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Comment by dzdt | Hacker News Reader

College level textbooks in USA are a total racket. The major textbooks come out with a new revision roughly annually, where the material is reorganized enough to change section and exercise numbers. The purpose is to destroy the used textbook market, as assigned reading and homework will not correspond to older revisions of the book. Then students are forced to buy new books and the publishers can make big profits.

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It has been getting worse recently. Publishers are encouraging institutions to adopt programs that use dark patterns to force students to *rent* ebooks for the same price as purchasing textbooks new. The default release date for telling the student what book to buy is the first day of class, but reading and homework is assigned that same day. Unless you want to go in person to a book store and wait in a long line (or rent the ebook) you are going to be a week behind schedule waiting for a used book to ship from an independent marketplace.

https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2017/11/07/inclusive-acc...

More recently I was required to purchase an ebook that included online tests and homework hosted by the publisher. There is no 3rd party marketplace for that content. There is no way to get a refund if you do not use it. Publishers are allowing professors to outsource basically all of their lesson planning and content development responsibilities and pass the cost off to students. To add insult to injury, that product is setup to allow each institution to be the sole distributor of the license to their students and charge an additional markup to mail you a physical card containing the product activation code and offer no digital delivery option.

https://www.oercommons.org/about

I used to work in the textbook industry.

I’m going back to school.

My networking course recently changed from CCNA to CompTIA network plus content.

I complained that I pay tuition and my coursework labs and tests for over 85% of the marks, are all done via CompTIAs cloud service. And this costs over $200.

On top of this, CompTIA charges the school thousands of dollars a year for the right to teach their content.

So I quit. If I wanted my network + cert, I’d self study and take the tests myself.

My last internship was working on a textbook publishing tool. The whole reason I took the job is that it allowed authors and small teams to create beautiful books, publish them independently, and push updates rather than sell new editions. It did not take long for the big publishers that were partnered to cut off independent publisher access and continue rereleasing small revisions as new editions that had to be purchased at full price. * Some speculation, but this was the optics.

> My networking course recently changed from CCNA to CompTIA network plus content.

Wow, did the school just decide that they didn't want anyone taking the networking course?

Cisco changed the certificates but not the names, the low-level certs like CCNA are now on the same level as Network+ rather than being more valuable.

Western Governor's University [1] is a good deal for IT-related online degrees. They are $3920 per 6 month term, no matter how many or few classes you take that term. You can take the tests for most classes without having taken the class and get credit for passing, so if you already know a subject required for the degree would can satisfy the requirement that way.

The cost of certifications that you earn along the way are included in the $3920.

Here's a page about their IT degrees from WGU Washington [2].

As an example of the certifications included, here is what they bachelor's degree in network operations and security includes: CompTIA A+, CompTIA Network+, CompTIA Security+, CompTIA Project+, CompTIA IT Operations Specialist, CompTIA Secure Infrastructure Specialist, Axelos ITIL®1 Foundation, LPI Linux Essentials, Cisco Certified Network Associate (CCNA), Amazon AWS SysOps Administration-Associate, and Amazon AWS Cloud Practitioner.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Western_Governors_University

[2] https://www.wgu.edu/online-it-degrees/it-certifications.html

I have a degree from an accredited online institution, and it holds literally no sway at tech companies. In fact, it’s a hindrance. I was self taught before I got the degree, and while you still won’t get past HRs screening for most interesting jobs, you will, at least, get industry props for being a “go getter”. With the degree I’ve hit more glass walls and ceiling’s because it’s not from a “good school”, and in their eyes I am no longer self taught either.

Think long and hard about doing an online degree, and what you think it’ll do for you.

I appreciate this comment. Being an "adult student" (30s+) is a rough road and I definitely understand the attraction of self-paced online degrees. That WGU includes certifications as part of its tuition is pretty appealing too. I'm slowly trying to whittle down community college credits so I can hopefully transfer to a state school, but it often feels like a helpless situation. I'm just grateful I don't have children - work, bills, and a wife are hard enough to juggle as it is.

Which online university? I think that's really weird that you've had that experience. Can you share specific examples of what problems having a "bad" degree has caused vs. having no degree at all?

It seems the online quiz/testing racket, that is only available with the ebook license, is just the response to the fact that there is a vibrant ebook/textbook piracy community.

I don't really get why this is even a hard thing, surely there is some wordpress/whatever "quiz" plugin that the teachers can use to copy/paste multiple choice question/answers in and the school can pay the minimal fees to host for all their classes.

Textbooks were a scam 25 years ago when I went to school, but many of them were sub $40 or so, and could be picked up for ~$20 used. A few of the science engineering texts were closer to $100 but it was rare to spend more than ~$200 a semester on books.

