It incentivizes the right people with the power and market participation to optimize for the right thing. Presumably, teachers and departments would have to justify costs from a materials budget to an admin forcing real downward pressure on the textbook market.
The current state of textbooks acts like a surprise fee(dark pattern) where you purchase a product(education via tuition) and choices are made for you(textbook selection) that you have to pay for in order to pass the class(see the realization of tuition). That's fundamentally broken market mechanics.
The folks in charge of making the market decision(which textbook to use) should be the same ones paying for it. We have a term for this pattern - moral hazard, and we shouldn't be surprised when students continue the same pattern of behavior when the system continues unchanged.
I was a first generation college student, my tuition and living expenses were funded mostly by a scholarship (covered all of my tuition and about 30% of living expenses) and a private student loan covered the remainder. My cash flow was strictly negative and the surprised $1100 bill right at the start was extraordinarily unappreciated and the fact it went to such comically little use was just spitting in your face.
So the subsequent 7 semesters I paid $0 for books, which still left me with an average cost of books at $137/semester. Ridiculous.
This really bothers me.
Universities hold themselves up as virtuous. Then students hire them to provide to provide an education. Instead of being agents for the students, the students are instead treated like a captive market. There is a very real conflict of interest in universities profiting off textbooks they "require" while being hired to provide a class. I really don't get how any of this is acceptable.
Then you get required to take an ethics class as part of your degree.
It's kind of like meal plans: when I went to college, meal plans were priced horribly, but you were forced to pay for at least a base meal plan, even if you lived off campus. It was just another way for the college to make money off of students who had no other choice. When meal plan prices rose $100 in a single year, or the college eliminated the previous cheapest meal plan, it's not like any students are going to transfer over a couple hundred dollars a semester. But it still sucked. Seems to me like bundling doesn't solve issues, it just reduces transparency and results in more "hidden fees" that might not show up in standard tuition costs.
I went back to college in the early 2010s. Even then it wasn't uncommon for a text book to come with a license code for an online learning module that was both required for classwork and non-transferable.
So yes, I could share the book, buy a used copy, or rip a PDF from an ebook, but that doesn't get me into the online class module that my professor is requiring for class, because that's hosted by the textbook's publisher and I don't get access unless I buy the book new.
There needs to be a minimum amount of content that has materially changed in order to call it a new edition. Moving questions around and adding a word here or there is not cool.
But the main reason why the idea would help is that colleges set tuition based on what they think the market will bear. The actual cost of the books though would be the school’s problem. Administration might actually pressure professors to NOT use custom self-authored editions that cost $200 more. Also, if the books are included, the school would want to buy used ones from any students who didn’t want to keep them, since it would save the school money. So they would be incentivized to tell professors to not switch to the yearly “new edition” which just resizes a few callout boxes each chapter in order to screw up the pagination, and randomly shuffles the exercises.
* note: I’m imagining here that tuition is set to a fixed amount for everyone just as it is today, not that everyone’s tuition is computed custom for them to include the books their particular professors picked.
A better approach would be to allow student loan debt to be treated like any other debt during bankruptcy proceedings, as it was previously. It was only after bankruptcy protection was withheld from students that the student loan crisis and skyrocketing tuition became problems.
It's not like people used to file bankruptcy on graduation day just to screw over the system, so the changes to bankruptcy protection weren't actually addressing a real-world problem. Their only purpose is to shield institutions that are intentionally giving out bad loans.
Once that's done, sure, add textbooks to tuition. That way the university / student loan agency is taking on the risk that the book isn't worth potential future increases in the students' earnings.
I may be a pessimist, but tackling the systemic issues that make loaning a bunch of money to an HBCU student much riskier than loaning a bunch of money to a Stanford student isn't what would happen. The demand would be equal outcomes (loans to all) without addressing why there's any disparity to begin with, which would lead to demands of some kind of guarantee the lender wouldn't be screwed over, which pretty much leads us back to where we are. Defaulting on a loan if you don't matriculate is a rational choice, especially since by definition those declaring bankruptcy aren't sacrificing much (they are almost certainly not in a position where bankruptcy would hugely impact their life in their 20's).
