Week 5 saw deadlines come and pass. When I showed up to work on the catalog, I learned that new prices were being settled on and that FIT is trying to incorporate ebooks into their catalog this year. The new prices are being selected in an interesting way. I'm sure it is the usual way these things are decided, but it is fascinating and sort of fun. I asked my boss what the new price for a certain book would be, he looked at me, and picked up another company's new catalog, flipped to a page, and said $52. I must have looked sort of perplexed, so he turned the catalog around and I saw the other catalog had a similar book listed at $55. Other prices were shifted in similar ways, just by a few bucks, usually, and always with an eye to the competition.
The ebooks, for those of you who haven't heard of them, are books online. There are even little computers designed just for these ebooks. Matt and I spent probably fifteen minutes looking at ebooks and the portable screens to read them with. They hold a ridiculous amount, thousands of books. But, there aren't many books in this format yet. FIT wants to be ahead of the curve, so is going ahead and putting some of their textbooks into the correct format. We talked about the problems of theft (students printing one copy and then copying it over and over again) and price determination. Only incredibly cheap students, like myself, woulk likely print one and copy the rest, so theft shouldn't be that big of a problem, especially since the real benefit of an ebook is that it can be read from a laptop or other device.
I am still doing some copyediting and proofing, and Professor Wible's suggestion to use style sheets for this type of work has worked out well. The sheet provides me, and more importantly, those above me and the authors, with the reasoning behind and description of the decisions I made. I recommend them highly for anyone doing this type of work, where the same types of problems need to be dealt with again and again in the same work.
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Really interesting stuff here, Berkeley. I've always been incredibly interested in how prices get set for products, wondered what types of analysis goes into trying figure out the "supply & demands" figures. It's pretty funny, then, to read about Matt's flipping through the catalog and bettering the opponents' cost by $3.
ReplyDeleteI'm glad to hear the style sheets have been useful for you. I'll be interested to hear what feedback you get from your internship supervisors or the authors you're working with about these style sheets, to hear your analysis of how these style sheets shape your communication with these people.