Per Text Fee Verses a Resource Fee Usually when an institution moves towards adopting eBooks, a single publisher provides the institution with all of the materials and eBooks (Ye, 2015). Moving to a resource fee rather than a fee for each textbook, the resource fee would make the students have to by an electronic textbook without an option to purchase a printed textbook (Ye, 2015).
Process of Negotiation
When negotiating with publishers, there are several topics that must be addressed. When it comes to price negotiation, asking for a price is a signal to the publisher that the item is going to be purchased, and the value of the product cannot be determined from the price (Dunie, 2015). Instead, the institution should ask the publisher to
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If the institution wants to have a third party to place the content on a platform of the institution’s choice and manage the content, the institution may not be able to do this under the license with the publisher (Dunie, 2015). Often times, the publisher will have restrictions on the technology in order to have a continuous connection with the institution, so the institution needs to ask if they are able to use a third party or ask if they can have the source code (Dunie, 2015).
Often times, the university bookstore is a third party vendor, and during negotiations, there are items that need to be discussed. In contract negotiations, there needs to be information that includes electronic material (Raible & deNoyelles, 2015). Since the definition of electronic material is constantly changing, it is recommended that the terminology used for referencing electronic material in contracts is “digital material” so that it can include all types of material and not just eBooks (Raible & deNoyelles, 2015, p. 8). The negotiations need to also include the time frame for students to access an eBook, refund policies, and format availability for the eBook, and it also needs to include how much the bookstore can markup the price for the eBook (Raible & deNoyelles, 2015).
Impact on the Institution’s Finances
In order to convert to eBooks, the impact on the institution’s financial bottom line could be significant. If the institution has to install
As demand for technology increases, many companies have begun to transfer every day items and tasks to an electronic version of the same program. A specific type of product that has been altered to be more compatible with growing technological demand is books. Before technology was popular, books were available as paperback and hardback copies only. However, as consumer demand for technology increases, tablets are becoming an asset to a person’s work materials. To accommodate for this shift in consumer wants, eBooks are created; these make up for the technological improvement and produce a cheaper alternative to actual books. The possibility of an eBook monopoly is steadily increasing and is already high
A book that cost 25 dollars in 1978 would have cost 208 dollars in 2013, for an increase of 812 percent, and 82 percent just between 2002 and 2013. This is a higher increase than medical care, housing, and even the consumer price index. The college board estimates that in 2014 an average student paid 1,200 dollars on books and supplies, roughly 14 percent of the students tuition cost. A survey in 1997 shows students paying an average of 642 dollars, almost doubling in 17 years time. This is a drastic increase in the price of books, but what is causing the textbooks to increase in price so severely? The regular inflation rate is one part of the increase in price, but the increase in book costs are more than double the regular rate of inflation, 6 percent over the regular rate of 3 percent. Half of the textbooks produced in 2003 were “bundled” with additions such as a CD-Rom or a workbook, nearly doubling the cost where a non bundled version was available. However, these additional resources are not always used by the instructors. 65 percent of instructors polled reported that they “rarely” or “never” used the additional materials. Another way the cost rises is when a new edition is released, roughly every three years a new edition of a textbook is released. The new edition of the textbook normally will have an increase of price of 12 percent. A text that starts at 50 dollars will cost 70 dollars or more by the time it is on it's third edition. 76 percent of the instructors polled say that the new editions that they use are justified in the “never” to “half the time” range while 40 percent say the new editions are justified “rarely” to “never”. Perhaps the largest contributing factor to the cost of textbooks rising as quickly as they do is one simple fact, there are very few publishers that release college textbooks and four of them, McGraw-Hill,
The main support activity that adds value to the customer is the development of the computerized support systems, software development, and process designs of the online businesses. Allocating resources to develop the eBook business and make the online store easy to use are key contributors to maintaining customers and gaining new ones. Designing an infrastructure to provide their customers with wireless access to digital content also enables customers to access their store with ease, which makes today’s efficient customer happy.
