A Brief History of the College Textbook Pricing Racket | Hacker News Reader

A Brief History of the College Textbook Pricing Racket

atlasobscura.com

137 pointsyitchelle93 comments

One point that is often undiscussed: what defines a textbook has expanded greatly. It used to be that a textbook was just a book. But now a textbook is the book plus a huge collection of other resources, most of which the student never sees. A modern textbook includes tests with answer keys, a teaching guide that a grad student TA can use to teach an entire course, flash cards, supporting videos, handouts for class, online exercises, etc etc.

The dirty secret of modern textbooks is that there has been a huge arms race in developing material that makes it easier to teach a course with less work. I don't really think that truly benefits students, since most of this material isn't for the student, it's for the professor (or more cynically for the free labor of grad students used to do a lot of the teaching). But you can't sell a textbook these days without it. I wish there was a universe in which you could sell a simple Psych 101 textbook for $50 and have that be that. But the market won't adopt a simple book like that without the myriad of extras. And since the market here is wonky, meaning the person making the decision (the professor) doesn't bear any of the cost (and might in fact benefit if it's her book), we end up where we are.

This isn't to say that the whole new edition thing isn't worth criticism. Or that there aren't all sorts of things wrong with the industry. But the percentage increase you see in the cost of a textbook for students doesn't just equate to the same percentage increase in the profit margin of textbook publishers. They're not just making the same product from 40 years ago and jacking up the prices 1,000% as the article implies. The product is a whole different beast.

(source: I sit on the board of my family's textbook publishing company)

Who is guiding your business, So to speak? My professors taught mostly from the textbook. I assumed (back then) they chose the texts. Chemistry. Biology. Math. Even computer science (funny that was an IBM manual and some profs college printed and stapled pages of machine instructions), physical geography (strahler & strahler), humanities, etc. But each prof referred to text to cover on our own.

So now who choses what text? And doesn't that drive why you print what you print? What happens if prof doesn't like chapter 10, say?

The professors still choose the textbook. They dictate what the student needs to buy (or rent or acquire through other means). That part of the equation hasn't changed in decades, as far as I am aware. But they're entirely disconnected from the financial burden that they place on their students. There are certainly some teachers who will care more about the financial cost than the "ease of use" (for lack of a better phrase). But often if you can offer an easier package, meaning pre-made content for use in lectures, etc. then they'll pick the more expensive book if it makes their life easier. So I could offer a simple book that retails for $50, but the prof will choose the one that costs 3x that if they don't have to make their own tests and handouts.

Regarding your question about what happens if a prof doesn't like a chapter, we're starting to see decent growth in customized books. So for instance, for one class they might only want 3 chapters from one book and 4 from another. This is similar to course packs that have been around forever, but created by the publisher. Publishers love it because it means the "book" is custom for the course and you can't easily just buy/rent a used version. These are often sold much cheaper because the publisher is guaranteed 100% sell-through for a course.

Of course a professor who has more time might be valuable to you- more office hours, for example, or better prepared lectures.

OK that's not bad. But in that case, how about I just buy the book (with all the aids and guides) and drop the worthless tuition payment to the school?

From my experience there are a handful of publishers and when it comes time to pick a book we look at the relevant book from the publishers and pick whichever we want.

That being said, we don't have any control over them releasing a new version. I've had the book store tell me I had to order a new version because they couldn't get the previous one. (and of course the only difference was one or two paragraphs per chapter...)

As far as the scenario of "what happens if prof doesn't like chapter 10," more and more publishers are pushing "customized texts" which we can decide what chapters we want and they will publish it on demand. My last year at my phd program they switched to a book which was combined from readings and chapters from a variety of books.

The reason publishers love this is, of course, that students have to buy the book from them because the book we use at Any Town State is unique and can't be bought used from Amazon or something. So instead of being a benefit to the student it is just another scam to squeeze more money out of students.

Seriously? some professors actually use all that crap? Over the last five years, I've been a grad student / teaching assistant at both a large state school and an ivy, and I've never once seen anyone make use of supplied handouts or tests. The professor I work for now has written a book which he never assigns, updating his handouts each year to keep current with changes. There might be more room for that $50 textbook than you think.

