Re: Ebook aimed at college students

--- In [email protected], Muriel Lede <muriel.lede@...> wrote:
>
> Please. Have you never been a college student?
> 
> Let me phrase it that way. Cash-strapped college students have to purchase 
> several manuals each session. By 'have to' I indeed mean compulsory purchases, 
> because no one in their right minds would purchase these in any other context. 
> More often than not they're outrageously expensive and not worth the paper 
> they're printed on. The only comfort that provides is the prospect of selling 
> it to the next batch of students to follow that course, if they can, and then 
> only for a fraction of the purchase price.
> 
> This is already bad as it is. Now make these manuals ebooks instead. Students 
> now need to buy a reader of some sort, also expensive, just to be able to read 
> the books, and these readers, for the moment at least, have severe limitations 
> over their paper counterparts, especially in the classroom. The ebooks 
> themselves are often just as expensive as the said ebook counterparts, if not 
> more so. And of course they can't be sold afterward, because they're not 
> transferable.
> 
> Now tell me with a straight face you wouldn't be at least tempted to work your 
> way around that racket if you could. This has nothing to do with "respect for 
> intellectual property rights" and everything with common sense.
> 
> Respectfully yours,
> Muriel
> 
> -- 
> Visit Muriel Lede's Official Blog! 
> 
> 
> [Non-text portions of this message have been removed]
>
As a college student whose parents did not have the resources to pay even one dollar of my expenses, I know firsthand how financially strapped students from poor families can be. I won't bother ranting about seeing students needing large trucks to move their possessions into the dorms these days and them whining about how expensive things are. As a student, I bought used books whenever possible and resold them after the course was over whenever I couldn't borrow one from someone who had taken the course earlier. Sometimes, I even checked out an earlier version of the text from the library. But I never stole a book. Photocopying wasn't an option because it often cost more to xerox a book than the book cost.

If you had read my post, you would have seen that I was not talking about an expensive text book. I am talking about a bok that would sell for $15 or less in the print version. Now I see that spending money to create an ebook that is of primary interest to college students is folly and would be a waste of time and money. They will have to get the information elsewhere--if they can find it.

Tom Benjey
www.Tuxedo-Press.com




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