There would be pamphlets published on how to shed this debt. It would be a disaster for the lenders. Purely public funding probably can't work either, because to control costs you'd need to ensure students are prepared for higher education (likely via testing like everyone else in the world), and tests are already politically problematic in the United States.
[1] https://www.tateesq.com/learn/student-loan-bankruptcy-law-hi...
There used to be a social contract, where your country provided you with certain guarantees, and we felt some obligations in return. This was one of the main ideas of the Enlightenment, and also the founding of the USA. We abandoned that decades ago. Neoliberalism erased all "American values." The only American value left today is greed.
In that lost time, you're absolutely right: people would not have just bankrupted their loans on graduation day. College used to be affordable. The country provided for its people. There was a guarantee of a basic standard of living. You could raise a family as a single income household with just a high school diploma.
These days, no one can afford kids anymore. You need to have a Master's degree just to afford a crappy one bedroom apartment downtown. If you fall down, there is no rock bottom. Skid Row in LA has been described by the UN as more deprived than anything they saw in refugee camps or Brazilian favelas. US tent cities are gross violations of human rights. The decadent ruling class openly mocks the idea that human rights even exist in the first place, only pretending to acknowledge such things when manufacturing consent for war with Russia. You have no right to life, no right to liberty, no right to the pursuit of happiness. You will own nothing, and you will be happy (or else).
In this Brave New World, where the social contract has long been shredded and there's no such thing as society anyway, absolutely everyone would declare bankruptcy on graduation day if they could. Just like all the criminal business owners walked away from $4 trillion of fraudulent PPP loans they didn't need. Just like Jeff Bezos takes every legal tax deduction he can find and more, despite not needing them. I would declare bankruptcy on Graduation Day. You would, too. You would have to be an imbecile not to. In this world, you take what you can get as long as it's legal. If you find a loophole in the system, you exploit it unapologetically.
JFK's most famous quote was widely applauded at the time: "ask not what your country can do for you, but what you can do for your country." The underlying implication there is, the country already did a lot for its people back then. Half a century later, all these years of all take and no give, it's about time we started asking the reverse. America's Human Resources are all tapped out. No more blood left to draw from these stones. What has this country ever done for you? When has it ever given you a single dime back, in return for all the taxes you've paid? Even universal healthcare is too much to give for them, but they'll give Ukraine everything and more. They'll fund their universal healthcare system, their pensions, and all the things the oligarchs have stolen from us. The child tax credit cut child poverty in half overnight, but American oligarchs are demons, they enjoy seeing kids going hungry. It's good for business or something.
It will take another generation or two before your theory is true again -- that people wouldn't just declare bankruptcy to start adulthood at zero. You'd need to fully rebuild the social democracy that has been systematically destroyed piece by piece ever since black people got human rights in the 1960s. Even if we got FDR's Second Bill of Rights enacted tomorrow, young people have been completely broken by this Hellworld we've raised them in. They've been forced to ritually practice their own deaths on every equinox in these truly disgusting school shooter drills every year of their lives, since they were in preschool. Part of rebuilding that underlying social democracy would have to be making public university free again. There's no way around it. Either it's free again via declaring bankruptcy on graduation day, in some sort of quasi-baptism in the civil religion, or it's via direct funding as it was before higher education was desegregated. Honestly, I kinda prefer the graduation day jubilee. It begs the question, why don't we just reset all the debt? It would delegitimize the entire system of debt that enslaves the human race.
I don't view textbook costs as a "dark pattern", they're an honest signal from the professor to the students. A professor who makes a $250 book mandatory and then barely uses it sends one kind of signal. A professor who goes out of their way to hunt down (or even scan) and provide free PDFs for all required readings sends another. Students receive these signals and they're reflected in professors' online ratings. To the extent possible (which is a large extent for some highly flexible programs, such as mine), students will go out of their way to drop and swap classes to avoid unpopular professors, further incentivizing faculty to keep these ancillary costs down.