I honestly hope you're right. And if so things like OpenStax might really work in higher ed. We'll definitely respond accordingly if the market tells us they want a cheaper simpler textbook.

And also it sounds like you have worked with good professors who actually care about teaching, which is always really good to hear. Sometimes hearing about the more cynical side of how higher ed is delivered gets depressing. So keep doing what you're doing, and if you're going to become a professor yourself please become one that values teaching equally to research.

This semester we have switched to an OER (it is only the second week so I don't know how well it is working)but the last two years we have used a book from Cengage. The powerpoint slides and test questions that they provided were of terrible quality. I did base my powerpoint slides off of them but changed them quite a bit - including basic things like fix typos. The course was taught by several people and we came together to make a test bank and some of the questions from Cengage may have made it into that.

More than that, however, Cengage (and I'm sure the other publishers as well) have been making a hard sell for their online interactive stuff and their ebooks. A year or so ago they came and made a pitch to us talking about how much cheaper they are for students (of course the students can't sell the ebooks back and can't buy used copies and their access to the book goes away after a year...) and how awesome the interactive online stuff was.

Luckily, the course director is kind of a self-professed Luddite and didn't really care for it but other people at the meeting bought the sales pitch completely so if we had a different course director I could see being forced to use this drmed junk.

Really cool to hear about the OER adoption, I'd love to hear more about the decision process. From another comment in this thread it sounds like people in your dept actually wrote/revised significant content of the text. That's both awesome in that you/your peers can update the content that you need, and disappointing, in that it's not going to work on a mass scale if every dept has to dedicate a lot of time to editing the content before they'd be willing to adopt it.

I'd love to hear your perspective on the state of OER resources and their likelihood of adoption. Particularly if you think outside your institution.

I had very little to do with it (last semester I taught during the staff meetings so I was a bit out of the loop). From what the course director said it was really based on the cost. I teach at a SLAC with a lot of first generation students who rely on student loads. One of the profs apparently mentioned it and then they went whole hog on it because we didn't like the current book all that much.

Basically, they took a book that existed and added at least 2 chapters and then customized the rest. I don't know to what degree they customized it but I do know that wherever possible they added links and references to campus resources to make the book more relevant.

This is a little depressing. I'm a lowly adjunct at one school and this is my last semester teaching chem with just an old-fashioned textbook (which is already overpriced).

The department head has decided to switch us over to Cengage (with all of its interactive features) next semester.

My suspicion is that the students aren't going to use any of interactive products.

Do the schools get some kind of kickback from the publishers?

No. To the best of my knowledge there is no kickback (they did give us a Panera box lunhox and a totebag...).

Like I said the sales pitch convinces them how awesome it is and how it saves money. I also think the fact that a lot of the online stuff can automatically be graded is appealing to some profs.

I also think that some people are not that tech savvy so they don't see the downsides of drm that are so clear to most of us that read hacker news.

They get a more insidious kickback. They get to be lazy. They mandate the "textbook" with 1 time access code that results in them having to do the least work, and the students pay. Publishers have sold them on this value prop to kill the used textbook market.

My son is taking a course at a local college, where the department assigned a $140 "custom" loose-leaf packet (basically a few chapters printed from a textbook) with "access codes" to some damned online thing.

The class asked the instructor, who said: "Access codes? No, you don't need those. And a $40 past edition of the text will be just fine."

Trying to think over my 5.5 year degree in Comp Sci and Politics...

I think my AI and Algorithms classes may have used some preprepared slides for Russell and Norvig / CLRS. My Theory of Computation lecturer set assignments based on questions from the Cindarella book (which initially bit a few people like myself who had imported "international editions" from India where they swap the questions around subtly). Some of our first year maths courses (though I don't think they included the ones that I took) use MyMathLab.

Those are the only times I can remember seeing those extra textbook resources being used during my >5 years at the Australian National University. In the courses that I tutored/TAed, we barely touched the textbooks at all, let alone even thinking of these extra resources.

Nothing has changed in the last 20 years in terms of the economic model for the textbook publishing industry. The strategy is still about how to create artificial demand with useless features and how to create artificial scarcity with exclusive deals. Yes, 20 years ago they really were literally taking the same product (like, the same text and photos) from 20 years before and jacking up the price 1000% by putting fake "revised edition" labels on them. Now that production costs have dropped, distribution costs have dropped, and sources of information have exploded, they are looking for new ways to jazz up old content to appeal to students and professors. But it is the same hopelessly corrupt and wasteful industry.

