[rant on]
I've been silently fuming about this to myself and figured I might as well share my views. I don't know what the justification is for the pricing scheme that the TSO have come up with is, but I sincerely believe it isn't geared to its entire customer base.
The price of each book is expensive enough, but why should we be paying more for an electronic copy? Surely any additional publishing and distribution costs involved with selling these doesn't justify the extra money you have to pay (i.e. VAT - so why not lower the cost of each unit?)
Furthermore, although I like the idea of an annual subscription; why on earth would I pay more than the cost of a hard copy to have access to it for only 1 year? I mean, really! At the end of the year am I seriously going to fork out another £300 pounds? I think not.
Of course, I'm writing this from the viewpoint of the individual person who is is interested in practicing ITIL within the workplace. For consultants who make their living this way, it's probably a reasonable sum to pay; likewise for organisations.
For the individual - it's simply just too expensive. I've tried explaining to my other half that it's a good investment for me, but when £300 can buy a rather nice new graphics card... you see my point?
[/rant over]
Friday, 9 March 2007
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4 comments:
Hi Imp
If you work for local gov, they may be member of itSMF. You would therefore be entitled to 15% off the ITIL v3 books with itSMF. I know its still a lot for an individual thought this may help. Regards
Graham
Hi Graham,
Thanks for stopping by; you're right - I should have shared that useful piece of information with people.
As it happens we are members of the itSMF but it IS still a lot of money for me personally. I'm one of those people who has lots of books at home. It's not enough for work to buy it for reference purposes; I want my own copy to trawl through in my own time (sad I know but everyone has their hobbies!) at home. Although work would benefit from my reading them, I'm not sure I can make the argument that they should pay the full bill. However, it may be worth seeing if they will go halves or something. Hmm...
The ITIL Imp
Theer are two reasons for the higher cost of electronic:
1) you are buying regular updates instead of a static copy that eventually goes out of date
2) electronic has higher risk of piracy so risk = cost. put another way when they sell one electronic copy they sell more than one copy, more like 1.1 copies.
Hi IT Skeptic,
Good point, I hadn't considered the loss of revenue from PDF copies being shared. How naive of me to think people would all pay for their copy!
I'm still going to complain about prices until I can afford to buy them though ;)
The ITIL Imp
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