Frankly, students can organize for all kinds of social issues, I'm shocked they can't organize to force the school to assure that prof's aren't playing into the textbook scams that seem common now. A bit of student fee to host a couple year old quiz server, and download PDF copies of class notes/etc seems like it should be doable. Particularly considering all the schools which have been providing online courseware for 20+ years now, frequently complete with free textbooks/lecture notes/etc.

There are quiz things. The online textbook ones do more than multiple choice like you can have questions where students enter a formula, or they deal with questions where students might have to enter a number but they need to account for students rounding etc. They also can randomize questions or parts of questions so Joe sees "Kelly has 8 balls" and Sally sees "Kelly has 5". But there are open source systems like LON-CAPA that will do all that too. But the book published ones come with giant quiz banks full with questions relevant to the subject/book used while the open source ones require you to make your own or scour for other people's. The school also doesn't have to host it. And of course no one needs to mark it except in the situations where it fucks up. It's an attractive cheap solution for schools and departments at the cost of the students which kinda sucks.

Course notes are typically posted by the prof if they want on services like Blackboard or Brightspace or Moodle. My university student union had a random PC with an old exam bank.

It's definitely not just the publishers. I think rackets like this work so effectively because bellies get buttered all the way down.

At one class at my university (an early chem class) the author of the book was also the professor of the course. And each year it was a new version which didn't do a whole lot more than fix some typos, introduce some new ones to be fixed next year, and change (probably automatically through software) the problem sets.

Then you'd be forced to buy new copies at full price from the campus book store. And at the end they'd then buy them back for you for a few dimes on the dollar so long as they were in "like-new" condition. And while I don't know what they did with them then I expect at that point they were sold to other universities at a discount for them to start the racket all over again with a set of now "like-new" text books.

Really nobody has any motivation whatsoever to change the system besides the student. Though even there most students seemed frustrated but simultaneously pretty apathetic. Everybody of course realized it was a racket, but didn't really care to make too much of a fuss over it since endless loans and the like all make it feel somehow like the money involved is not really real. And, after all, in a decade or two we'd all be millionaires.

Interestingly, in most of my classes, the professor-authored textbooks "lasted" the longest. Revisions were infrequent, and the professors would routinely tell you what changed when they did occur so you could continue using older versions

These were mostly electrical engineering (and a few software eng) courses, dunno if that has anything to do with it.

That was my experience, too. Opposing the racket was a reason that a couple of my professors wrote their own textbooks. Only a few did that, but a lot more wrote and distributed their own problem sets so that students could use any edition of the assigned textbook, or even a different textbook if they had one from another school.

In my experience the professor-authored books are not the same story. Professors teach one or two sections and earn a few dollars per book (author share on technical books is small!). Their main optimisation using the book they wrote is reduced preparation time to teach as they know that version inside and out.

> Really nobody has any motivation whatsoever to change the system besides the student.

This is not completely true. I have long avoided using any textbooks the students have to pay to access. The only exception currently is my intermediate macroeconomics class. I have not found a suitable no-cost supplement that covers all the topics of the class. My motivation is that it's easier to teach a class if you can offload certain topics to a reference, and you can't do that unless everyone has access to said reference.

Beyond all that, universities have an incentive to reduce cost as much as possible. Whether university administrators ignore that incentive is left for the reader to determine.

My employer offers small grants to support the creation of open teaching materials: https://lib.k-state.edu/services-support/scholarly-communica...

Yeah but you care about teaching. That already makes you an outlier at a research university.

I distinctly remember the author of my Linear Algebra courses textbook was the professor himself. He only assigned homework out of that book and you had to buy the book through his website/preferred publisher. It was not available in print at all so you couldn't even buy it in the bookstore.

The cherry on top, was that his book was chock full of errors. We were constantly receiving emails from the professor letting us know which problems HE HAD ASSIGNED had errors and which numbers to change in his own book, etc. How this is allowed to happen is beyond me and was beyond frustrating for all of us as students.

Worst experience I ever had with a teacher and textbooks.

This wasn't even advanced linear algebra, just the basics. You could literally assign/use any book published in the last 20-30 years and nothing would change about our learning experience. Math doesn't fucking change so often that a new book is needed every 6 months and everybody knows it.

> At one class at my university (an early chem class) the author of the book was also the professor of the course.

I came to the comments to make this point. I had several professors with massive egos that made you buy their crappy book for their class. I remember on at least a couple of occasions the book wasn't even used!

At the other end of the spectrum, we had professors which used regular tech books for the textbooks and supplemented with lectures as appropriate. I much preferred this approach.