This is such a load of crap.

The textbook industry maliciously engineered this market in whatever way they could to kill used book sales. You're out to screw students whether you like to admit it or not. Planned obsolescence is a core element of your business strategy.

As a student, I've been fortunate in that most of the time I can find pdfs of the books I need, saving me a dime and the pain of the weight of a normal textbook. The two books I had to buy this semester were books I still bought online, and I still hate them: they're slow, don't work without the internet, constantly log me out (b/c timeouts), and why the fuck can't I cntl-C? Chemistry nomenclature is a bitch. Give me a pdf for use in my favorite pdf reader damnit!

The other stuff I fucking hate is the free resources given to professors (yay, fiscal budgeting!), but shifts the revenue stream to the student. For example, iClicker, which provides the server for free to the professor but makes the students buy a physical clicker ($50); when this service could just use the fucking web-browser and make the professor/university I pay tuition purchase this REQUIRED part of the course pay for the software. Or the online homework, which is also a purchased item (like $60-70 too). I don't pay for the organic chem lab equipment (and couldn't; that stuff is expensive!).

To be clear, I have not a problem with using these materials. I also don't mind paying for them. But I ONLY want to pay for it through tuition!

Also, why don't publishers work directly with universities so that every student is provided with a copy of textbook/homework? It seems to me that that would be a sure fire way to prevent lost sales due to the used textbook market/pirating. They could just get the university to purchase pdfs of the textbook for each student every year: it would drive down the incentive to pirate and would mean they didn't need to develop their own shitty-af reader. A win-win.

Anyway, to those still reading: sorry 'bout the language. This status quo drives me absolutely bonkers.

How's reading PDF textbooks on an e-reader for you? Personally, I've found them a nuisance because you are not able to skim through pages quickly as you can with a traditional textbook. Let's not forget the small screen size.

It ain't bad, but I have a Surface Pro 3 (the Surface's are awesome, btw).

Yeah, it's massive drawback. I prefer it anyway as it incentivises better features (at least I want it to): I can envision a reader that shows the edges of the pages so you can flip through many at a time (ie think of how the pages don't line up when the book is opened flat). I use the Microsoft Reader so I can use the pen so probably no such luck for me.

Found for large text books the Ipad air 2/3/pro to be a live saver. I tried E-ink but gave up after most of them suck for reading large text books.

Also advantage of the ipad is you can load it up more modern that can assist your learning where by a book is a dead tree.

I agree with most of what you're saying, but I'm not sure about shifting the cost of textbooks to the school and charging for it through tuition. In my three years of school so far, I haven't bought a single textbook, and I've only had to pirate two. And I only pirated those two to have the questions for mandatory homework problems, didn't really use the material.

I think that if a student can find better alternatives to their assigned textbook, making the school buy it anyway and charge it through tuition just seems wasteful.

In my case, at the University of Kansas, a lot of the time assignments will come from the required textbook (when not taken from some online system), so still kinda required. Homework is a teacher aid anyway (in a sense, though I do realize for many it is also a study aid), so why am I forced to pay outside of tuition? I don't pay for tests outside of tuition.

Either way, the intention is to make the person (ie the dept chair/professor) who selects the textbook/online homework/etc be the one to pay for it; otherwise there's no is pressure to use cheaper books (or rather the books with the best value/cost ratio).

Also, I presume that the universities would be able to bargain down to a lower price, due to gains had in mass production (as an analogy) or your usual volume ordering discounts reminiscent of Monoprice. This is especially true if the university buys access to N pdf every semester, which offer practically free distribution costs vs textbooks.

I remember coming to US to go to High School then to University and noticed the books huge, heavy things. Full of pictures and shiny pages, yet content sucked and was spread out unnecessarily. Everything could have been condensed to a 1/3 or 1/4 size. Then when I got to University also happened to notice they cost an arm and a leg.

So I was thinking, I'll just sell them back when I am done and get the money back. Nope, it cost only a small fraction of original price I paid. Because a new version was out already.

