Digital Directions: Rethinking the Monolith
The imperative for textbook publishers to embrace online services
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The damage caused by the international grey-market, illustrated by Kirtsaeng, is dwarfed by the damage that results from the used textbook market. Like Kirtsaeng, resourceful students who completed courses and no longer needed the textbook saw an arbitrage opportunity to sell their copy to the next student — and the used book market was born. To combat the used book market, publishers adopted a planned obsolescence strategy by shortening revision cycles. Shorter revision cycles oblige publishers to increase book prices to recoup costs in a reduced revision cycle — which ironically made the used book problem even worse.
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Andrew Brenneman
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