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Comment by shakaijin | Hacker News Reader

Also, they release new versions of books all the time and force their use in classes, making it impossible to use 2nd hand textbooks in a lot of cases. *I mean, come on. How of ten do fundamental physics change... Pearson is a company that should not exist.

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Plugging open source text books. There are many high quality option out there that are openly licensed. Openstax is a project by Rice University that has textbooks for most gen ed courses. openstax.org/

Thanks for the link. Didn’t know. Btw, this is why they lobby for state mandates. A single teacher cannot make an exception

Situation in private school is not better. A prominent private high school in Bay Area, made me run around like a crazy man scavenging used books from all over the place because the recommended books were out of stock. They won’t publish the exact book name until after classes begin in August and apparently varies by teacher by year. This is after paying $$$ fees equivalent to buying a new car. Next year I pulled my kid out of it.

Was this at Harker? I bet it was Harker.

I know of a company that had a pretty large set of creative commons licensed learning materials they put together, along with tools to customize lesson plans and rearrange/edit material, make online quizzes, etc. It was offered as a good low cost digital replacement to traditional textbooks, aimed at colleges. Follett, the #1 textbook distributor (which interestingly has common roots with Barnes and Noble) bought the company. Shortly thereafter, the product mentioned was discontinued. The professors that had adopted it, I assume, were somewhat inconvenienced.

textbook and education material, in an open way? OK let's look.. but.. Ghostery[0] in Chrome shows:

Google AdWords Conversion <icon>; Twitter Advertising <icon>; DoubleClik; Facebook Custom Audience; LinkedIn Ads; Twitter Conversion Tracking; Google Dynamic Marketing; Drawbridge

Analytics: Google Analytics; CrazyEgg; PulseAnalytics; Facebook Connect; Pardot; LinkedIn Analytics <icon> ; PulseInsight

Can someone give some insight into how much "Surveillance Capitalism" is being done here? Facebook is a giant red-flag to me, personally..

[0] https://www.ghostery.com/

That's an unethical practice employed by some companies. Although in many cases it can be circumvented by buying old textbooks anyway.

I am glad that many CS authors nowadays make textbooks available for free. And companies like O'Reilly, Packt, and Manning provide DRM free copies.

If you have an ACM Membership, you get access to tons of books too!

also many professor make wink-and-nod that student may simply "find pdf copy" from internet. good ones are not desiring for to make students pay large moneys.

Bad ones on the other hand make you buy their badly photocopied, handwritten notes from the university copy center, where the receipt is itemized as:

Binding and printing: $1.50

Royalties to professor X: $$

I literally changed majors back in my school days over those shenanigans by the department head.

At least the university copy center is open about it vs taking the blame themselves for ridiculous printing fees.

I would expect better from Professor X though.

I got a bit pissed that this for one course. Wasn't the professor's fault, but rather the school.

(in 2011) University tells incoming students they must check the book list for their course and get books before classes start. Books are expensive.

First day of class - professor gives everyone a PDF of the physics book I just spend $200 on. Says, "the university requires that I list at least one book for the course and they can't communicate with the students beforehand.

Never bought books before the first day of class again.

I've seen similar things, with the reasoning being less "the university requires the professor to list at least one required text" (this one would be easy to sidestep: just require a cheap or free one and then use another) and more "the texts listed are required will be sold to students at a discount, so students can only profit from this... as long as they are in the know".

When I tried using a previous edition, the page numbers and most of the exercises didn't line up. "Thursday's test will be on pp 144-172 inclusive, and get to know exercise 5.17." It put me at a surprisingly big disadvantage.

Pretty sure the publishers anticipated this.

That's often the only thing that actually substantially changes between editions. Shuffle the exercise numbers and change the font and spacing and voila, brand new edition completely incompatible with older versions!

If that’s true, can’t there be some consumer class-action applied?

Class actions, like any lawsuit, require a law to be broken.

If the teachers are helpful, this would not be an issue. In most places I went to, teachers understood, and some peer always helped people with older textbooks. For problem set additions or extra chapters or pages, we used to photocopy those pages before high-res cameras became a norm in mobile phones.

What school was this? I would never send myself or a child to a school that exploited us like that.

This one reason is why it's nice to take classes from professors that base most of your grade on exams rather than homework.

You can pick one book for the prose and another for the practice problems and neither have to be whatever the professor recommended.

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