My memory may be fading away, but what I remember is that many professors provided their lecture in a kind of written form (written by them or their assistants, not copied from books), at cost to copy. No book required in addition.
A lecture that follows a book seems weird. Why a lecture, just read the book?
Having it as a reference? Sure. Requiring its purchase for a semester, as in, your grades will depend on it? No no
If I desire to charge people to teach them what an array is I must provide the explanation of the array myself.
If the book is really to good to skip a teaching license must be acquired that names the specific chapters and their purpose. The rights holder doesn't have to sell by chapter but if anyone wants to make a more specific version at a better price they can.
Ideally work towards a single book for each year with a wiki for educators to debate changes and updates.
The value of the current arrangement is students can't ignore the prices.
I'd bet a nice lunch that if books were part of tuition, the net dollars flowing to publishers would increase.
I therefore have a double-take when I read about people spending upwards of $1000 for books in a semester - I just can't imagine what that course would be like, or how students would feel with that kind of teaching that is presumably very heavily reliant on the book.
As a former textbook seller, professors will exploit this for profit by publishing their own textbook at inflated prices and collecting a nice reward. This does happen in some places (or did, I'm out of the industry).
Imagine if every state or country developed their own open source curriculum, instead of allowing publishers to exists as owners and gatekeepers of knowledge.
1) There is no best book for a subject. What suits a class in Elementary Statistics in one place or program might be all wrong for another.
2) There's a lot more to developing texts (or, as you say, curriculum) than people think. Besides a book, there are exercises and answers to the exercises. There are in class slides, perhaps programming components, and the elephant in the room is integration with the most popular LMSs. And all this has to be kept up to date.
It really requires money. At least in the US, I'm unaware of funding.
I'm an Open Text author so I'm sympathetic to your thoughts but it proves to be complex, IMHO
But it doesn't. What incentivizes people in power right now is the AirBnB and TicketMaster fee schedules. That's why we have those things.
You can describe a better solution, one you could enact if you got into power, but you might never be allowed to get into power because you have that idea as a solution. The policy makes the power structure less than the power structure determines policy.
I would argue to you that piracy is the power structure answer to poor incentive structures in academia.
Do you think we would have experienced streaming as it is today without the piracy of old?
Unbundling who the money is paid to is part of the reason this happens. It's socially forbidden for professors, who are white-collar workers, to ask for tips, so making you buy a book you never use of which they get, say, 30% of the price is the only way they can divert more money into their pocket from that of the students. Just see it as a "mandatory service fee".
That the problem continues isn't because the right tweak hasn't been tried but because university administrators allow this situation. The reason they allow the situation is both that they some material interest in it but also because the administrators and funders of the university operate with an ideology that sees markets inherently as a solution to problems.
The concept of using endless debt to pay an escalating price for privatized knowledge is the epitome of efficient use of resources in this view. And your idea of rebundling the costs certainly would change the regime if it somehow got tried.
My partner is doing her degree now and her institution, in two cases... a math course and biology course, opted to use OpenStax text books. After looking through them, I liked them enough that I pick up the print editions for sub-$40 new and use them for refreshing things.
The idea of having to source these books is mostly foreign to me, though many of my friends went through it. I never did, and still do not, understand why this isn't a thing everywhere...
And this is the cheapest college in the state for me. It really emphasizes how lots of the cost of college is just the fancy name on the diploma.
We cannot be funding things that are not truly new. I know that textbooks are well known for having multiple editions that pretty much just scramble the pages, but students should be able to map books around, and I bet that professors can also point out to the pages on older editions.
""" A few days later a guy from the book depository called me up and said, "We're ready to send you the books, Mr. Feynman; there are three hundred pounds."
I was overwhelmed.
"It's all right, Mr. Feynman; we'll get someone to help you read them."
