Just a few thoughts in response to all the comments:

1. Several people point out that it is the publisher, not the author, who decides the cost of a book. That’s right. The author has some input, and for almost all of my books, I’ve talked with the publisher, before signing any contract, about keeping the price down. We insisted that Bayesian Data Analysis sell for $45, Teaching Statistics sold for $40, and ARM sold for $40 as well. I thought that A Quantitative Tour of the Social Sciences was going to sell for around $25 but now I see on Amazon that it’s selling for $33; I don’t really know what’s up with that. And, as a trade book, Red State, Blue State was always going to be reasonably priced—people aren’t generally prepared to pay $40 for a book that they don’t feel they need for their work—and, as for the Applied Bayesian Modeling book co-edited with Meng, we never tried to keep the price down, and as a result the publisher charged $100 for it.

2. Ragna is irritated that my Teaching Statistics book is selling for $190 at the local bookstore. This is simply a mistake—they seem to have ordered the hardcover rather than the softcover. Teaching Statistics is a great book but I wouldn’t pay $190 for it. Annoyingly enough, if you look up the book on Amazon it sends you to the hardcover. But if you look carefully you can find the softcover for $63 (“list price $70”). I don’t know how this happened. It was $40 when it came out.

3. Bayesian Data Analysis now costs $60 on Amazon. But, to be fair, it has been well over a decade since the original $45 version came out. I’d like it to still be $45 but I don’t have much influence over this. It’s a matter of negotiation.

4. I understand that if the book sells for more, the author probably makes more money. Certainly for technical books. I’d guess that if all my books were doubled in price, they’d sell more than half as well as they sell now (and, conversely, if they were halved in price, I doubt they’d sell at anything like twice their current rate). But my books don’t make a lot of money for me (and, as for my book with Deb, we donate all the royalties to charity). What the books do do is make money for the publishers. That’s fine, but making money for publishers is not one of my major goals in life.

5. I’ll have to look into this open source thing. I’m a traditionalist myself and like hard-copy books. I’ve seen how students work on the computer: they seem to have the ability to only look at one window at a time, and so I think they need the hard copy of the textbook.

6. Some people were surprised that I didn’t already know that these books were expensive. Yes, I know that technical books are expensive (hence my struggle to keep my own books under $40), but . . . an intro stat book? These things don’t have a lot of content. $150 seems like a lot. If you pay $70 for Jun Liu’s book on statistical computing . . . well, you get Jun Liu’s book—that’s a pretty good deal! But paying twice as much for something generic—that just seems horrible.

7. In answer to the questions of what my book will be like: I’m not sure! Seeing the $150 books makes me want to quickly write a generic book for $10 or free or whatever, just to do my part to destroy the market for the $150 books, but, no, I’m gonna do something new. I’m still struggling to figure out how it should be structured.

8. In answer to Bob’s question: It’s my impression that the Ivy League colleges get zillions of applicants, so they have no motivation to break the coalition and charge less for tuition. But, for an intro textbook, it would only take one author to change things, right?

9. I believe that many intro stat books, including Dick DeVeaux’s and many others, have strengths. I have my own ideas for how to teach intro statistics, but I’m certainly not trying to claim that the current books are pure crap. And if the choice were DeVeaux’s book for $100 or a generic book for $40, I’d probably assign DeVeaux’s for $100. I think it would be worth the students’ $60 to learn from a better book. But what amazes me is that even completely generic books are selling for well over $100.

10. Yes, I agree with everyone on the basic economic argument that it’s the profs who assign the texts but the students (or their parents) who pay. Nonetheless . . . how did they even get the chutzpah to charge $150 in the first place?

11. Sometimes I sort of wish that Jennifer and I had self-published ARM or gone with some zero-margin publisher such as Dover, who do publish new books, by the way, including some great kids’ activity booklets for something like $1.50 each. Anyway, if the goal is a $40 book, I think I can go with a regular publisher; after all, Cambridge is selling ARM for $40 and will sell Regression and Other Stories for a bit less, I believe.

12. From some of the resources provided by the commenters, it seems as if free textbooks are out there, and so maybe the current $150 texts are just the last bit of profit-taking before the collapse. I’d love to see time series plots of intro textbook prices in various fields.

13. Regarding the issue of homework questions and test banks: This is a real concern, I agree, or at least it should be a concern. In the courses I’ve seen, instructors don’t actually use these test banks, but maybe that just means we’re not getting our money’s work.

14. I noticed a remark on cost per page. As an author of a couple reasonebly-priced 600+ page books, I’m sympathetic to this argument . . . but, no, I don’t think there’s 600 pages worth of material in these intro stat books. My impression is that, at some point, a book being heavy makes it that much harder to use.