College Textbook Prices: Out of Control
cliffmass.blogspot.com
cliffmass.blogspot.com
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Georgia State University was willing to try their luck at arguing that distributing articles and book excerpts to a classroom as reading material is covered under fair use. They were sued in 2008, and eventually mostly won their case in 2012: http://chronicle.com/article/Long-Awaited-Ruling-in/131859/
This doesn't settle every possible version of the case that could come up, but it at least gives a stronger basis for arguing that course packs with copyright clearance are in many cases unnecessary. I've personally been also using just regular hyperlinks to material available as PDFs online (hosted by the article author, usually). But some universities (not mine) require that any reading material necessary to successfully complete the course must be officially available at the university bookstore and listed in the syllabus before the course starts. This started out as a student protection measure, to ensure that completing the course can't depend on weird material students will have difficulty acquiring, but can also have counterproductive effects. However with the outcome of the Georgia State case, it may be possible to satisfy the requirement by putting the articles on electronic reserve at the library instead of printing a course packet, since that's now (probably) legal.
Besides the insane prices, one things I've noticed is that students don't get their student aid paid out until weeks into the semester, so you either have the choice to buy books at incredibly high prices at the college bookstore (higher even brand new compared to Amazon), or you have to wait 6 weeks before the aid is available for students to shop elsewhere.
Sneaky business.
The federal government is not okay with this, so they instituted a system of mandatory reporting where we have to keep track of whether or not a student shows up during the first few weeks. That way they know who not to send aid to when that time is up. If we fail to properly report this then the college is expected to send money to the federal government to make up the difference.
So it's not a trick on our part to get you to use the campus bookstore. I personally encourage my students not to use the bookstore, since I think marking up the prices on textbooks is inappropriate. I've also pushed hard for the adoption of open textbooks in my department, but it looks like that's going to be at least two years away.
(Looks like HN doesn't canonicalize all the blogspot.tld URLs.)
Then there's the paper publishing racket which is just as perverse.
This whole system needs to be disrupted so hard nobody even recognizes it.
Part of the issue is that there are many moving parts in the value chain: students, profs, authors, publishers, distributors, and bookstores. The exploitation has persisted mainly because the decision maker in the sales process is not the client! Mainstream publishers are milking this fact as much as they possibly can. Insultingly so, you're right. The main problem is that schools and universities are incredibly slow to adapt so the racket continues, but with students taking textbook decisions into their own hands things will change.
I'm optimistic that within the next couple of years, the $130 price tags will be a thing of the past. The market says so.
Ordinarily I'd put my bet on market forces, and I really hope you're right... This is so much closer to monopolistic extortion though, I don't see it changing without lawsuits, regulation, or large donations to University presidents contingent on new textbook policies.
> I am trying to get my [[colleagues from the]] department to create an introductory meteorology textbook. > A pretty decent online book could be written ... we could charge $30 for it > and use the money for an undergraduate scholarship.
$20 sale price - $10 printing = $10 profit x 300 students = $3000 / semester
We're not braking the bank with these profits, but at least first-year undergraduates will save $100/course/semester, which is money they will use for beer instead.
All of these intro texts (at $150-$200) are broken. They do not go into the subject matter deep enough to use as reference later in coursework or a career and their too expensive to disseminate knowledge widely. Realistically at $30 it's still too expensive to compete with free. But until annotation and referencing UX catches up for e-books dead-tree books still win for learning (I know people manage with PDFs and annotation, but I haven't had success with e-books for anything except for recreational reading). And I think there is a hurdle that is difficult to get over with getting other universities to adopt a university press book from a different university especially for an introductory text.
[1] http://www.amazon.com/Calculus-James-Stewart/dp/0538497815/
For $25 I was able to buy a copy two editions prior, which was what pretty much everyone else in the class was using too.
Of course this doesn't help actually solve the problem, since someone else had bought that book for $200 and they then saw it depreciate by $175 when they sold it to me used.
Moreover we get "Indian" edition of those books which are written by Americans and those used to be as cheap as Indian author text books.
On flipkart (Indian version of amazon) Introduction to algorithm is for INR621 which is roughly $10
http://www.flipkart.com/introduction-algorithms-3rd/p/itmczy...
On amazon same is at $60
http://www.amazon.com/gp/offer-listing/0262033844/ref=sr_1_1...
The campus library may well only have one copy on reserve for a course with 300 students, or they may not stock the newest edition.