Ever since I consider publishers of those books scam artists and crooks. In college I had a meager stipend, and only later got a job on campus for minimum wage -- I had work extra hours at night to make sure to have enough for next quarter when an unpredictable (but high) amount of money would be needed to pay for books.

Amen on the content being awful. I'm in school right now, and have noticed a distinctly inverse relationship between the size of the textbook and the clarity of its instruction.

Especially in math books.

Imagine you're the author, and you have to explain derivatives in 100 pages, because your boss asked you to make the book 1000+ pages long. Including definitions, formulas, examples, and problems, you could get to 30 pages. You'd think it's impossible to write 70pp of padding, yet somehow they make it happen...

So students are double the victims: they pay through the nose, and they get 100pp of crappy explanations, where 30pp would do.

Honestly, I don't understand what is the goal of the teachers by making their students buy textbooks a hundred of $.

In my engineering school (France), teachers write their own textbooks and make them available to us as PDFs. You can pay for paper version at the school's printer (~150€ per year, and then you'll have all the textbooks for your year, and trust me, many students find that very expensive, especially when you only get 3-4 textbooks some years). In the university I went, it was the same, except that the only teacher who had written a textbook gave it to us for free (300 pages). The rest of them gave us their PDFs.

That's why, would a teacher ask us to buy a book some insane amount of money, students would not understand, and at the end, not buy the book. Moreover, what do the US teachers gain from this? I truly don't understand how they support this racket.

Because the books are written by the teachers (or their colleagues)?

Also, many textbooks come with teaching material, incl. slides and handouts, short tests, etc. If you have to teach a course for the first time, it is super easy to get up and running with little prep work.

Interesting. But then, I would say it's part of the teacher's job to prepare his slides and exams, he shouldn't charge the students because he didn't have time to do his job. If he wants some ease in his teaching preparation, fine, but he should be the one paying for it. I mean, if the textbook has everything, the teacher could as well not even bother to come and teach the class, since the students already paid for everything.

In our high schools, exercise books are mandatory, but they are bought by the school and usually last more than 5 years (you don't keep them). Couldn't it be the case in US colleges, if teachers really want to rely on some textbook?

Also, to answer the other comment, making students pay for your own textbook is completely unethical, especially for academics who are supposed to hold to a minimum of work ethics. So, I'm surprised it's so widespread.

I know that I don't live in the US and that mentalities are different in every country, but here I see that teachers make students pay because they don't want to prepare their classes and because they receive royalties for every sold textbook.

I agree completely.

The trend is to pay sub-minimum wage to part time college professors [1] and as a result these part time instructors are often busy hustling multiple teaching jobs in order to scrape by. They often aren't paid enough to afford to have decent office hours never mind write textbooks for a class they might never teach again. Maybe the colleges think that buying the package of books/workbooks/slides/etc will let them treat their part time instructors as interchangeable parts?

"What’s more, poor salary and benefits are the proverbial tip of the iceberg. Unhappy, underpaid, overworked, and sometimes under- or differently-qualified instructors provide less-than-ideal instruction. Contingent faculty are often staffed at the last minute, a circumstance that prevents them from properly preparing for the classes they teach. In order to make enough money to make ends meet, many teach at two or three universities, often taking on far more than four classes, which is a more-than-full load. NTTF often have little choice in the classes they teach, meaning they often teach outside their areas of specific expertise. Many are limited in their freedom to develop new curricula and are forced to follow syllabi that may be outdated, ill-conceived, or inferior. In short, the combination of lack of time to prepare, lack of freedom, a heavy workload, and commuting between two or more schools leaves these faculty members with little time to bring their best work to the classroom."

[1] http://www.forbes.com/sites/noodleeducation/2015/05/28/more-...

Some professors in US colleges are focused on research and publishing. Their pay and whether or not they get tenure is based somewhat on the amount of research they have published and the amount of grants they have gotten.

So teaching isn't a high priority for some professors as teaching is time that you could have spent doing research.

Some classes are taught - at least in part - by TAs or graduate students. TAs also grade most of the homework. In my school at least, I think the professors graded the tests.

Now that I think about it the TAs might benefit the most from these pre-made slides and such.

It seems to be the Ryanair pricing model; rather than include the $100 upfront include it in a near-mandatory extra.

