December 03, 2004
Text Book Prices
Crooked timber is having a discussion about whether text book prices are supply or demand driven. Looking at the figures it seems that the problem is supply – International Economics for instance retails at 125 dollars and is a compulsory text in many undergraduate courses. Its second hand value is 25 dollars, suggesting that the purchasers, undergraduates had little inherent demand for the book and want to offload it as soon as they’ve got their grade. By contrast the spread for advanced or graduate texts is much smaller because most graduates choose to study the relevant subject and therefore have a higher demand for the subject. And this interest effect increases s we move up the ladder – so that books aimed at the faculty or top level can even have excessive demand i.e. where the new price is less than the second hand price –as can be seen for Essays in honor of Murray Kemp.
First off, I really like your site. I've read it a few times and I always learn something interesting.
I'm no economist, so forgive me if this is a silly comment, but...
It seems the purchase price of International Economics is not related at all to classical supply and demand relationships, since it is a required text for a course. Wouldn't this fact mean that it's price is inelastic in the same way that a cancer drug's price is inelastic? If you need it, you need it, and you'll pay any price. If you don't need it, it has no value except as a commodity. The fact that the students have no use for the book after the semester ends is immaterial in terms of the price of the new book they purchased four months before. If you pay 1 million dollars for a supply of the miracle cancer drug, and you get cured by it, whatever you have left over will be worth considerably less to you now that you don't have cancer. In a way, some undergrad classes are like a cancer and the otherwise useless books are like the miracle cure - they only have value when you have the cancer.
Hello,
Jim I think the whole bookstore mafia is like a cancer for college students, I developed a site to hold them back a little bit, is called textunion.com
I am not computer scientist or anything like that, I am not good but, I put a lot of thought into it and I came up with something worth a shoot, Tackle a look , also send me an email to mzmaker05@gmail.com and send me some feedback or if you are interested on doing some advertising also will be welcome..
Martin
CEO
TextUnion.com
Hello,
Jim I think the whole bookstore mafia is like a cancer for college students, I developed a site to hold them back a little bit, is called textunion.com
I am not computer scientist or anything like that, I am not good but, I put a lot of thought into it and I came up with something worth a shoot, Tackle a look , also send me an email to mzmaker05@gmail.com and send me some feedback or if you are interested on doing some advertising also will be welcome..
Martin
CEO
TextUnion.com