Why Textbooks Are Ridiculously Expensive

Theresa Nielsen Hayden writes about The Writer's Collective, which appears to be a vanity publisher. In the course of her extremely detailed explanation of exactly how vanity publishers rip you off, she talks about various things that drive up costs.

One of those things is continual proofreading errors. If you catch all the proofreading errors in the "first pass" (I can only guess what "first pass" means), it's pretty cheap. But each succeeding pass costs more and more money. Generally, according to Nielsen Hayden, changes to text after proof approval are about 1 or 2 dollars per line.

She goes on to say:

(Obviously, even if you’re charging by the line, late alterations can run up the price pretty fast. I once got one of my typesetting sales reps tipsy over lunch, and he told me his next appointment that afternoon was with a client that published large complex guidebooks. “I’m giving them a beautiful rate on the first pass,” he said. “Doesn’t matter. I could give them the first pass for free, and I’d still be making a profit.”

My eyebrows went up. “They’re making that many corrections?”

He beamed. “They’re rewriting those things in fourth pass.”

I made an instant and horrified calculation, and blurted out, “With clients like that, why do you even bother typesetting our books?” And it’s true, we can’t have been paying a fraction of what that other house was cumulatively paying per page. But he soothingly explained that we were a bread-and-butter account, steady business in large volume, and thus dear to their hearts.)

Not that this will make me feel any better when I have to buy the books. But at least I feel slightly less ripped off. And clever!