Bloomberg View: Textbook Apple?; GOP Immigration Hope

If ever an industry were deserving of digital destruction, it would be the $10 billion textbook market. A handful of companies sell almost all primary, secondary, and higher-education textbooks. At the college and university level, where 19 million students spent $4.5 billion in 2010 on texts they virtually had to buy, many schools own bookstores and get a cut of the sales.

The rationale for pricing can be opaque: Paul Krugman’s economics textbook is $166 at Barnes & Noble in the U.S., less than half that at Blackwell’s in the U.K. The federal government helps to underwrite annual textbook price increases by baking their cost into financial-aid calculations. No wonder textbook prices rose 186 percent in the U.S. from 1986 to 2004. That’s slightly more than 6 percent a year, vs. an overall inflation rate of 3 percent.