I couldn't figure out how you do that: you either read them or you don't read them. I had a special bookshelf put in my study downstairs (the books took up seventeen feet), and began reading all the books that were going to be discussed in the next meeting. We were going to start out with the elementary schoolbooks. """
So right away we see the text book business is bullshit because the peddler has an established business of helping others review the books, but as Feynman asks, how do you actually do that? How do you help someone read and review a text book?
Later:
""" Then I came to my first meeting. The other members had given some kind of ratings to some of the books, and they asked me what my ratings were. My rating was often different from theirs, and they would ask, "Why did you rate that book low?" I would say the trouble with that book was this and this on page so-and-so – I had my notes.
They discovered that I was kind of a goldmine: I would tell them, in detail, what was good and bad in all the books; I had a reason for every rating.
I would ask them why they had rated this book so high, and they would say, "Let us hear what you thought about such and such a book." I would never find out why they rated anything the way they did. Instead, they kept asking me what I thought.
We came to a certain book, part of a set of three supplementary books published by the same company, and they asked me what I thought about it.
I said, "The book depository didn't send me that book, but the other two were nice."
Someone tried repeating the question: "What do you think about that book?"
"I said they didn't send me that one, so I don't have any judgment on it."
The man from the book depository was there, and he said, "Excuse me; I can explain that. I didn't send it to you because that book hadn't been completed yet. There's a rule that you have to have every entry in by a certain time, and the publisher was a few days late with it. So it was sent to us with just the covers, and it's blank in between. The company sent a note excusing themselves and hoping they could have their set of three books considered, even though the third one would be late."
It turned out that the blank book had a rating by some of the other members! They couldn't believe it was blank, because [the book] had a rating. In fact, the rating for the missing book was a little bit higher than for the two others. The fact that there was nothing in the book had nothing to do with the rating. """
And so on. You can read the full story in the book Surely You're Joking Mr. Feynman or at https://www.rangevoting.org/FeynTexts.html .
This is a very very poor idea that binds advanced students to the standard of a place.
This is very elitist and will deepen the divide.
If you are a really smart individual in a bad college due to your socio economic situations, you need to be able to read what MIT students are reading and not your below average peers are reading.
https://get.vitalsource.com/vitalsource-advantage/equitable-...
How so? At that point it's a small cost buried (read: hidden) in much larger cost. Who is going to go to the mat for "the kidz" if no one is going to notice the savings?
Totally realistic set of goals, but until then I'll be pirating.
Their primary focus seems to be empire building: Create as many admin positions under me in the Org Chart as I can get away with and extract as much money from students as possible to fund the growth of my empire.
This has been allowed to happen because they have essentially unlimited access to funding, no accountability and can make hand wave arguments about needing more staff (DEI, etc.)
Wrong, at least in my experience. Professors with published books wanted us to buy those books for their course. They would just pass the cost (from which they profit) back to the student if they were bundling, with no alternative to the student.
I think that's how it's done in the UK? I don't remember paying out the wazoo for my course books. If I did have to pay it would have been some nominal amount.
Professors: OK, my book is now $10,000.
this is whats happening at some elite/Ivy league universities
Many textbooks come with license keys specifically so you can’t buy used books anymore.
Students who do buy a used book are typically coerced into buying the license key to do digital homework, or whatever other reason.
When I was teaching during a graduate fellowship I accepted paper assignments for students who bought used books, or who shared books with other students. The Pearson representative complained and I was given a talking to by the graduate student dean about consistency or some such nonsense. Eventually I would be reassigned to teach classes that didn’t involve digital components.
We called it the textbook industrial complex.
You are fucking with this company's fief.
There, that's what's really going on. They feel entitled to earning money and are pissed they need any customers at all to get it.
Public libraries are now paying more money per use for licensing fees than an individual would pay. Libraries are pretty much looking into the abyss, no more permanent copies of anything. All books a rented, they all have usage limits, typically some combination of date of expiration as well as number of checkouts - they the library must pay for another license.
It's beyond absurd. I'm not at all sympathetic to this business model. Meanwhile author percentages have gone down.
Digital is dramatically worse, except for the fief holders.