As to how it came about, that's a good question and probably depends on the intricacies of funding.

Yes, textbook pricing is totally out of whack. Also, the need to legitimize the higher sticker prices forces publishers to make books that are bloated, repetitive, and waaay too long. Who has time to read 1000+ pages? The textbook racket and bad quality of explanations is precisely why I started a publishing company: we make science textbooks that don't suck.

[1] No bullshit guide to math & physics => http://www.lulu.com/shop/ivan-savov/no-bullshit-guide-to-mat... (recently released v5.1)

[2] No bullshit guide to linear algebra => http://gum.co/noBSLA

There are also really good free books out there, with my favourite "gems" being really old books like this one on basic math https://www.gutenberg.org/files/41568/41568-pdf.pdf#page=3 and this one on calculus http://www.gutenberg.org/files/33283/33283-pdf.pdf#page=3 The calculus book is tiny, yet it covers the same material as a mainstream calculus book.

I realize this is self promotion for your textbook company (who's goals I laud! Acessible knowledge is a good thing), but the idea that a text book is "too long" is...odd. I've never been expected to read a textbook cover to cover before, and all the extra content a textbook has makes it a remarkable resource for referencing even after the class has finished. While the basics of knowledge can be disseminated in far fewer pages, the upsides of having extra examples and asides in a textbook pretty easily outweighs the downsides (unless you count pricing).

I agree that examples and asides are useful. What I had in mind is certain chapters in physics or math books that are fully boil down to one equation, but somehow end up stretching the narrative out to fill dozens of pages.

Just the other day I was looking for the statement of Stokes theorem in a mainstream calculus textbook, and fell upon two special formulations, one 'outline' of a derivation, before finally finding the theorem. Even though I knew exactly what I was looking for it took me minutes. What would a student remember from this chapter?

A much better structure would be to state the Stokes' theorem upfront and then give a few examples, and maybe show the derivation, then end the chapter. Short and sweet; something the reader will remember.

You can skim of its too easy. Another student can't conjure more detail if it is too hard.

I'm guessing the value of concise texts depends upon your learning style. Personally, I like to read beforehand and mull over topics so that I can engage my professor in class, rather than just trying to keep up. This would be extremely helpful to me, because I tend to become frustrated when I see unrealistically long reading assignments, and then I abandon the way that works best for me. I was recently assigned to review three 600-page references before a two-hour lab; when that happens, I stop reading altogether. I know that that's far beyond what would happen with inflated textbook chapters, but it is similar.

My fiancée, on the other hand, does her reading afterwards. She goes to class to see what the professor cares about, and then looks for those areas and reads about them. She probably doesn't mind long texts at all (I'll have to ask her.)

I find it shocking to realise, reading these comments, that the university is requiring you to buy these books in order to pass.

I didn't buy a single textbook for my entire Maths/Comp Sci degree (only about 5 years ago, at University of Sydney). The maths dept generally didn't use them (they had optional notes books that were just dense maths, generally written by the professor, and cost about $20), and the IT dept...I think had them but I didn't need them and we were never assigned homework from them.

The one case where I had an assignment (read: something that was worth marks) assigned from a book, I complained and the professor provided me with a copy of the relevant question.

I can understand recommended texts. But I can't understand requiring you to make an additional purchase just to complete assigned work...at that point you're effectively just paying for marks.

I suspect this is mostly a US problem, courses there seem to be structures differently than how I experienced it in Germany. With one single exception, all the textbooks I bought were not required, I selected them myself based on recommendations, but I could have chosen to buy different ones or none at all.

The textbooks are still expensive, though the non-US editions are around half the price of the US versions. But it's a level of expense that seems justified based on the value I got, at least for the better books.

Oh you don't have to buy the books. You just have to buy a license key so you can submit your homework for credit!

The cost is not just the purchase of the key. To work effectively at this, you would also have to get access to the a computer and the internet. Both of which are not ubiquitous as, say, electricity and cost money. I understand that this is a 1st world situation, but even in the 1st world, access to a computer and the internet is always possible.

The ultimate bullshit textbook is the "Mercury Reader" and it's ilk. It's frequently assigned to English Comp 1 & 2 classes and is basically a collection of short stories or books, a mixture of licensed and public domain works.