Frankly, the entire US higher education system is a racket and is long overdue for disruption.

Most universities have a policy that if the professor authored a textbook he himself assigns, then he is required to return a comparable proportion of the royalties.

Perhaps he was forcing you to buy brand new so that he didn't overpay the royalties back (i.e. they may have had a simple formula based on the number of students, regardless of whether you bought or not).

Every course like that which allows rating of the course should get negatively reviewed for exactly this reason. It's fine if they want to extort students, but there should be a cost.

When I was a kid, watching a movie on TV, it would pop up and say, "This movie has been edited for time, and for content, and to fit this screen," or whatever, and my dad would always jokingly mutter, "BASTARDS!"

So, my mom is in grad school, and in the second quarter of a class, and the professor announces, "I'm sorry, but there's a new version of the textbook, so you'll need to buy it," and my mom, without thinking at all, muttered, "BASTARDS!"

Everyone turned in shock to stare at my mom.

In slovenian (tech) colleges, years ago most of the books were written by professors, and published directly by in-college publishers, so calculated to current prices, books cost 10-20eur (literally depending on thickness and size), and were resold and reused for many years. Even photocopied versions were available at a few photocopied places around, due to a size difference (A4 book shrinked down to two A4 pages, side by side on one landscape A4 page), and noone cared, not even the authors.

Checking the situation now, some are even available online, eg:

http://antena.fe.uni-lj.si/literatura/ed.pdf

Some are even unchanged from my times: https://www.fe.uni-lj.si/mma/Osnove_elektromagnetike_2016-02... (1999)

Basically, noone really cares.

Reminds me of Feynman's anecdote about how math textbooks were evaluated by the Curriculum Commission.

"The reason was that the books were so lousy. They were false. They were hurried. They would try to be rigorous, but they would use examples (like automobiles in the street for "sets") which were almost OK, but in which there were always some subtleties. The definitions weren't accurate. Everything was a little bit ambiguous – they weren't smart enough to understand what was meant by "rigor." They were faking it. They were teaching something they didn't understand, and which was, in fact, useless, at that time, for the child."

> Then students are forced to buy new books and the publishers can make big profits.

So it's the schools that are in on it and the primary target to put blame on. My university (in eastern EU) had majority of textbooks available for free. We could print them ourselves, have them printed at school, or just buy used. I'm sure it wasn't the case for all curriculums, but probably for many. Writing textbooks is one of the things teachers (professors) do after all.

Some instructors are beginning to use more Open Educational Resources (OER) such as open access online textbooks (OpenStax) in their courses.

Huge props to them and I hope more do this, but we also need to recognise that most OER today serves the basic classes that more people will take.

Its when you get into the higher level, more specific courses where OER is currently under-serving. OER for most of these courses just plain don't exist, I hope someone figures out a way to serve these student and instructors in the near future.

I' surprised more people don't know about OpenStax. It's an amazing project

Well good news: they don't bring out new versions as often any more for most subjects.

Bad news: they are pushing hard for ebooks that are drm'ed to hell so you can't resell them. And if they do still have paper books, increasingly they are moving to "loose leaf" editions which are "cheaper" because they are just loose pages which means they are much more likely get damaged so you can't resell those either. Or if they do offer actual books, they do "rentals" which means you pay most of the price but have to return them and so you have zero chance of being able to resell them.

But that's ok, I'm sure your local bookstore can help you. Oh wait, most college bookstores are now owned by Barnes and Noble and so they are just another corporate business...

What I don't get is - do US universities not have libraries where you can borrow these text books?

They might have one or several copies, though maybe not the right edition and never enough for an entire cohort of students.

At my university, students who didn't buy the book would simply make photocopies from the library's copy or from a friend's. But then the photocopiers were modified so that they only operated using credits from "copy card" that was tied to the student ID.

I never knew anyone who got into trouble, but heard that you'd be called in if you were making "too many" copies.

edit: an extra word

It's weird because they know how many students they have, they know the text books needed before the course starts, they have a library, seems like the library should provide them.

They will generally have one on reserve that you can only check out for something like 4 hours or something.

My college has used the government covid money to pay for all students' textbooks and we hope to be able to include textbooks in tuition price from now on but they are ebooks only.

Thats fucked. I only bought two text books (30eur and 40eur) for the entire time I was in collage. All else I loaned from the school library for free.

Can students no longer pool their money for a loose-leaf edition and then take it down a local sketchy copy center?

Even better, download a PDF on Libgen, print it out on the school library printer or pool your money for a laser printer, and bring it down to a local coffee center for a cheap plastic binder.

