Why Are College Textbooks So Absurdly Expensive?
theatlantic.com
theatlantic.com
Sorry that some good textbook authors are affected by this, but frankly, there is a bigger issue here, and collateral damage is to be expected. The only solution is to charge fair prices, and until that point is reached, I believe students should pirate textbooks to their hearts content.
I didn't say they should mandate a fixed price. I said the book publishers should charge a fair price, one that decreases the amount of pirating because it's low enough so that it's not worth it for students to pirate. That's up to them. Until they do, I fully support pirating of textbooks.
No one put a gun on your head to go to that college. You took this decision and then you must be responsible for the costs of tuition, housing, books... Inform yourself well of the college and professors before enrolling too.
The solution to piracy is for the publishers to charge fair prices. In other places such as the UK where textbooks are sensibly priced, there is almost no incentive for piracy and people are far more inclined to buy the text from a bookstore than used.
No it isn't, but thanks for the 1970s propaganda flashback. If the government is setting prices that private producers are bound by, then that's some form of socialist/capitalist mixed economy. If it were communism, the means of producing textbooks, diamonds, etc. would be publicly owned in the first place. That is, DeBeers wouldn't even exist unless it were some kind of state appendage.
There is nothing inherent in the definition of corporation saying that corporations are 'more corporatey' when left unrestricted by an external legal system. In fact the only way a corporation (a legal entity) can exist is within a legal framework. That is, corporations can't exist without being regulated into existence.
>Governments dictating prices of textbooks would be a step toward communism
No, if anything it would be shifting the socialism/capitalism balance towards the former. Regulating a market price isn't making a claim on ownership of the means of production, and so has nothing to do with communism.
The US government sets price floors on almost every crop produced in the country. Nobody claims this to be communism or a step towards communism, because it isn't. Price guarantees are a transfer of wealth from non farm-owning taxpayers to farm owners, which is an economic policy rooted in socialism. Price-setting for textbooks or diamonds would also be a policy rooted in socialism.
If your argument is that any socialist policy inevitably leads to communism, then I don't know what to tell you. Do you really think the USG has communism in mind as an end goal?
I wouldn't call that communist, but it's not a free economy either.
Who's the biggest state-run-economy advocate, I wonder?
Interesting you bring up DeBeers. I suppose you assert that the global diamond market is healthy as well?
A solution would be to make sure that Colleges have to pay for half of the price of student books, and put it into Tuition. That way when students see the inflated tuition prices (due to lots of $300 books), they go with the other college that has book prices that are reasonable.
It's a nifty switcheroo to charge students tuition, then say "you are responsible for buying the books, and by the way you don't have a choice in the books."
Really? I know professors who wrote textbooks in their spare time. Universities could give professors a paid year off (no teaching responsibilities) to work on textbooks. Time is a non-issue here.
"...or skills to create diagrams..."
Professors, who spend their time writing research papers that are usually filled with diagrams, don't have the skills to do so? That's an interesting assertion. There are plenty of software tools available for creating diagrams.
"handle formatting and typesetting issues"
Hm, I think there is a tool for that one too: LaTeX. What, it's too much to expect a professor to know how to use LaTeX? Well, there are several other tools that could be used. These problems were more or less solved decades ago. Professors routinely format and typeset their articles; formatting a book is not substantially different.
"write hundreds of homework problems"
I know professors who do this: they write homework and test problems for their courses.
Really, I think you underestimate what an experienced professor could do in a year. Even if what you were saying was true, it would not be hard to solve: universities could hire experts on formatting and publishing to work in their libraries and assist professors. It is also not necessarily the case that every professor would have to write whole books; if books were being shared by universities via their libraries, professors could make corrections and improvements to books as needed, with the changes being propagated in a manner similar to patches in open source projects. We have all the technology that is needed for this, we only need to put in the effort to organize such a system (but I won't hold my breath).
At whose expense? Taxpayers and the students themselves, of course. There is no such thing as a free lunch.
On top of that, there is no sense going against the specialization of labor. Better leave the professionals (in this case, the publishing companies) to do their thing.