By the way various feudal privileges were fascinating by the way in how Byzantine and random they were, of course from the modern perspective. At the end even the nobles supporting the Enlightenment were for ending them: some say also because they saw more money in free(r?) enterprise. I kind of doubt we'll live to see similar sentiment in copyright robber barons.
They're farming money off the students. Don't mess with the crop, even if you are the crop.
What actually happened is textbook publishing houses like Pearson just leveraged the digital tecnology to make duplication or resale difficult or impossible, and kept all the cost savings to themselves.
I think what really irked them was other students found out and started demanding it from all the real professors and adjuncts and in other contexts. Then I was an actual problem not just a troublemaker.
It's a patronage network that exploits young people.
We exploit 20 something year olds new found freedom and cashflows. This is the first time they are making money and are looking to be independent and "grown up" or "find themselves" so the market says "hey, I'll help you find yourself if you give me money."
Young people have a natural sense of invisibility. "I can do anything I set my mind to" has been burned into their brains since grade school. The market turns this into "I can buy anything I want to."
It's like society says "Look, you're grown up now so you need to participate in the economy. Not only do you need to make money, but what's more important is you need to spend money so I can have it."
The wedding industry from wedding rings to venues, new babies, even interviewing for white collar jobs used to be accompanied with the need for a new suit.
Once it can be established something is important and to be revered, rent seeking knows no bounds.
Food is fairly inexpensive as well.
Housing has major problems in part stemming from over-regulation via zoning, NIMBYism, etc.
Food isn’t cheap either and constantly is getting expensive (1), and I’m not even touching the subject of its bad quality.
(1) https://www.nerdwallet.com/article/finance/price-of-food
Really? I admit that this is anecdotal, but as an American when I studied abroad in Europe I was consistently pleasantly surprised by how much less expensive eating out was. In particular I felt like it was much more affordable to get healthier food at restaurants compared to the US, and also much cheaper to get alcohol drinks at restaurants. There were a few exceptions (Copenhagen, Paris) but even major cities like Rome, Munich, & Barcelona had pretty well priced restaurants (which included tip).
You mean 25% tip, minimum -- according to many POSs!
The salary is frankly embarrassing to share with my peers in industry.
But not all of us take it out on the students. I find free books whenever I can for my courses. I even write books and let the students (and everyone) freely use them. If there are good for-profit books out there, I only use them if they're cheap and something useful beyond college.
I got it from Dad, who was also a teacher. He got tired of book prices and wrote his own. Students still had to buy it, but they could do so at cost at the college print shop. Dad made no money from it.
Say the textbook used for the last 5 years costs $300 and now you want to switch to a different, cheaper book. Now you have to convince admin (why switch? The previous one works) and students (I pay $$$ tuition, why are you cheaping out on the book? Is it worse?).
> how much royalty do they get?
Basically nothing, so that is obviously not the reason and you should be ashamed of yourself for suggesting that.
You might consider providing a more concrete example if you're going to throw shame around. This answer feels emotionally charged and incomplete.
You can use 15% of a copyrighted work for educational purposes. That means you can pick and copy chapters from different books to cover the course material. All free!
So first thing I did was setup a DC server (direct connect, early 2000s p2p sharing protocol) with a friendly grad student on university infrastructure, where we shared books, encouraged other students to upload books, we also built a dyi book scanner (there's one popular design that comes up first on google). the bookscanner at some point had a near 24/7 utilization, and people were coordinating time slots by dc messages. the room with the scanner (which is also where the DC server was) turned into a kind of unix room/hackerspace, because there was always somebody there working on something only vaguely related to university courses as such.
reminiscing on things like that always makes me realize just how much hacker culture has changed, to a significant extent as a result of societal pressure. I was extremely lucky, because when the handful of us got inevitably discovered, what followed was a series of meetings with department dean and university heads, lots of stern talking, which basically ended after they were convinced that they put sufficient fear of god in us. I'm particularly grateful to one networking and os professor who showed up to every single one of those meetings to advocate on our behalf. said professor had a significant contribution to computing in general, was strong supporter of old school hacker ethos, and is just all around great guy.
only a few years later aaronsw was thrown to the wolves by the cowards and bureaucrats (but I repeat myself) at MIT over his JSTOR downloads, which in my personal perception of history was the end of this kind of "oh captain my captain" university hacker culture.
