Coming to campus: E-books with expiration dates

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Re: Not so much a racket

I doubt that much has changed in this respect in the 20 years since I was in graduate school, and the authors got very little at that time. In fact, there was one professor in my department that gave every student in his class that purchased a new copy of his book the royalty payment he received for it, which was only one or two dollars, because he didn't want to profit on the book from his students.

However, from other comments, some things have changed a great deal since I was a student. At that time, the bookstores routinely offered 50% of the new price for textbooks that were still being used and were in reasonably good condition, and sold used books at 70-80% of new price, and I was sometimes able to do better by selling directly to another student. But there were many books I did not want to sell and some which I still use occasionally. I just can't see buying an electronic copy that has an expiration date for a discount of only 33%. Given the advantages of a real book, I probably wouldn't buy an electronic version that didn't expire without a significantly better discount.

Posted by: criderja   Posted on: 08/10/05 You are currently: a Guest | Members login | Terms of Use

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