The latter part gets to be a problem in the instance where the textbook publisher decides to publish a new edition every year or two just to ensure that you'll be doing the wrong homework exercises unless you're using the same new copy the professor has.
Obviously there is something to be learned about the price differences in the different versions, but there is also a non-trivial difference in quality. I've had International Versions that were missing whole 10-page sequences, pages out of order, and different problem sets whose answers had factual errors. Also the lower grade paper is an obstacle to book reuse.
By this I don't mean to be negative, I just believe the final answer involves more reasonable digital distribution; I'm sick of the myth of "getting the exact same book for cheaper" because I've been burned by it a number of times.
The idea that a book would be necessary for a class that a teacher should be teaching seems crazy.
We run white-labelled price comparison sites for about 350 campuses, and the stores at those campuses end up winning 80% of the sales. The need to look competitive against online retailers is a really powerful incentive for the local store to do everything possible to get lower-cost options on the shelves (and we do things like help them get more used/rental books, lower prices strategically, etc).
Here's our website, shoot me an email if you're curious: http://www.verbasoftware.com
For students at universities that haven't yet partnered with verbasoft, I made a textbook search engine in college that does essentially the same thing: http://textbooksplease.com
EDIT: I have heard that most people would spend $112 on a single course, let alone even a single book. I don't think the publishers and text book companies really like(d) my University. Yes, this is in the U.S. too. I think if a school's student body comes together and "demands" text book rental they can get it. Talk to your student council and apply pressure on the staff and faculty to incorporate it.
When I was in college, I figured out the textbook scheme by my second semester. We would buy expensive books and next semester the bookstore wouldn't buy them back because they were "outdated editions."
So every year after that, I never bought any textbooks. I would either find the professor's powerpoints online, or make a friend who did buy it and make copies of their book. If I absolutely needed a book I would rent it from Chegg or buy used off Amazon, but now Pack Back books looks like an even better solution.
I found all my books available without a hitch.
The publishers don't lose out on any money, so I don't feel too bad. I wouldn't have bought the books otherwise.
Several of my younger friends in the 20s or going to continuing ed have reported on this phenomenon.
You can't get a search function with that hard-cover stuff.
Granted, sometimes the quality is not as good as that of a rich textbook, but it is usually sufficient for the course. And much lighter to carry around as well.
Besides, the university library contains a small amount of textbooks, which is usually sufficient for those few interested students which want to learn more.
I open sourced a course data scraper a while ago to help solve this problem: https://github.com/bsgreenb/Open-Textbooks
Starting in 2010 schools that receive federal financial aid are required to list the ISBN and title of books (or author, title, publisher, and date if an ISBN is not available) at the time of course registration.
In practice, though, one wonders how many courses have their texts listed as "TBD" up until the week prior to the semester.
The law was good in spirit but in letter it didn't require making the data available. A good law would just be that every school has to offer all the data they send to the bookstore to everyone for bulk download.
But as I take upper level classes I have stopped purchasing text books unless required and necessary. I still like holding a book or reading it off my iPad but most of the time I prefer not to read anything but my notes. Quality of textbooks vary, just like quality of online sources vary. Textbooks should be reference. Teachers are the one supposed to explain the details to me, but few can do that well :/ well, teaching is hard.
In one case I simply opted for an alternative course rather than pay $148.00 for the textbook.
At the same time I've been doing ID Verified courses on edX. edX courses and materials are a fraction of the cost with vastly superior interfaces for everything.
Rather than just fixing the cost of materials at traditional Universities I hope to see the whole racket of higher education broken by the MOOCs.
That's where my empathy ends. It seems to me that there's a huge problem with unethical sales practices and underhanded tricks to reduce the used textbook market. This article's title should have been about the shady textbook companies rather than simply the prices of new books.
I wonder why?
I know the www prefix doesn't work. Perhaps there's some sort of filtering being done at your location?
A good starting point is to simply Google the title of the work you are looking for and append a "filetype:PDF."
For example, I found no less than six copies, all hosted by various universities, of Rosen's Discrete Mathematics this way.[2]
If you are talking about a market for having pirated physical copies mailed to you my I ask what advantage would that service have over a print shop like Kinkos? Do places like Kinkos refuse to print copyrighted material?
[1] http://www.reddit.com/r/trackers/comments/hrgmv/tracker_with...
[2] https://encrypted.google.com/search?hl=en&q=discrete%20mathe...