Why, pray tell, is a Pre-Calculus book $235? | Hacker News Reader

Why, pray tell, is a Pre-Calculus book $235?

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0840069421

Our students (and their parents) are being robbed at a monumental rate. What can possibly justify this kind of a price for a subject that has seen no change for decades. Why can't my kid use my pre-calculus book from 30 years ago? Have the definitions of slopes and limits changed during this time?

Even the used versions are highway robbery. A Calculus book ought to not cost more than $20 (or be free).

View on HN

Because people keep misplacing blame and as a direct result nothing ever changes.

All I keep reading is Americans blaming the evil publishers for their greed and profiteering. However that is a publisher's job. It is in their DNA, they're a profit making business, they aren't meant to do the right thing.

Instead the people who should be "blamed" are the schools/departments/academics. These are the people who assign a $235 book, these are the people who's job it is to spread knowledge and educate people. They're the "gatekeepers" and they're asleep on the job, or worse in cahoots with the publishers (because publishers give them a way to keep tuition lower, by doing the grading on your teacher's behalf via one-time-use codes, instead of the school/department needing to hire more graders or develop systems).

A lot of schools/departments/academics have solved this issue, they're developed free or "open source" books and other material. But many either don't care or are benefiting from the relationship with the publishers.

If you wish the situation to change then complain in the right direction: To the educators, school, department, or similar. Publishers are just going to laugh at your complaining with good reason.

PS - In many other countries this issue doesn't exist, not because $200+ books don't exist (they do), but because educators haven't lost sight of their role as gatekeepers to knowledge and education. Many of my own teachers wrote all of the course's material in-house and then made it available for free, they re-used the same material every year for the same course. It was like $5 to print it all out (just in photocopier/binding costs), but digital so just bring an iPad if you wish...

> Instead the people who should be "blamed" are the schools/departments/academics.

I am an academic. Unfortunately this answer is correct.

Still more unfortunately, one reason that this persists is that it's in no one's self interest to create an alternative. What I'd really like to see is momentum build for high-quality, wiki-style textbooks where lots of teachers from lots of different institutions collaborate. Unfortunately, this isn't happening much.

there are a lot of these in existence. Not a specific model to get the books into the right hands though. For example, the wikibooks if you look them up would fit the bill. And there's a model using version control like GIT to enable people to fork their own versions of the book into branches. BUT what's the divide? You have to get the book in front of the educators, and you have to make it as easy to acquire the printed item. The reason why coke and pepsi and frito lay are in every store and dominate? They keep showing up and restocking. Their product is the most available and they keep doing it. So make the book printable, easy to acquire and just as easy for the professors to say yes as it is for them to just sign a paper when the publisher's sales guy shows up with an expensive book and a small token bribe to encourage them.

There is this, for example:

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/a3/Calculus....

Not terrible, but not as good as commercial textbooks. (Please let me know if you are aware of anything better.)

I've never really browsed the mathematics area of these types of books. I do recall a story of high school teachers developing their own text making news in the past 5-7 years or so. While I don't really have time to at the moment, you'll find the best wikibooks / gitbooks.io are probably on programming. Or topics where less diagram content is involved or required. Also when it's an open source book anybody can extrapolate the content and reformat it in design software suc as indesign, scribus or whatever. The framework and methods exist, but there are gaps in the process that have made it so a professor is gonna make their own book and bind it through the campus copy shop. But we know the divide, we know a way to make it work, just need people to jump in I guess and have a reason to do it well for less cost. It will take a couple entrepreneurial people, but it would make for an attention-getting enterprise. hacker news might breed the right kind of people for this.

There are literally hundreds of books on Precalculus. Just don't buy this one.

I studied precalculus in India. There, the textbooks are all made available online, viewable by anyone. Give it a try!

http://www.ncert.nic.in/ncerts/textbook/textbook.htm

Specifically, for grade 11 math: http://www.ncert.nic.in/ncerts/textbook/textbook.htm?kemh1=1...

And when your professor assigns you homework based on the $235 book, and the tests align with the chapters in that book, what are you supposed to do, exactly?

That is a good question, actually. In my personal experience, there will always be a few professors who "go by the book" and will test you only from the book and so on. And the people who "read from the book" will get better grades and such.

The idealistic suggestion would be that if you know the material well enough, you will be capable of solving these kinds of problems. In fact, the professor will teach from the book in his class right? At least take notes about the kind of stuff that he covers and study that. Yes, people with the books who have practice solving the same problem will find it easier, but you won't find it impossible either. And the test itself will be more honest, don't you think? :)

That's what I did in college, but I understand that not everyone will want to do the same.

I am really passionate and angry about this. Knowledge is everything in this world, and it is being withheld. I'm a well paid silicon valley engineer, and I think twice before pressing the buy button on Amazon, because the books I want run 100-200. I mostly don't push buy. I don't see how that helps anyone (some revenue > no revenue). How does anyone else afford it?

