In order to increase the number of links to this site, I decided to start a link exchange program. So if you have a music-related blog and you put a link to my blog on your site, just e-mail me at the e-mail address listed on the sidebar, and I will post a link to your blog on the sidebar of this blog. This is a first-come, first-served deal so send in your link as soon as possible to ensure placement at the top of the blogroll.

The topic of this posting isn’t really something about which I usually write articles, but this article about the new e-textbook trial by the University of Texas got me thinking about the college textbook business. This is a business that has all the earmarks of a cartel: there are, relatively speaking small number of firms in the industry, and their product relatively homogenous. There is a relatively stable level of demand for their product – there is a steady supply of college students – and production costs are likely the same across the industry. There are several factors working in favor of the textbook publishers charging as much as possible. (1) A small number of textbooks gain widespread acceptance, thus limiting the amount of competition. (2) College professors – not the students, who must ultimately purchase the textbook – decide what is the required textbook for a course; thus since they are insulated from the financial cost of textbook purchasing, they have little incentive to consider the price when choosing a textbook. (3) Students (or their parents, if the parents foot the bill) who wouldn’t think about dropping 80, 90, or 100 dollars or more for a book under ordinary circumstances may well look upon it as the “cost of an education” and bite the bullet on overpriced textbooks. And all of this means substantial revenue for those in the business: the University of Texas’s financial aid website estimates that students should expect to shell out an average of $409 a semester for books.

The effects of this are obvious to anyone with a Internet access and 5 minutes of free time. At Amazon, the cost of the latest edition of Paul Samuelson’s Economics textbook sells for $140.65. The book is 800 pages long, so I suppose if you believe in the labor theory of value, the cost may be warranted; I, however, see little point in paying that much for what the late Murray Rothbard once referred to as a textbook that “differs from its rivals largely in being bigger, more indigestible, and filled with the flip and unsupported wisecracks with which Samuelson is wont to dismiss deviant economic views.” Around the same time I looked up the cost of the Samuelson text, I was also shopping for a copy of the current Baseball Prospectus, which is available for $13.97. Is the comparison unfair because I am comparing apples and oranges? I could purchase Economics in One Lesson: The Shortest and Surest Way to Understand Basic Economics by Henry Hazlitt, which has the disadvantage of being written in plain English and doesn’t feature the gaudy 3-D charts and graphs of Samuelson’s econ text, but serves as a good introduction to the dismal science nonetheless.

I am, of course, not alone in making these observations. Even politicians have taken notice, and in 2007, the Washington Post wrote about an effort by Christopher Peace, a Virginia legislator who planned to create a state-sponsored digital database of print-on-demand textbooks. A company called Flatworld Knowledge has been formed by publishing industry veterans, and is apparently an attempt to provide e-textbooks using the open source model. Textbook file-sharing sites also about: the most popular of these was Textbook Torrents. The site is currently down, but its rule page once exhorted users who saved money downloading textbooks to use the money to buy a scanner and use it to scan as many textbooks as possible. Although this site’s blatant copyright infringement practices makes them an easy target for the enforcement arm of the publishing industry, one wonders whether similar sites will do to the textbook publishing business what music file-sharing did to the recording industry over the last decade.

In any case, it seems unlikely that the college textbook cartel is going to manage to put the genie back into the bottle here. What is going on is a revolution in the dissemination of information, and it is not restricted to music, newspapers, or textbooks. The textbook business, and academia in general, has been shielded from these changes, as the middle class continues to send their children to colleges and universities (and foot the exorbitant bills), but the recent economic downturn may very well strike a fatal blow to these institutions. The fact is that a college education is no longer the ticket to a higher income that it once was. Proponents of a college education will note that on average, college graduates earn more over their careers than non-college graduates, but as any first-year statistics student would know, this is merely confusion correlation with causation. Kathy Kristof has written about this in some detail in her Forbes article, The Great College Hoax, so I won’t reiterate her argument here. But her central finding is worth repeating: “A correlation between B.A.s and incomes is not proof of cause and effect. It may reflect nothing more than the fact that the economy rewards smart people and smart people are likely to go to college. To cite the extreme and obvious example: Bill Gates is rich because he knows how to run a business, not because he matriculated at Harvard. Finishing his degree wouldn’t have increased his income.” It is only a matter of time before the middle class realizes this, and it becomes reflected in lower enrollments and colleges and universities closing their doors. Those who do enroll will likely be more budget conscious.

