Hacker News Reader

Comment by riffraff | Hacker News Reader

Italian, and fellow european here. When I started university (1999, I think) there were still plenty of Big Expensive Books (I recall my Chemistry one was like that).

The "student pressure" materialized in the form of doing illegal copies of the books. This used to be totally illegal, but incredibly easy.

At some point the legislative environment changed so that photocopying up to a decent percentage of the books was considered legit. Suddenly, low price books started to bubble up everywhere.

So, if you don't have this yet, start lobbying your parliament for a "fair use" textbook copying policy, publishers will follow.

View on HN

In the US it feels to me like it's gone the opposite way. The textbook publishers are increasingly able to block people from using pirated books, or even buying used books, by including one-use online codes in the books. Then they can raise the prices because there's no other market.

Don't ask me what I think the punishment should be, for devising this system, or for a professor requiring the use of such a thing in a course.

My wife works for a major textbook publisher. Not all those free textbooks or cheap textbooks are the same quality as the ones produced by big evil corporations. Frequently, when looking at competitors books, she will find more typos, fewer citations, out of date studies with small sample sizes, poor quality graphics, and sometimes just wrong information. Big books are expensive because the companies frequently worry a lot about these things and also spend lots of effort on the pedagogy of the text.

However, management is not good, the commercial model frequently prioritizes things which are not good for students, and the industry is still shedding revenue. In an effort to change that, they seems to be doubling down on digital products, which are still less popular than print by several orders of magnitude.

Looking back, I can think of one or two professionally-done textbooks I used that were really good. (The Campbell biology books in particular were stellar.) The amount of work that must have gone in to their creation was enormous, and I am thankful for them.

But there were not enough of them. For every worth-the-purchase, there were a dozen of middling to genuine crap quality, and every single one was painfully expensive.

I genuinely feel for the good folks that I know are stuck in the system. But the current model can't die fast enough.

Thank you.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com