Economists view copyright monopolies as inefficient because they create a
large gap between the price of a textbook and the marginal cost - the cost
to the publisher of creating an additional copy. This cost can effectively
be zero, when the option exists to transfer material over the Internet.
This gap between price and marginal cost is the exact same issue that leads
economists to view trade barriers as inefficient."

This is neither the best nor the most important issue regarding trade barriers, though it is an important one.

 

This is particularly true in things like freshman and sophomore English textbooks. They have no need at all of graphics (If I-as-teacher, which thank Heaven I no longer am, feel my students will be starving for information if they don't see a color photo of a painting of Sir Walter Raleigh, I can always take a picture of Sir Walter Raleigh to class and pass it around); the textbooks may be extremely expensive because of the cost of using copyrighted material, which in turn used copyrighted material.

 

Big fleas have little fleas

Upon their backs to bite 'em.

Little fleas have lesser fleas

And so on ad infinitum.

 

In the past month I have had several (don't remember how many, as many of the requests were by telephone) people asking permission to put Gutenberg material in their self-published textbooks, which they prepare for their students and sell at cost, instead of buying "one size fits all" textbooks, and how much it would cost to use. I grow weary of explaining the same thing over and over and over. Almost all of it is eighteenth and nineteenth century stuff, and you'd think that anybody who is sufficiently well educated to teach in college would know that eighteenth and nineteenth century stuff is automatically out of copyright, even if the notes, bib, and other impedimenta aren't.

 

I see no reason at all for ANY textbooks. It is perfectly possible, right now, for everything from K through Ph.D. to be put on ONE halfway decent notebook computer. Thus when something changes, such as Pluto now has three moons, the writer or editor of the textbook can go on and make the change at once and the student could immediately download the insert for something like 49 cents, which is the least that FictionWise will let me sell something for--I tried to sell an essay I wrote 45 years ago for 29 cents. Yes, it is necessary for the writer, editor, and publisher all to make a living, but that can be done without charging 200 dollars for a textbook which was probably outdated before it hit the printing press. It has been pointed out to me that students lose textbooks. It is not necessary to lose textbooks. The second time the student has to fork over $700 dollars for a new notebook, even if he can go to the company he bought the etext from and get a new copy for free, the number of lost computers per capita will become a lot smaller than it is now. One tends to get a little careful, using such options as putting their computer bag between their ankles instead of on an open shelf when they are eating lunch.

 

I'm still rewriting, editing, and selling my books, as I now have copyright reversion on all but two nonfiction books which I don't have the time and energy to research and rewrite anyway. I'm reselling them for somewhere between 2.99 and 4.99. I noticed last week that the book I'll have for sale at FictionWise next Monday (not tmrw) sold, in hardcover format, for almost $40. Gee whiz. How odd that the publisher couldn't possible sell it for less. How odd that it wound up remaindered--though there were under 100 copies unsold at the time. I value my imagination highly, but I'm not vain enough to think that people should rush to pay $40 for something which came entirely out of my brain. (No, the writer has absolutely no say in this, any more than s/he does with the cover. My cover artist at St. Martin's Press, with which I am no longer affiliated, kept putting saguaro cactuses in covers of books set in Fort Worth, Texas. Uh, there are no saguaro cactuses living in Fort Worth, unless somebody brought them there and is keeping them in some kind of screen room.) And I am able to pay my writers MORE money per sale of a $3.99 ebook than those writers would have gotten per hardback book.

 

Day before yesterday I bought two novels by Laurie King from eBookWise. I paid slightly more for them than I would have paid for a paperback, but certainly nowhere near what I would have paid in hardback.

 

Just after I entered grad school I was lucky enough to find a complete set of "Great Books of the Western World" for $20 at a garage sale. Those enabled me to avoid buying at least two thousand dollars worth of textbooks. So now my "Great Books" have writing all over them, and so what? One of the reasons I still have my ragged, ratty-looking Shakespeare that I bought as a college freshman is that although I have "complete Shakespeare" books that are cleaner and newer, I still want all those notes I wrote in that one over the course of many years. If notebook computers had been available then, I could have had the book up on half the screen and a word processing program up on the other half of the screen, and I type a lot faster and more legibly than I handwrite. I-as-student can always go to the library if I will absolutely die if I don't have the impedimenta; professors usually put books they're teaching from in a special area which will allow the books to be checked out no longer than 4 hours at a time.