Cicero Books is a publishing company dedicated to quality books, fair prices and faculty support.
Textbooks are expensive because the business model followed by large publishers works well for books that sell in the tens of thousands of copies, but is not appropriate for niche textbooks that sell fewer than 5,000 copies a year. The high-volume textbooks are expensive because they subsidize the large administrative overhead of these firms, and the low-volume ones are expensive because otherwise they are not profitable. The end result is that students end up paying a lot for textbooks.
There is a better way, and we think that we have been able to make it work. Cicero Books operates on the “lean principles” of the manufacturing industry. We have eliminated as much waste as possible in our editing and production of textbooks, which means that all of us are wearing many hats.
Cicero Books are:
- affordable (both in print and electronically) because we keep developmental costs low and ask our authors to develop the instructional materials
- attractive (full color) because in many cases the color photographs and graphs explain the concepts so much better than a black-and-white diagram.
- earth-friendly because we would rather sell you an inexpensive electronic book than a moderately priced printed book.
- educational because we provide good supplementary materials, written by the authors of the textbook themselves.
- current because our model allows authors to update their books easily if a new development takes place in their field.