As for the "professionals" at the publishing companies, what exactly is their profession? We do not need publishers to copy books for us anyone, because we have computers that can copy the books faster, cheaper, and on a much greater scale and if students need printers, they have access to them. So what professionals would you be referring to? Textbook publishing companies are not academies where experts in a subject spend their days writing about that subject; universities are the academies where experts (i.e. professors and researchers) are paid to write about their area of expertise. Textbook publishing companies hire people who can make fancy covers (which adds no value to books), double check typesetting (which is a redundant task, since librarians and professors can do that), and operate machines that print and bind books (but we do not need that anymore, because we have automated ways to distribute books). So in what way are we "going against the specialization of labor" by asking for books that are CC-SA licensed, written by professors, and shared over the Internet?
When diagrams and typesetting are needed though, this is the perfect task for the students to attend to. I'm seeing this right now in the free online classes at Coursera and Udacity - teachers publish notes in lectures and students are providing transcriptions, translations, diagrams, deeper explanations, and overall creating massive improvement on the originals, in many cases creating an online textbook in pdf or wiki format.
Instead of required text books they have lecture notes for most of the classes that are provided free on the website that might as well be a textbook considering how thorough they are (eg: [2]). One or two intro classes had a reader version of the lecture notes, but that was well over 1000 pages, and again, not required since it was provided free on the course website.
For the few classes that did have required textbooks, most of them were books that had been out for at least 3-5 years, so used copies were easily available (eg sicp, K&R C, Vazirani's algorithms, etc.). For the very few classes that had textbooks with a recent version the profs mentioned in the first lecture that the old versions would work fine, but that the students would have to figure out where the assigned reading was if the chapters didn't match up exactly.
[1]: "There is no required textbook for this course, since none is altogether satisfactory, and all tend to be ridiculously expensive. Officially, we'll rely on notes that I provide (on paper and on the web), but many people feel more comfortable if they can supplement this information with other treatments. You might want to take a look at the following books:
Compilers: Principles, Techniques, and Tools by Aho, Sethi, and Ullman—also known as "The Red Dragon Book". You won't need the latest edition.
At least one student recommends Thinking in C++, by Bruce Eckel, which you can download by clicking here.
Python Essential Reference (3rd edition) by David M. Beazley. This is also on-line (see the bar on the left) and at bookstores, on-line and otherwise." - http://inst.eecs.berkeley.edu/~cs164/fa12/info.html
[2]: http://inst.eecs.berkeley.edu/~cs164/fa12/notes/notes.pdf
It's the only thing I pirate these days, and I know its wrong, but I would be lying if I said it didn't feel like victory.
A course requiring 4 books, and using only 1/10th of each one is beyond frustrating.
Piracy is illegal.
You are complaining about an unethical company and solving the problem by doing an illegal action. Isn't this selfish?
No, it is called "civil disobedience" and it is one of the few effective nonviolent ways to promote change. Further, the law is completely out of alignment is this regard; it is in no way promoting the progress of science or useful arts, nor is it helping to ensure that a needed industry remain solvent. We do not need the textbook publishing industry, because we have a much faster, cheaper, and effective way to distribute textbooks: the Internet. If the law continues to protect these unethical and laughably anachronistic businesses, then the law itself is wrong.
Sitting at home downloading stuff and then posting about it using an anonymous handle is not civil disobedience.
I'm pretty sure they are lying, at least as far as that explaining the high prices. Here is why I believe this:
http://www.amazon.com/Calculus-Vol-One-Variable-Introduction...
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0471000078
These are Apostol's excellent two volume undergraduate calculus textbook. Volume I is $231.25, and volume II is $189.49.
They were around $22 each when I bought my copies in 1977. I'm sure that NONE of the subsequent price increase is due to revisions and updates, because there have been no revisions or updates. Volume I is still the second edition (from 1967) and volume II is also still the second edition (from 1969). (There has been no need to revise or update them).
Based on inflation, these books should be about $80-90 per volume now (if we assume that $22 in 1977 was a reasonable price).
And based on the fact that books and other "intellectual" goods may be expensive to create, but only as a one-time investment, and all the years that have passed they should be dirt cheap by now.
In fact, they should be in the public domain, if we had something resembling a fair copyright law.
Boundless is taking OER resources and syncing it up to the chapters in existing textbooks, so a student can enter the textbook for the course and get a customized online replacement.
When you go to the site it already knows what school you go to (or at least it did for me). There's more then one school in my town, so I don't know if they just do geo-location and go with the larger school, or if they have some other source (I don't see how or what though). On one hand very cool, on the other a little worrying.