When my dad taught it last year, it was $90, and all of the assigned reading could be obtained from project Gutenberg. He told the class to return the book and get the material online, and got a stern talk from the department chair (he's an adjunct)

The textbook price increases were once thought to be a genius way to increase profit margins. However like all goods and services, even those with the most inelastic demand curves have a point at which people will begin to substitute them for another good. Textbook piracy is at an all time high and publishers profits have fallen significantly. The long run solution is subscription - access to all the content required by the students at an affordable monthly price. I'm one of the co-founders of Bibliotech the Spotify for Textbooks (www.bibliotech.education). We are working with Oxford University Press, Taylor & Francis and Cambridge University Press to achieve exactly that. Our challenge is convincing publishers to provide the necessary content under a subscription model

This is an interesting angle - have you had any feedback from colleges themselves? What's your expected price-per-semester for an average student without the 14-day-free trial?

With regards to the UK universities/colleges which we currently in the feedback is generally super positive since we can provide books in a more accessible format with a much lower upfront cost. Regarding price point (converted from GBP to USD) we currently have in Chemistry: 1) A premium plan with all the textbooks a student currently buys for ~$17/month ($102/sem) plus all optional reading 2) All optional reading for ~$4/month ($24/sem)

> The duo noted the picture-free material tended to be comprehended just as well as material with pictures, but students preferred the more vibrant option.

I wonder why students' preferences are even a consideration: if they learn just as well with older, pictureless books … why not use those?

> But it's worth asking—if professors know these textbooks are absurdly expensive, why assign them? Well, the answer involves a couple of factors, basically: Many professors simply don't know the prices of the textbooks, and, far less frequently, sometimes the professors themselves wrote the book.

FWIW, when I was in school I recall one professor doing his best to ensure that our bill for each of his classes was never more than $50. I think that all of our professors exercised some care in that regard — but ours was a small liberal arts college, with every class taught by a professor or associate professor.

The best thing about these book scams is that it is clear signalling: a professor who forces you to use them is either a bad prof, or trapped at a bad school.

Here are some hits

$181 Campbell Biology: Concepts & Connections [0]

$275 Fundamentals of Financial Management [1]

$201 Psychology, 11th Edition [2]

$248 Management Information Systems: Managing the Digital Firm (14th Edition) [3]

$254 Marketing Management (15th Edition) [4]

[0] https://www.amazon.com/Campbell-Biology-Concepts-Connections...

[1] https://www.amazon.com/Fundamentals-Financial-Management-Fin...

[2] https://www.amazon.com/Psychology-11th-David-G-Myers/dp/1464...

[3] https://www.amazon.com/Management-Information-Systems-Managi...

[4] https://www.amazon.com/Marketing-Management-15th-Philip-Kotl...

I never purchased any textbooks in my 4 years of a Computer Science degree. I always found them online or the professor would be smart and have his/her own material online. The only books I had were for some of my humanities classes because they were actual books (novels, nonfiction) that were good.

After the first or second semester I learned to buy (or... cough... acquire) the book when needed.

It's amazing how many books are listed but never get used... and it's amazing how easy it is to get most books if you know where to look. It is hit or miss (some books are impossible to find), but its amazing how much money I've probably saved.

If it weren't for the online codes it would be a lot easier to get through college without purchasing textbooks. The books are easy to find but the most of the cost has been shifted to the online codes.

Most of the early math/phys/chem classes require codes to access the online homework.

Are those more common in big universities? Mine had 15-25 average class size and we never had to do anything online.

My "Chemistry for Scientists and Engineers" class had 600 people in it and my "Intro to Programming" had another 600 people.

I've been told that with the amount of students it wouldn't be possible to grade stuff like that by hand.

As far as the online grading goes it is mostly the early STEM classes that have the online grading. The non-STEM classes were mostly "read this and do an essay" and the tests were graded on scantrons. After you move past the courses with no pre-reqs and weed-out classes there are less people left and the professors don't really rely on the online grading as often.

>I've been told that with the amount of students it wouldn't be possible to grade stuff like that by hand./< This is a pretty lame excuse. Far greater numbers of students have a far larger volume of work to submit at schools and yet that is all marked by humans, or at least it is where I am. Some could be very easily scripted. The rest (hand writing comes to mind) cannot be assessed by human or machine.