Some profs may electronically distribute materials separately, which would likely sidestep both of these costs.
The football team probably brings in enough revenue to pay the coach.
Most of them were written by the professors who taught the course and every year or two, they'd reshuffle the contents of the book to make it harder for students to follow the course by purchasing used copies from the previous year
Most of the time only a small part of the books were actually part of the curriculum. It wasn't unusual to spend $100-$200 for a 700 page book only to later realise only 50 pages from it would actually be part of the curriculum. It seemed to me the page count had only been boosted to inflate the sticker price
I can understand why students turn to pirated copies when they realise they're just viewed as cash cows by the teaching staff
That makes for a lot of very interesting behaviors, like compiling "exercise equivalence tables" between different editions of a book, and students having a culture of self-organizing around the library sharing availability.
I believe if I had to buy all the books I used, the cost would be similar to rent.
A strategy I thought was fair at my school was - the main text is free, but you can pay for extra practice problems written by the professor for like $50.
That seemed fair to me since I know these adjunct professors aren't making anything for the amount of time they spend.
https://www.vmi.edu/academics/departments/applied-mathematic...
My wife is a professor there and wrote their APEX precalculus book several years ago (why precalculus is needed for college students is another matter). The print price was raised this year but is still well under $20. I think I paid around $350 in 2005 for the text we used for 1205/1206 at VT.
VMI also does outreach to help other schools adopt their books and transition from whatever they'd been using. Excellent use of public funds IMO.
The chemistry prof, in contrast, contracted with a publishing house, and made sure to make a few changes every year, including re-numbering the exercises to discourage buying and selling of old textbooks. The (expensive) textbooks came with accompanying lab-books, which cost almost as much as the textbooks themselves. Lab assignments were only accepted on pages torn out from the official lab books.
https://senatedemocrats.wa.gov/mullet/2023/03/20/senate-intr...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Integral_House
Suffice to say, I, nor anyone else, should not feel bad about pirating that series of books.
https://www.thehindu.com/news/cities/Delhi/University-copyin...
Wiki article because the hindu is paywalled: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/University_of_Oxford_v._Ramesh...
https://news.careers360.com/sci-hub-scihub-libgen-alexandra-...
Though I can't speculate on how the sci-hub case will actually go since the main reason copying was allowed for students according to the arguments was that before photocopiers existed, they were expected to copy the things themselves.
Anybody actually keep and use their old textbooks?
Way back in the day, I only ever kept an algorithms book and used it once a never.
The other textbooks I still keep just for when I need weighted objects to stack something. I don't actually read them.
My biggest problem with the current textbook industry (among many) is that each textbook manufacturer uses their own proprietary format for reading the books and doing assignments. Wiley and Sons uses WileyPlus which, in its original incarnation, used Flash until the very last day Flash was officially supported. Don't want a potential security hole installed onto your laptop? Too bad, transfer to a different school because this one has been bought out by Wiley and Sons. And the interface was absolutely horrid. If you were doing division in their math website and entered a "/", they never set up the Javascript to state you were typing in a textbox so Firefox would open the "search this page" prompt.
This system made doing my homework more frustrating, not less. I dreaded doing math homework every day from age 16-20, not because I didn't want to learn, but because I was constantly fighting WileyPlus' "quirks" instead of just doing the math.
All of these websites, not WileyPlus alone, also have horrible uptime. There were often times I had pressing homework to do and would be met with a "Servers are down for maintenence" screen. Since the textbook publishers cut predatory deals with the universities, professors are completely unable to switch to another publisher if these availability problems get out of hand. This leads to worse education outcomes, frustration with the professors who are constantly wrestling with the website, and students being forced to take out predatory loans to pay for these horrible books.