We do not need the textbook publishing industry in this day and age. They have outlived their usefulness: we can distribute books without them. When their idea of a "new edition" is to change the problem sets, when their idea of an electronic edition is "something you cannot read past the end of the year," we do not benefit in any way from their existence. We are not talking about entertainment here, we are talking about an important medium for preserving and propagating human knowledge -- the very thing that has led to the overwhelming success of human civilization.
That exists, it's called a sabbatical. Teachers are expected to do original work during their year off, and it often consists of writing books.
Anecdotally, over the course of my program (CS) I paid around $50 per term for textbooks. The majority of materials we worked from were either open source/free (e.g. SICP) or canonical texts (e.g. CLRS) available electronically from the library. That said for each course, there were other very expensive textbooks listed as required on the syllabus. We'd always get the "required, yes, wink wink" from profs on the first day of class, with a strong statement that all of the course material could be gleaned from the open-source or free resources we'd been given. But yes, the expensive texts were "required". By someone other than the professor, obviously.
I don't know how common it is for universities (or specific departments) to have relationships with textbook distributors. But I suspect that's what went on in the courses I describe. A large publisher makes a deal with the university, like "all students in {A, B, C ...} courses must be instructed to purchase Y book from our catalogue", in return for who knows what.
Or maybe I just like conspiratorial thinking.
And consider the trend to hire more and more adjuncts in lieu of full time faculty.
The not-so-required texts I speak of were always from the same publisher, which is the 'coincidence' that got me thinking about this in the first place.
At one of the institutions I've worked as a senior administrator, we did contemplate no longer having a bookstore and instead relying on Amazon/Chapters given their excellent service and general book availability. However, I would never have supported the idea of contracting out to some firm that dealt with a limited number of publishers.
Version churn can work to your advantage. Recently I bought a couple of previous-edition textbooks on subjects I was interested in. In both cases the newest edition was over $100 and the previous edition less than $10. The differences between editions are negligible. Despite this, I realized reviewing these books that the reason I don't normally do this is that textbooks are almost universally of utterly abysmal quality and riddled with errors, superstitions, and nonsense compared to the state of the art knowledge in any field.
For-pay college and textbooks are a waste of time and money. Stealing textbooks is pointless and futile as you are doing something illegal, but for taking something of no real value.
Speaking here as a sometimes college lecturer and teacher.
That's also how they are able to sell new editions constantly. Many subjects (math, mechanics, etc.) don't change much, but the publishers come out with different editions every 2-3 years so people can't just buy used books.
It's a ridiculous system, but hopefully open textbooks and online education will help change things.
The college itself was commissioning certain professors (department heads in some instances I believe) within each department to put together their own textbooks for certain subjects. When I would go to the bookstore, I remember seeing books branded with the colleges name rather than your typical textbook publishers. If I remember correctly, these textbooks were significantly cheaper, something on the order of ~$30 for an algebra or calculus book (I can't remember which it was).
Sure, it takes a little bit of work, but in the long run the students save money and the college may actually stand to make a little (or a lot, I don't know what, if any, markup is on them) money as well.
I've had professors apologizing to students in pretty much every class I've taken because of the textbook prices, so they're definitely starting to look at alternatives. So much so that I've had a couple professors tell us to return the books.
From what I could tell, the differences between the 6th, 5th and 4th editions were not discernible in the text, only the exercises had changed positions and had subtle variations in the numbers and wordings. That was my first experience with the textbook industry. The book, Computer Networking: A Top-Down Approach by Kurose and Ross was very good, but the obvious abuse of their monopoly by forcing students to buy the newer editions gave me my first look into how the textbook industry operates.
Still, I have great respect for my University (Utrecht University in the Netherlands) for (until now) either using syllabi that can be freely downloaded or cheaply bought for a hardcopy or accommodating students with older editions of textbooks.
EDIT: Oh, and I recently found this link: http://www.textbooknova.com/.
It's probably not legal, but free textbooks!
Also, there are open source books http://www.marketwatch.com/story/chegg-partners-with-opensta...
Make sure Colleges have to pay for half of the price of student books and put that cost into Tuition. That way when students measure the inflated tuition prices (due to lots of $400 books), they go with the other college that has book prices that are reasonable.
Colleges trying to increase enrollment will discover that switching to a non corrupt book seller will be in everyone's best interests. Free market will thus be restored and prices will float according to their value, rather than by authoritative fiat.