Interesting points, which brings me to my idea of crowdsourcing a proper textbook. Watch this space for interesting developments next quarter. I do not like the idea of a captive market in any environment, in fact this is one of the main reasons why I never use a prescribed text for the class. Most of them are out of date by the time they are released. One of my old professors recently published a book and he is going to go with this approach since it is targeted at upper management. Lets see what happens.
I like the idea of not having to pay a ton of money for text books and having all your books in one place. Even though I currently buy all of my textbooks I still feel bad writing on and highlighting the pages. With Kindle I would be able to book mark, highlight and take notes on the pages with without damaging the book. However I will miss that special day at the end of the quarter when the book stores pays me to take my books (even with the small amount i get).