I'm writing a free mathematical book, and pretty much want to continue it in the future (tackle other topics). We need an open book movement. Alan B. Downey has been doing it, all of his books are free. Khan, of course, is doing it, but in video format (so far).

I'm not a fan of 'shame the publishers' approach. They are trying to make a living, and turning out new books does that. Plus, they are also responding to government - we have some new initiative, tons of new material has to be developed so students can 'pass the test', and if the textbook is only going to be around for 5 years they legitimately have to charge a lot to break even.

I think online, free books with cheap printed versions is going to (or should) change all of this. The whole idea of 'editions' is outdated. If something needs to be changed, make the change, and push it to the cloud. If you made some typo, push the change tomorrow, don't spend 6 months proofing galleries. The economics of dead trees doesn't work when I can get an email from a confused reader and push a better written explanation a day later.

It's already happening [1]. Let's make it happen faster. It's more important than the next jSomething interface, or 'like Waze but for dogs' app.

[1] http://www.wsj.com/articles/a-tough-lesson-for-college-textb...

I think NPR covered this pretty recently. So, first you have a book salesman that comes in and sells the modifications from the previous versions--that its a better educational tool. They don't talk a lot about price, and they make the sale. Then, you have a super limited market. You aren't going to print a lot of these books because there are a limited number of students who need the book. After the first year the sales plummet because used books exist. So, there's a short window to make back all the money on the book and also profit enough for it to be a legitimate business. Then, there are people who hoard books like this playing on seasonal demand--buy low, sell high. There are programs they can buy to help them maximize their profit. There are even people who scour used book stores for good finds with barcode scanners.

And, I'm not sure where common curriculum comes into this, or if it does.

I don't really buy this. There are plenty of salesmen, but faculty don't generally believe their pitches.

The reason that universities "upgrade" to new versions is that publishers refuse to continue printing the old ones.

Indeed, my university (the University of South Carolina) had this stunt pulled on us by Cengage (the publisher of Stewart's Calculus), and we are refusing to play ball. So we've decided that we are absolutely going to use something other than Stewart next year. Unfortunately, the best alternatives also all cost around $200+.

My school also recently switched over from Stewart's calculus. Maybe this was why. Sucks for me though b/c my $80 textbook is now worth nothing.

With print on demand these days, it's cheaper to print a single copy of a 400 page full color photo book at blurb than these text books. Ridiculous. This is easily doable with digital printing now to get the costs down to say $40 for a few hundred copies still room for people to profit. It takes some courage and a movement within the universities and community colleges to start making dents in the industry.

It's $235 because students get student loan money and compared to $24,000 a year for an undergraduate education it's rounding error in a system structured to separate students from their loan checks. College is an experience to be consumed...that's how the meat hangs on "run more like a business".

You're missing the process by which textbooks are chosen.

The professor, or one of his friends, writes a textbook.

That is now the required textbook for the class, and the professor gets a cut of the profits.

Some textbooks are so good or popular that they are used by everyone, even if they aren't the author's friend. (Examples in CS: CLR, Dragon Book.)

The students must get the official textbook for the class, because all the homework exercises are assigned from that book.

It would be nice to see some effort for open source textbooks, but I don't see them being adopted in K-12 or colleges.

I won't defend $235, but a textbook is more than just explaining the math. Developing the problem sets is a lot of work. This costs money, even if you are using low-wage graduate students.

And problem sets need to be updated or they will feel dated very quickly. Especially if you are supposed to be using technology to help solve the problem.

I understand this if this is brand new material and you need people to develop teaching methodologies for this new materials and problems to solve. But precalculus is a very old subject and people have been generating problems and guides for it for generations.

I'm not claiming the price is justified, but it's not just about the "definitions of slopes and limits" changing. In some subjects, there may be improvements in pedagogy that justify new texts even if the material itself is unchanged.

Okay, what are those changes in pedagogy? Be specific.

Dover prints classic mathematical texts which are wonderful. There is nothing wrong with them. I've learned so much from them.

But, you know, I could be wrong (I'm serious, not trolling). I'm white, was lower middle class but had a great set of schools/teachers, and maybe the books are terrible for ESL students (for example), and I just haven't run into the problem because of my background.

With that said, I don't think the linked book is an example of new pedagogy. I'm eager to stand corrected.

I hope I didn't misstate myself, but I was not claiming that the linked book was an example of new pedagogy. I was just pointing out that it's not sufficient to consider whether the principles of the subject have changed but that one must also consider the pedagogy. It doesn't excuse all price gouging nor necessarily this particular book (I haven't read the book, so I wouldn't know), but it was an aspect of the discussion missing from the rant.

Knowledge & education are the last of the profitable "content" models.

Agreed. There are literally hundreds of available precalc books published, mostly by tenure wannabees who are required to publish. They differ by homework examples mostly. They should cost nearly nothing.

Supply & demand?

Changing teaching methods?

Because people are buying them at that price?

If you take precalc in high school the book is free.

To the end user, sure. To the school district they are very expensive.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com