August 26, 2014
A Vox piece on soaring textbook prices told readers:
“And the college textbook market has changed, too. Publishers used to spread out the cost of a new edition over five years before publishing the next edition and starting the cycle over. Since the publishing industry began consolidating in the 1980s — five major publishers now control 80 percent of the market — competition has become keener, and the window before a new edition has narrowed from five years to three. That means higher prices so that publishers can recoup the costs and make a profit.”
Let’s see, competition has become keener as the industry got more concentrated, causing prices to rise? That doesn’t sound like the textbook economics I learned.
This sounds more like a story where an industry grew more oligopolistic. Rather than competing on price, textbook makers compete on quality (or the appearance of quality — to keep the analogy to the prescription drug industry used in the piece). There is an implicit agreement not to try to undercut each other on price, since the big five recognize they would all end up losers in that story.
This sounds like a case where a bit of anti-trust action might do lots of good. Alternatively, a small amount of public funding for open source textbook production may wipe out the bastards altogether.
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