Monday, May 18, 2009

DP: Comment from the blablab-o-sphere on Textbooks

It's a singal v noise problem. If you follow the link and read his comments you'll see that Dan Lowe is a college student who does a pretty neat baseball blog. Maybe next time a global has a "strategy meeting" about how to break into the education market, they should get him to the table.

Flat World Knowledge and Amazon probably got the signal.

Two things (the same ideas I always seem to post on stories like these):

1.) Go digital. Make the digital versions significantly cheaper than the paper ones. Pirates are going to scan titles anyway. Go digital, reduce printing overhead, and hopefully sell books at more affordable price. (I also say this because I’m actively working on putting my whole library on my tablet laptop so I don’t have to worry about the $100+ to ship my books every time I go from one school/season to another.)

2.) Print on demand. If people want printed textbooks, print them when necessary. Unsold books are unsold books, and jacking up the price to account for unsold copies/meager demand is both economically and environmentally nonsensical. Textbooks aren’t exactly collector’s items at this point.

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