Even even better, don't print it and just read it on screen or get a supernote and put all of your books on there where you can mark them up and have them all with you all of the time.

I still prefer reading on dead tree material.

eBooks just don't hit the same as their dead tree counterparts. Unless you can live-type LaTeX annotations, I need the paper for highlighting and scribbles.

You can highlight and scribble with a supernote

I can also sit on the beach in VR, but I'd still rather go in person.

We're going to the beach? I thought we were talking about reading books.

We have the same problem with high school (videregående skole) here in Norway. It should be possible for a child to use their older sibling's textbooks, especially for subjects like mathematics and physics, but very often the school requires a particular edition.

At my high school, the textbooks were given to us and then we returned it at the end of the year for the next cohort (we'd right our names on list in the back with the current condition to keep track). I'm not sure if this is how other US high schools did it.

It's the same in the Netherlands. It's a great system I think. Sometimes you can see kids haul all their books on a bicycle, which is quite a challenge even for the Dutch

We each got a book to bring home, and then there was another set of the books kept in the classroom, and a few copies in the library.

That way we didn't have to lug our books back and forth to school and could just use the shared books in the classroom and our own books at home.

It seemed to serve us well and not stunt our growth!

I took Calc 2 at my university and borrowed my roommate's book that he bought the year before. It was useless because it was the "preliminary edition". It was virtually the same book except all the exercises were in customary US units instead of metric. Can you imagine, publishing a math textbook in 1995 in customary units? All of my high school books had been metric and were a decade old. There could only be one reason to do so -- to require the next group of students to buy the new book.

Ugh. As a non-American I have not heard a positive thing about American Education in any kind of media at all. There always seem to be a dozen problems with American colleges at all times yet so many flock there for higher education (mainly for Masters).

Sure, largely because the press are more interested in negative stories, because they generate more "engagement" and outrage and sell ad impressions and clicks.

Education in the US absolutely has issues, including the textbook pricing racket shown in this very thread. But at the same time, there's no question that the US has some absolutely fantastic universities and that the quality of education you can receive here is very high. I say "can receive" because obviously not all universities are equal, or even all programs within a given university. Still, all of those people flock here for grad school for a reason.

Note that I'm mainly talking about post-secondary education. Primary and secondary education in the US has a very tremendous degree of variance from state to state and is generally not seen as being in the upper echelon internationally.

It is because when we have this discussion it is 95% about credentials and 5% about education.

I mean almost every class is available to be audited online for free. Most professors are average when it comes to teaching ability. There is no reason a foreign school can not mirror any program or class in the US.

Of course, the value of the credential is a totally different story. We are really talking about the education equivalent of Louis Vuitton bags and not the general function of a bag.

There always seem to be a dozen problems with American colleges at all times yet so many flock there for higher education (mainly for Masters).

When I was more up on issues in education years ago, I read that people come here for an education because they can. In their country, there may be barriers to education that we don't have.

If you are an adult who wants an education and can pay for it, the US will let you pursue it. That isn't always true in other countries.

In the UK we (or at least I) never used the exercises from the text books - the lecturer sets their own questions and exercises.

So the exact page layout of the text books doesn't matter, and you can use any edition.

In general text books just seem to be less of a big deal in the UK. I remember reading all the classic text books, but the course didn't revolve around them. You could often pick which text books to read out of a selection.

And you just get them from the library.

I was never required to buy a textbook in uk for maths/physics, my biology friends had to buy 1 large textbook, that was it

Same thing is happening in my country. Is starts at primary school level. We used to have separated text and exercise books. Now the have up to three books for same math class and they have to write in at least in two of them.

I personally believe that public universities in the US should be incentivized if not outright required to use and contribute to open textbooks when possible.

In my experience undergraduate math textbooks are not like that at all. Perhaps for the introductory calculus sequence, but rarely for anything upper-division.

There are so many good textbooks for Algebra, Analysis, Topology and the most commonly taught ones are (Dummit&Foote, Rudin, Munkres) are nothing like what you describe.

i do not really understand, why students do not come together then and try to write, for example on wikibooks.org good comprehensive study material.

i mean after that, and when everybody looks on the project, that would be done? and at least that works for the entry level courses? why does nobody do that?

I think it's more secondary school textbooks which are the racket, as schools buy up the new versions of the textbooks when they come out without care for the prices. It depends on the course and subject but I find that professors often recommend books which aren't so difficult to get cheaply or second hand.

I think high prices for textbooks are fair (although compared to the field Pearson et al seem to have extortionate prices), they contain high-value knowledge. I think it's more ridiculous that universities don't provide students with textbook copies, given the incredible cost of degrees.

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