I read an interesting article this morning on the UW Oshkosh website entitled "Publishers: Professor Drive Up Book Prices" that had me laughing out loud.

A regional manager from a major textbook publisher claimed that "the high cost of paper and fuel also contributed to a rise in text prices but said millions of dollars in profits are lost because professors practice book buying." Now I know this manager -- she's a very nice person, but I can't believe that she really believes the profs are at fault here.

A bit of background... A typical sales rep calls on hundreds of professors over the course of a semester, which is probably way too many to give each of them really good sales service and attention. So, the industry practice is the begin the semester selling season by shipping out thousands -- yes, I said thousands -- of free textbooks that their profs might be interested in. These are books that the profs probably haven't asked about, or for. They're just shipped out, thousands of books for free, so the sales reps can subsequently contact the prof and fish for the sale.

The cost of shipping these free books (called desk copies) is factored into the initial pricing decisions. In other words, the textbook publishers know beforehand that they will forego hundreds of thousands of dollars in sales by sending these textbooks out for free.

Now comes the fun part. The prof, who never asked for the book to begin with and may not even think it's any good, gets asked by a third-party book buyer if s/he has any textbooks they want to sell. When was the last time you were in a prof's office? It isn't like they have lots of room for these unwanted books, so they say sure. (They were probably going to be thrown out anyway.)

So suddenly the professors are at fault for cleaning unwanted, unsolicited textbooks out their office?

One of the things I learned in business classes is not to blame your customers for your own problems. It doesn't help you solve anything, and you run the risk of alienating your customers. Perhaps the textbook publishers ought to refresh their business sense with one of their own textbooks.