What emerges after the fallout is something on which we can only speculate. Gary North writes about the possibility of Wal-Mart getting into the higher education business and charging $30 for an online PDF textbook instead of $150 for a hardcover book. Education would be vastly cheaper and more efficient than it currently is. So far, Wal-Mart has not expressed any interest in such a venture, but I tend to agree with North the technological revolution of the 1990’s will eventually result in a complete restructuring of higher education. What is clear is that there is still a need for an educated workforce, whether or not they receive their education from a traditional 4-year college or not. Paying $140.65 for Samuelson’s econ text, however, is something that we can all live without.

Fisher Price record player toy

Ever since I was old enough to walk, I had a record player. I used my first record player so much that the motor burned out and caught fire, which is one of the most vivid memories that I have of my early childhood. The successor to that record player was a birthday gift.

At some point, I inherited a box of old 45s from an older sibling. Although there were some non-rock records in there (“Cast Your Fate to the Wind” comes to mind, as well as a Popeye record called “Never Play with Matches”, and one or two of those 78s marketed for children), this was my introduction to the genre of rock music. The box was laden with (mostly) 1960’s rock and roll: I remember there were some pre-Beatles stuff in there (Chubby Checker, Bobby Sherman, etc.), some British Invasion goodies (The Beatles, The Searchers), and even some late 1960’s bubblegum (The 1910 Fruitgum Company, The Foundations). Every once and awhile I would get some new records as gifts. At the time, even used 45s bought at a thrift shop served to expand my musical horizons.

By the time I was about 12, I actually had enough disposable income to purchase records of my own. The first record I bought with my own money was “Centerfold” by the J. Geils Band, and the first album was “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band” by the Beatles. Soon I had a small collection of music on vinyl. A trip to a local flea market proved fruitful, when one of the vendors was so eager to unload a collection of 78’s and 45’s that he sold me the whole box for one dollar. A few years later, my uncle, who had owned the house adjacent to the one in which I grew up since the mid-1960’s, sold the house, and I inherited a collection of albums that my cousin had left behind when he went away to graduate school in Boston in the late 1970’s. This collection contained everything from late 1960’s pop and rock (e.g. The Box Tops, Creedence Clearwater Revival) to mid and late 1970’s arena rock (e.g. Ted Nugent). Once again, I augmented my already-expanding collection of music.

During my high school years, I joined the school radio station (we were one of the few high schools in the area to have their own radio station). We had a Class D FM station (10 watts, non-directional). Class D licenses were first issued by the FCC in 1948, and were the FCC’s first attempt to bring more schools and colleges onto the air. Class D stations were strictly non-commercial, and restricted to 88 to 92 MHz (the educational sub-band). But in 1978, in response to a petition by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CFB), the FCC decided to phase out Class D licenses. No new Class D licenses would be issued, and existing Class D stations were encouraged to upgrade their transmitters to 100 watts. Back then, one of the local colleges wanted our frequency for their own station, and we were embroiled in a dispute with them over which would ultimately result in our station going off the air, although this did not happen until after I graduated. In the meantime, the school radio station provided a creative outlet. The broadcast hours of the station were split between our school and the other high school in the district, with our high school limited to being on the air from 3 PM to 6 PM on Wednesdays and Fridays (this soon expanded to 3 PM to 6 PM on Mondays in 1985).

In the meantime, CDs began to supplant vinyl as the format of choice, and I began to build up a substantial collection of CDs, starting with Billy Squier’s “Emotions in Motion”. I enrolled in college and briefly had a show on the campus radio station. By now, my interest in broadcasting had waned, although I was still a music fan. The parsimonious ethic that inspired my previous music purchases continued, and I rarely paid retail for a CD. Years later, even with the advent of Napster and other peer-to-peer file sharing networks, there was still music that I sought that could not be found through conventional channels. As a result, when I found out that there was a monthly record show at the firehouse in a nearby town, I began frequenting them, and was able to acquire a good deal of otherwise unavailable music.

Why have I decided to start this blog? In recent years, the proliferation of outlets for underground radio, such as low-powered FM stations (LPFM), internet radio, and free-to-air satellite, has revitalized my interest in broadcasting. With this in mind, I decided that the time had come to once again share my views on music (and radio as well) with the rest of the world. In the weeks and months ahead, I intend to use this site as a forum for those views, as well as the home base for my new internet radio station, Six Appeal Radio. Stay tuned.