Well that is just what I was told.

Another possible reason is that it is much easier to let MyMathLab grade everything and then spit out a grade at the end of the semester. Though I'm the one paying $140 for a license code.

If textbook companies are guaranteeing their rent seeking lockin via online codes, why not separate the book from the problem sets? Supply a separate service that just has problem sets and online grader-bots. Enable the profs and the schools to add their own problems, rotate problem sets, etc. Now a prof can teach from their own notes, book, etc and handroll homework as needed.

edit, this will be somewhat difficult as there is no incentive for a school to adopt this service if they can offload the cost of the online grader to the students via expensive books.

Calculus books also fall in the same ball park: https://www.amazon.com/gp/bestsellers/books/491544/ref=pd_zg... some of them are almost $300, OMG...

Price trends of the used textbook market have interested for for quite a while:

http://charts.camelcamelcamel.com/us/0321885325/used.png?for...

I wish it was only the college textbook market that was the victim of the racket.

I know of 12 year olds who have 10 kg of school books. No one cares.

At least the books are free.

Of course they aren't.

But the entity who decides to use the book is pretty much the same as the entity who budgets the money for the book. In a university, the students pay while the professors/departments choose.

My sister's public middle school in Indiana has student book fees, and various fees for using mandatory assigned Chromebooks, some of which are refunded if it's returned in good order at the end of the year, some aren't.

If you are low-income, you can get the fees waived, and the majority of her school books are still free. But not all.

I see your point, but I think individual schools don't make the choice. This stuff is usually done at the school board level, or maybe even State level.

It's a giant racket too, perhaps even worse than the university-level racket: http://www.textbookleague.org/103feyn.htm

Not always... pretty sure even for the brief time I was in a public primary school here in Australia my parents had to contribute for textbooks. I suspect they had some kind of aid available for families who really couldn't afford it, but I'm not sure.

Add me to that list. We had to carry them all due to a locker ban after kids kept bringing guns to school. Backpack was as long as about half my height. Enormous strain on shoulders plus 8 books slamming into by spine for years. Weight broke backpack's straps repeatedly. Many of us have back pain and inability to get comfortable easily for rest of our lives.

So, yeah, it's nice if textbook makers or those acquiring something in school remember the physical impact of books getting as thick as possible. Cheap, locked-down e-Readers might make a decent startup idea for improving poor's conditions. Along the lines of OLPC.

> Enormous strain on shoulders plus 8 books slamming into by spine for years. Weight broke backpack's straps repeatedly. Many of us have back pain and inability to get comfortable easily for rest of our lives.

Seriously, get a wheeled backpack. No need to make things worse for yourself.

I think I saw one or two of those. Ostracized, "checked," or beat down more than most. I was still trying to fit in at the time. Wasn't a solution although great in retrospect. ;)

> Many of us have back pain and inability to get comfortable easily for rest of our lives.

My shoulders are still paying for my high school textbooks 21 years later :(

My son was the accidental beneficiary of the new edition of a history text in high school: the new edition stayed in his locker at school, and he picked up for a few bucks the older edition, which hardly differed, to use at home.

But I think that we Americans are in general too much in love with the apparatus of education: it's a hell of a lot easier to estimate the weight of a backpack than it is to evaluate what actually happens in the classroom and what the kids are learning. So it reassures us to see a seven-year-old girl carrying a backpack she could about sleep in.

I seem to remember that the IRS changed the tax law on book publishers in the late '70s. Before the change, publishers made large printing runs of well respected texts and kept the unsold and warehoused books on their ledgers as raw materials. The IRS changed the law and required the unsold books to be counted as assets at the wholesale price, and taxes paid on those assets. This started the current new-edition-every-year model of publishing textbooks that has spiraled into the current situation.

Can you share a bit more information about this? I was unaware that assets sitting in a warehouse were taxed at all. Indeed, assets are typically depreciated in order to claim tax deductions.

