Another View on Text Book Costs

Rather belatedly I have discovered your article of 14 May headed "Utopia for $12.75 — Cheap at the price?". At the risk of being labelled "reactionary", "self-interested", "commercial", I felt I had to respond.

I am also taking the risk of being labelled as middle-aged when I recall that my annual expenditure on books during my four year course of study only 20 years ago at Auckland University, as 40 pounds. My total student bursary was 40 pounds; vacation jobs were Just as difficult, if not more so than today.

What worries me when I see the griping and groaning at the cost of books is that no one ever seems to comment about the importance to students of their building up a personal library of professionally valuable books. Discussion always centres on the importance of the information contained and few comments exce recognise the value of the acquisition of the source of this information and the ability to refer back to this readly. Okay, accept that I am a bibliophile and that because books were an attraction to me I eventually migrated into the publishing business. I appreciate that not everybody likes books as such, but I find it incredible that lecturers and students don't seem to regard even the acquisition of textbooks and references as important.

But in this day and age is $100, honestly, a lot of money to spend for one year's source of information? that is the equivalent of one ticket by air from Auckland to Christchurch, or a cheap demin suit, or a decent meal for four people in a restaruant. Alternatively, it is the equivalent of about twelve dozen of DB Brown and the new Muldoon prices. Well, that has labelled me as both reationary and middle-aged.

Now lets look at the real implications of your suggestions that books are overpriced and that what is cheaper is to produce in-house multillth publications, or to have information recorded on video tape available in the library. You don't have to study economics to realise that if no one changes the end user for the purchase of the printing press or video tape machine, the labour of the printer or librarian, the occupation charges of such machines, nor for the origination of the material itself, then the end product is always going to be cheaper than anything which is commercially produced.

You quote in your article that the forerunner of Professor Cleveland's "Politics of Utopia" which was produced by the Department never cost more than $6. Yet the commercially produced item cost $12.75. The price differential strikes me as remarkably low. Last year the student may have got the information at a cheaper price but the original publication was economically indefensible when compared with the more efficiently produced commercial publication. This commercially produced product was created at no expense to the taxpayer, the university, or for that matter, the fee-paying' student. The user pays for the production. For the Department's original publication the university, the taxpayer, and the fee-paying student all in effect contributed, even though they may not have been benefiting from the information. The cost of printing and the time spent in production was at the expense of other more valuable machinery, library books or salaries. In effect the students for whom the Department was supposedly catering in an effort to save them money, were the losers.

So now you can label me "commercial" as well. But at least my economics are in the right place!