I do not miss college.
Textbooks are a racket.
That said, we weren't required to buy any books at all and and books we were required to read were kept at the library in the "core" section, so there'd always be a number in the building, not lent out. As it turned out, in retrospect, I don't think any specific book was ever actually "required" to be read.
I did buy a few books (about 10 over 4 years), including a copy of Stroud's Engineering Mathematics so old it recommended logarithm tables (otherwise it was perfectly serviceable). I bought those because I actually wanted them to keep and I still have nearly all of them.
I wonder how unusual (or not) that is? Is the heavy textbook emphasis a US thing, or is it more common?
(About a decade later I read Maths with the Open University, which is basically the student on their own for six years learning some trick mathematics; a couple of those modules definitely taught from textbooks, although by no means all of them; some of them again simply provided notes and explanations and problem sheets generated by the university)
I honestly struggle to understand why students would even participate in these textbook extortion rackets.
UK, Computer Science, 10-14 years ago. I was given 5 core textbooks on day 1 of my course – Java, C, 2x Maths, Communications. Probably about £200 worth. After that there were no required books. There were recommended books, of which the university library had copies of all of them with policies that meant they were always available to read but couldn't be loaned out because they were core material. On top of that there were subject reading material that no one used and made no difference. I never once heard of a textbook being part of an assessment - like using questions in the book.
I seemed to have been very lucky, both CS often requiring fewer textbooks and the UK not having quite the same culture of exploitative companies. But it does illustrate how unnecessary the process is. Maybe students need to strike on buying textbooks.
They’re not as well-known as redshelf or vitalsource, but their content largely overlaps. I only became aware of them because they approached my startup about licensing our technology, but since then I’ve been using their platform to read various nonfiction books (they have about a million titles between textbooks and nonfiction).
I think they have a good shot at changing how students pay for books, and as their library grows their model will become even more attractive to students.
We had suggestions of text books if we wanted to go further, but they were all available for free at the university library
Source: I'm a teacher.
But I don’t want to lug around 40lbs of paper everywhere I go. So I get a DRMless pdf copy of the book too.
I’d get the OReily subscription in a heartbeat if I could read it on the device of my choosing. But I can’t so I don’t.
I want to download the ebook to the ereader of my choice (ReMarkable) where I have instant access to my entire library, the ability to markup the document without defacing it (notes are separate layers), and the ability to add blank pages for notes between the real pages (this will damage the binding of a real book).
Books are objectively inferior for studying unless you need to rapidly flip between pages. And I’m going to optimize for my own time and efficiency every time.
Given years of abuse, the customer base that purchases textbooks has no patience for moral grandstanding. 'Lower prices or die' should be the message to publishers.
Back in the 90s, copy shops across from the university would have entire books photocopied, and we could get them for $20 instead of $150. Some of the international students would go back home to Hong Kong or India for the summer and take orders on next year's books, because they were much cheaper in Asia. This is a racket that has been going on for decades but only got exponentially worse these days, and I completely support starving these robber barons of any revenue.
[While this type of activity is clearly illegal, the sentence also has an ironic twist. A quick calculation shows that the fine and confiscated money amount to less than $20 per pirated textbook, meaning that buying them legally would probably have been more expensive.]
For some courses, professors also just uploaded PDFs of entire books in the learning platform.
There was also an on-campus shop where you could buy the printed slides for an entire course for a few Euros. I still have one of them for nostalgic reasons because I was intensely studying the math in there. By the way it was beautifully done by the professor's team in LaTeX.
We live in an age where you no longer need a printing press to manufacture and distribute books. And public universities already get enough of my tax dollars that they should be publishing the text books required for their clases. For free. Public funding equals public availability and ownership.
When a university demands a $300 book from some private publisher, it amounts to fraud and all involved should be investigated, prosecuted, and convicted of federal felonies. Stop the grift.
What the fuck are we paying professors for, if not to write the written materials they deem requirements to learn the curriculum they teach? Get to work motherfuckers.
