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Comment by jhallenworld | Hacker News Reader

Great! How about we reduce the cost of college by eliminating the equally parasitical textbook industry?

That's pretty much entirely in the hands of the universities and professors. To a large degree this is really a US-specific problem, US textbooks are easily 2-3 times as expensive as elsewhere. And the cause is likely that US universities require specific textbooks for courses, which is not how it works e.g. in Germany where I studied. I had a single course that required a specific textbook, which cost like ~50 EUR at regular price. Every other textbook I bought I selected myself, and they almost all were really worth their price.

Requiring specific textbooks in specific editions removes all market forces and direct competition. It also kills the second-hand market and makes it much more difficult for libraries. When students are free to choose which textbooks to buy or rent from a library you get a much healthier market.

This is wild as someone with a North American perspective... you can buy your own textbook?

I'm shocked at how reasonable a policy this is.

How do you build lesson plans around students who don’t have the same textbook?

Seems like the only way that’s work is if the teacher provided all necessary info and books were only supplemental.

As college expenses go, textbooks were less than 1% of my costs attending a public university as a state resident. The industry may be just as parasitic but I don't think it would appreciably help reduce college expenses.

6% in 2014 according to this..

https://thecrite.com/home/2014/04/29/the-hidden-cost-of-educ...

But even if it's low, it's also low hanging fruit for a big problem.

My department seriously discussed making our own textbooks for at least one class. The idea never got off the ground, although I think it was a good idea. Part of the reason really is that there were no incentives for doing so, no real teaching or research credit, no grant dollars brought it, etc. The other end of it too was that there was a lot of pressure to turn it into a profit-making venture. Rather than it be open-source, for example, to keep the money in-house with the idea that it would lower costs for students and keep the money in the department instead of a publisher.

So, good idea but too much pressure on departments to be bringing in indirect grant funds, and not enough incentive to release it openly. I think some people in some places can get away with it, but not everywhere.

Your story makes it pretty clear what the solution is:

Change college accreditation / federal financial support rules so that the cost of textbooks is rolled up in the university's tuition fee, and standardize tuitions across departments within each university.

I think there needs to be good textbooks, but there could be some GOOD rules for conflicts of interest with respect to who chooses/requires which textbooks.

you mean like my kid's class a few years back, where the 'textbook' was about $75, and was written by the person getting paid to teach the class, and was just about 150 pages of plain white paper stapled together with no binding?

Get paid to teach the class, and then also make 100 or more students pay for some photocopies, the money which goes directly into the professors pocket - oh yea, and then change a few paragraphs each year and tell next year's class they can't rely on previous years books - i.e. no resale market for the 'book' you just bought.

The problem is the professors are the parasites in many cases.

There are ways for students to side-step the problem (textbook resale, piracy, libraries), unfortunately lazier professors are using the textbook company homework websites as part of their grading metric.

https://openstax.org/ has been working on this.

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