Nelly Lahoud
Superb Content Destroyed by Outrageous Price
November 22, 2010
I was about to buy this book for its analytics (the jihaddists are not self-destructing, they are morphing) when I saw the price. This is another example of outrageous pricing that destroys the dissemination possibilities of knowledge. The author would be better off using CreateSpace or any of a number of self-publishing “on demand” services, while also offering–as I do–a complete copy of their owrk free online.
This book, at just under 300 pages, cost the publisher a maximum of $6 per book and probably closer to $4, to print. While I am sympathetic to the problem presented to publishers by Amazon taking 55% of the retail price, there is, never-the-less, absolutely no justification for this book being sold at a penny over $29.95.
Columbia University Press appears to have forgotten that it is supposed to be in the business of disseminating knowledge, not destroying it.
I continue to recommend that authors take responsibility for their work by not signing any contract that fails to include pricing guarantees and ideally also offers all material free online….at a minimum the author should reserve that right to themselves.
Alternative purchases at a reasonable price:
Dying to Win: The Strategic Logic of Suicide Terrorism
Rage of the Random Actor: Disarming Catastrophic Acts And Restoring Lives
Harvest Of Rage: Why Oklahoma City Is Only The Beginning
The Looming Tower: Al Qaeda and the Road to 9/11 (Vintage)
Web of Deceit: The History of Western Complicity in Iraq, from Churchill to Kennedy to George W. Bush
The Sorrows of Empire: Militarism, Secrecy, and the End of the Republic (The American Empire Project)
The Fifty-Year Wound: How America's Cold War Victory Has Shaped Our World
Imperial Hubris: Why the West is Losing the War on Terror
Rule by Secrecy: The Hidden History That Connects the Trilateral Commission, the Freemasons, and the Great Pyramids
Unconquerable World Power Nonviolence