There was also a second hand bookshop, where you could buy books for about 25% of the original price and usually sell them back to the bookshop for about 20% of the price at the end of the year, so they just got restocked most years and sold to the next batch of students needing it. This system only broke down when the course changed substantially, but in practice that was usually only about 1 of the 10+ modules each year.
In my 3 year course, I probably read about 100 relevant books cover to cover, bought maybe 3 full price because I knew I'd want to keep them for longer than the course, and kept 2 of the second hand books rather than selling them back.
Back then, I also had friends studying law, and they had to pay a fee at the start of each year, but would receive a pack each term that was several inches thick of photocopied case material. Presumably that was because they weren't predominantly reading to learn and internalise the material, but they needed to constantly quote specific sections at multiple points during their assignments, and so pretty much everybody needed the same material at the same time. But in that case, the university had permission to duplicate the necessary material.
I personally love to buy textbooks because I think a physical book is easier to retain. Printing and binding a PDF at Fedex is usually a similar cost, and I’d rather have the nice physical copy decorate my bookshelf, like a hard-won trophy.
I would make the argument that textbooks should cost more than novels because I can read a novel at a page per minute or two, but a textbook is probably more like a page per 30-60 (on average). Then again, many Dover books cost around the same price as novels.
That being said, you might need to consult 3 or 4 different textbooks for a course, and on a student’s budget, this is absurd. Anybody that doesn’t have parents in the upper middle class and beyond will suffer. Science is an engine of social mobility for the intellectually gifted and nobody should feel bad for pirating textbooks. I think, like pirating journal articles, the only people that disagree with you are publishing companies.
Some years ago, to prevent US students from using these versions, most publishers changed the page numbering, some content and the problem sets.
Not only did it mean students were not stuck with a surprise bill for a book they'd rarely use, but it also meant I had more freedom to teach what and how I wanted. Since I was teaching it with a focus on being a day-to-day developer, I put in my own section on await/async style coding and optimizing chains of dependent asynchronous calls. It was one of my favorite sections as it was exactly the sort of thing I would actually do in my job.
Of course the same company fired me when I was fighting cancer, and then was acquired by Wimba. Oh and if T. Mack Brown reads this site, you can kiss my ass...
This seems like a basic thing that governments should be doing, but governments never do anything that would "crowd out" rent-seekers, because they're the servants of rent-seekers.
Maybe, if you're a multi-billionaire, use one of those billions to put together enough unencumbered material to fill a wide-ranging university program? Or if you're a university, while you're committing to open-access, make a commitment to your students that all of the materials that they'll need will be available freely, on the net, if at all possible? So many billions sloshing around, so many people claiming the problem is so complicated, when it looks very simple. It's as manufactured a problem as the idea that taxes are so complicated that the IRS can't figure them out.
edit: and succinctly,
> I think that high textbook prices is one of the many little signals we sent young people, for the last 3-5 decades, that we are not interested in creating a better world for them.
Start with the old textbooks in the school library and teachers editions and give writing assignments for new original writing that becomes the teaching material for the current class and future classes.
But I mainly pay for books because it tends to be cheaper than printing them myself.
If I were born as a westerner with my mom and dad being there always to catch me if I fall I would always pay for knowledge, sure. But I pretty much feel entitled to free knowledge. I will happily pirate a 200 eur math textbook, 200 eur for me is a lot more than for your average westerner.
Meanwhile me and a few friends got access to all the books for free by hanging out in the library every day. It's not something that would scale to everyone but I always found it amusing. Ended up buying a total or 4 books for a 5 year EECS course, and that's because I wanted those as keepsakes, for nostalgia reasons.
It’s not about being “acceptable” - it’s about it being _necessary_ to afford. Sure, maybe they could go hungry for a few weeks… but this is such a predatory practice that preys on the psychology of student loans. “I’m already paying 60k for tuition… what’s another $800 for 4 books.”
The cost in the end was pretty miniscule as the loss in value of a book across 1 semester was pretty tiny.
Price to value was solid.