I wish I could be definitive. This the explanation I was given by one of my professors. As I understand it most large businesses use accrual accounting, instead of cash accounting that a small business might use. In accrual accounting money is recorded in the ledger (I would say put on the books, but that could be confusing given the topic.) when a sale is made, even though the cash may not have yet been received. So, you have a profit on paper even though you don't have the cash in hand. The IRS ruled that all the books the publisher printed had to go in the ledger at face value when printed instead of waiting for a sale. That means that on paper, via accrual accounting, there is a profit that is taxed whether the publisher has the cash in hand or not. Publishers could record sales and make there quarterly tax payments knowing that they would get the cash in hand next quarter, but recording the printing of the books as sales and paying taxes that quarter when they might not actually sell the books for years was to much of a burden. Publishers started producing just the number books they thought they would need for the year. And, next year, if you are setting up a whole new printing run why not make corrections and updates, that is, print a new edition.

Pay a company to make the "book", dont print any copies, put it online for any school to use and charge like 50 cents a download. School requires to see your reciept so they know its legit, prices drop. Thing is they arent really serious about lowering the cost of education.

Why shoot the duck that lays the golden egg?

But seriously, I would have thought the second hand market for used text books would huge as the course contents rarely change from year to year. It looks like this is ripe for a disruption.

The publishers already solved that problem by constantly revising the books making the previous editions unusable.

Part of the problem is with the codes that are required for homework.

A class that I'm taking right now has a code for $110 and a code and textbook for $135. So the textbook isn't really worth very much secondhand. The code is the only required part of the class and is essential for the homework.

After the basic GenEds and weed-out classes are over there doesn't seem to be that much use of online grading. Possibly due to the amount of students that are left over at that point. Then you have more leeway on buying a used or earlier edition.

In my Chemistry class there were 600 students and we had to purchase a code for the online homework. I've been told that there is no other way to grade that much homework.

Non-STEM (like English Literature) classes seem to have less of a problem with purchasing codes for homework. The English Literature classes I've had in the past just require you to read a certain book and write a paper on it. But there wasn't any problem getting an older book or a used book.

Also if you need to do problems out of the book you need to have the right book to do the right problems. The professor will tell you what chapter and what questions but not what the text of the questions. Though you could copy the questions from someone else's book.

Help me understand if you would. The code is the same code for everyone ? so if it was open source you could just download it ?

I don't know if I explained it very well but I'll try to improve a bit.

The homework in large classes that have hundreds of students are usually graded online on the book publishers website.

For example Pearson publishes a Calculus textbook. In order to do the required homework in class you need to buy a license to the online software which is about $110. The license can only be used once for one book and expires after a set amount of time.

So the textbook is not really worth very much. Because it's the license code that is the requirement.

I see you were thinking about code as in software. I was talking about a license code. A code similar to the Windows activation code/serial/key etc.

Thank you, I think it was just me not understanding because I havent been in school in a long time. Thanks for explaining. The more I find out how schools work right now the more it seems like a scam lol Best wishes with your studies!

Are you Eric, formerly of QSC?

No I am not.

> In my Chemistry class there were 600 students and we had to purchase a code for the online homework. I've been told that there is no other way to grade that much homework.

It's not like grading homework is an important class function. I imagine they still grade your tests.

I've had plenty of classes where homework was graded on a strict "turned it in / didn't turn it in" basis. And more classes where the system was "we don't care".

Is this for university level or secondary school level? It seems rather expensive if this is for secondary schooling.

More realistically is the OER model mentioned in the article. (I wish they would just call it open source or creative commons licensed but anyway...) People in our department took the time this summer to revise an existing OER text and add a couple original chapters to it. Now our students can have an electronic version of the book for free (or they can get a print copy for something like $17 from the campus copy shop).

Plus the people in our department were able to talk the university into paying them a small bit of money to write it too!

This makes much more sense as a model for educational texts compared to what most do now IMO.

I think it's a little disingenuous to call openstax "the Napster model", but it's still a good article nevertheless.

Everyone pirates textbooks. The fuckers at the textbook companies can go dig their own graves. Artificial scarcity is their only hope, and they can't resell calculus and Newton's laws forever... it's not like they've changed in the past few years.

I can imagine a parody commercial... I saved hundreds of dollars this semester by switching to BitTorrent!

I don't even understand why some college students still lug around tons of worthless paper textbooks.

Gen.lib.rus.ec

It has really an impressive selection on textbooks of any kind.

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