On Mon, Jul 14, 2003 at 01:02:01PM -0700, Jimmy Wales wrote:
Sanford Forte wrote:
This has become an untenable situation, because private publishers control content. Even GNU will not keep private publishers form competing with freely available GNU licensed content, and driving up the prices again.
Competition drives *down* prices. Economics 101.
In this case it doesn't work that way.
Textbook publishing in Poland is horrible too. While making it all private really improved quality of textbooks, it certainly didn't managed to drive prices down - they're insanely inflated.
Bussiness model for textbook publishing is something like: * spring : make a textbook * early summer : use any means possible to get as many teachers as possible choose your textbook. teachers don't care much how much it will cost and often don't really know either at this point * late summer : print like crazy * semtember : sell at grossly inflated prices. risk is huge, as you must sell everything in just about two weeks or you will have to wait whole year with capital being frozen in books (if you manage to sell it next year at all that is), so you must keep margins very high
* next years : make a new version of textbook, incompatible enough to discourage reuse, but similar enough to keep teacherbase
Eliminating that risk could really drive costs down. Easy solutions include having different regions start terms at different time, or having copyrights abolished. As we can't get the former, we may try with the latter.
Side note: To get teachers in Poland use GNU textbooks, getting certification by ministry of education could help a lot. That's not free but probably not that expensive either (not that I ever tried to get one).