Used Books Blog

According to Inside Higher Ed, Princeton University Press will join other notable University Presses such as Yale University Press, Oxford University Press and The University of California Press in making portions of their catalogs available on Kindle.

University Presses, even the big ones, have often found it difficult to survive, much less flourish. The Kindle could help these struggling presses to find greener pastures. Details on the nature of these relationships is still unknown.

The university presses participating in Kindle were reluctant to describe the specific financial arrangements they have with Amazon (which also declined to discuss them), but said that they were revenue-sharing deals, and that preparing the books for release on Kindle was not particularly burdensome or expensive.

I’d be very interested to know exactly what the revenue sharing deal is at present. Kindle is certainly working hard to make more and more titles available for download. The question is whether this is a type of introductory offer type of deal, sweet at the beginning and then onerous as it moves forward when you’re essentially addicted to the platform. (I’m looking at you Comcast.)

Barbara Fister has a great comment to the Inside Higher Ed piece:

I don’t have any objection to UPs trying this revenue stream (even self-published authors are doing it), but I doubt the Kindle will revolutionize the textbook market.

First, if illustrations and color and permission-based images are problematic, that’s a hurdle. Second, the publisher sets the price, and they haven’t shown much inclination to price electronic versions at a steep enough discount to tempt students in huge numbers. Third — students object to paying a lot for a book that they can’t share or resell, and they won’t be all that thrilled that they can’t buy a used copy. (I’m skeptical that you can download a Kindle book to your computer — isn’t that a violation of their terms of service?)

Add to that students in Montana and Alaska are outta luck (the wireless network that Amazon uses doesn’t reach there) and students would be forced to spend a lot of money for the a gadget that limits their shopping to a single store.

The price is certainly an issue. The Kindle versions come at what seems like a 10% discount. It would take a substantial number of titles to offset the $300+ cost of the Kindle itself. In addition, you can’t resell these books.

In ‘analog’ form, you can sell a number of these titles back to a University Bookstore or independent bookseller for more than 10% of the purchase price. I recall with great glee the end of the semester when I’d sell back my textbooks to the University Bookstore. Not all were accepted and I probably only got 20% to 50% of the original purchase price but … it was enough for a weekend splurge at the local watering hole.

This one currently lands in the A for effort pile, but incomplete as the grade of record.

This entry was posted on Thursday, July 3rd, 2008 at 9:40 am and is filed under Kindle, Textbooks, eBooks, Book News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.