Barnes and Nobles is one of the biggest bookstores that has a brick-and-mortal store concept. In the past they were know as a “big bully” that drove small book stores to close down because of their aggressive tactics to have competetetive advantage over them. Nonetheless, with the evolving circle of technology they have had a hard time in keeping up with the E-book era. In 2014 E-books increased its reader subscription by 28% compared to 23% in 2013. This number will continue increasing because 50% off American’s have access to devices that are either an e-reader or a tablet. B&N changed its business model to adjust to this new setting before it suffered a
Roediger tells us how the book stores make even more of a profit by marking up the textbooks by 25% and returning the book that are not sold without any risk of losing money. he explains after the students are done with the books they often attempt to sell the books back to the store and only get 50 to 20% of what the original price is and then sell it for a marked down price that is the original price without the mark up profiting tremendously, and the authors still get nothing. Roeding tells us that it all gets worse because the text book companies send out copies of the book through email to professors and then used text book companies seek out these professors and buy the books from them and print copies without any charge besides paper. the text book companies can only mark up the books in order to recuperate or make new additions that make the old ones obsolete and if they put in other products like CD study guides the store will sell those for an even bigger
Textbook prices have been on the rise since the late 1970s. A book that would have cost 25 dollars in 1978 had risen in cost to 208 dollars in 2013, an increase of 812 percent (Follett 1), and with an 82 percent increase between the years of 2002 and 2013 (Sennack 6). This is a higher increase in the price percentage wise than medical care, housing, and even the consumer
Not to mention, many students are struggling to pay for the large sums of money for required college textbooks (Rathert 1). For many students, textbook prices add up to a total of $400 to $1000 (Hammond 1). Overall, textbook prices are too high, and many “new editions” which come out roughly every three years are not helping. Most of the minor changes in newer versions of textbooks are just different practice tests, and content rearrangements (Friedl 2). Publishing companies do whatever they can to continue making profits, even if it means outpricing students. On average, textbook prices are raised about 6% every year due to “new editions” being created and printed (Friedl 2). This has been affecting the accessibility of quality education for many students, and must be put to an end. Without access to affordable textbooks, students won’t be able to complete many of their courses. However, to combat this, Tennessee has passed “a law requiring on-campus bookstores to notify professors of the costs of the books they assign” (Friedl 1). The used book market used to work until publishing companies have come up with methods to ensure that colleges buy newer editions of textbooks. An example of this is when a textbook publisher comes out with a new edition of a textbook and stops printing the previous edition. If
Some of the unique aspects of Barnes & Noble’s situation are that the bookseller was once the top competitor bookstore, pushing other small bookstores out of the market. It is currently the only bookstore chain in the nation. Recently with the development of e-readers and e-books Barnes & Noble has struggled to stay afloat. Typically companies can see improvement in business as technology advances but, Barnes & Noble has experienced the opposite effect. The bookstore kept up with the e-book demand and invested in an e-reader, the “Nook”. However because of this exact investment needed to promote the product Barnes & Nobles has incurred losses in 2011. According to the text there is still more profit in printed books that in e-books. “Customers
When it comes to textbooks, there is a conflict of interest between the consumers and publishers. The textbook industry consists of five major publishers, McGraw Hill, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, Pearson, Thomson Gale and Wiley. Combined they occupy over 80% of the college textbook market (Staff). As publishers, their goal is to maximize their profit on textbooks. They do this in a number of ways but the most common way is to release a new edition of the textbook. Often when releasing a new edition there are minor changes to the course material. But regardless of the changes, by releasing a new edition they are able to drive the price of the old editions down, making it extremely difficult, if not impossible, for students to sell their books back. Publishers will release new versions of the book because they only receive profit off of the first sale of the book. Anytime the book is resold and reused, they receive nothing. Out of every dollar spent on a textbook, 22 ¢ will return to the bookstore as profit, 1 ¢ will be for shipping but 77¢ of the 100 goes to the publisher. The publisher then turns around and divides their profit to their expenses, which consists of marketing, authors and material operations.
It’s common knowledge that Barnes & Noble hasn't been stuggling to get its digital act together.A well reknowned New York based national bookstore chain, it made a daring attempt to innovate its Nook hardware and e-book business, but hasn't been able to perform very well and the market savvy that has pushed Amazon's Kindle or even other tablet competitors.It yet has to learn how to play the e-book pricing game and as a result is just getting pummeled.
Every time an ebook is purchased or downloaded for free, the reader has an expectation that they’ll be receiving something of value, even if it’s just a little. Regardless, there are many published ebooks that fail to do just that. Not only does publishing a poorly written and executed ebook eliminate the author as an authority in their niche, it can damage their credibility with future prospects.
Will Bury's e-publishing invention that can produce both digital text and understandable digitally-read text quickly from published books has the potential to completely disrupt digital publishing, digital recording and a wide spectrum of other training-related industries. His early efforts at selling the recordings and downloadable book files online have been disappointing, showing an apparent lack of price elasticity in the market. One of the fundamental shortcomings of his pricing strategies is their lack of agility as it relates to a value-based pricing strategy. Will needs to realize that the content of the books and their reputation for scarcity versus ubiquity has a direct effect on their price elasticity curves (Xu, 2007). Will needs to also do a significantly greater level of experimentation with pricing to determine how the customers he is attracting to his website view the recordings from a value, substitution pricing theory, and scarcity versus ubiquity standpoint. Static pricing for digitally-enabled and distributed goods often fails to capture the nuances in product demand including an accurate assessment of the demand curve (Clay, Smith, Wolff, 2006). These are foundational elements of any pricing elasticity study, and Will has just a small proportion of the data he needs to define an optimal pricing strategy for the digitally enabled books and recordings. The following section provides an analysis of key questions
The seller of digital textbooks will also be saving money over producing hard copies. 32% of the cost allocated to paper, printing and editorial can be completely eliminated along with 22.4% of costs related to bookstore operations and personnel. Bookstores as we know them could become obsolete or transformed into stores that sell tablets, e-readers and software packages on campus. Publishers or sellers will now be able to tap into a more global market with electronic textbooks as the information can be translated into many languages quickly.
My client/stakeholder, Mr Patchigalla will be providing me with all the content that is to go into my eBook. The eBook would act as a guide for the students and would also include some methods that students can implement to receive the higher grades in the subject. It is hoped that through this eBook, many students will be able to use some of the strategies that I used last year to get excellence endorsement for the subject and get good grades for the course.
Lindsol had to identify problems in the industry and realized that there were several core reasons students did not like the shift publishers made from hard copy to electronic PDF files. The main reasons collected by college student surveys was that the devices used to read the books were cumbersome to use, they lacked tools like highlighting, and they preferred having a physical hard copy of the books for them to take notes. Several advantages for realizing these core