Here's a proposed solution: Do away with textbooks. Have tax payer money go to a national comittee of member professors who work on updating the standard curricula (with good version control), any time there's a change or new hotspot in the area of say cell biology, they can review/update and "push" their changes to the master for merging. Then the teachers can just "pull" the updated version to their pc's in the classroom, students could do the same. Have the same thing at the college level. If a student for some reason has no internet access (shouldn't internet access be a right by now, try functioning without it), he can receive a printed version. There are so many positives to this (environmental, educational), but I suppose the interest groups involved who profit from "learning" (which should be the most important free/open thing we promote), would never let this happen ...
The Textbook Industry & Greed: My Story
21–30 of 128 posts
Re: The Textbook Industry & Greed: My Story
#22Custom editions and packaged access codes are the last futile attempt that publishers bookstores and professors have against cheaper Internet alternatives. The one thing your writeup didn't touch upon is digital textbooks- which the publishers actually love since eBooks are usually rentals, so the secondary markets like Amazon and AbeBooks are cut out. I am from SlugBooks- a web app that compares prices between the c…
I had one college course with a custom edition and we still had the option of using the regular edition, (all the page numbers were the same the custom editions only difference was a lack of extra chapters that we weren't going to cover). The custom edition was cheaper than the regular edition and this is the only reason the professor did this. The book didn't seem to have very many used copies being sold as it was a…
Hey, thanks for this. There are corner cases where custom editions make sense, but overall they cause far more harm than good.
-The biggest issue is that custom editions segment the global secondary market for a given textbook into slivers of useless fragments. Instead of Campbell Biology, Regular Edition being bought and sold between Stanford students and students at every other college in the country (this significant supply drives the price down), Campbell Biology, Stanford Custom Edition is only ever going to be bought/sold by Stanford students. This hurts students in multiple ways: 1) the bookstore is the only place they can BUY the book from. Period. 2) the bookstore is the only place they can SELL the book too. Custom editions are a perfect storm for bookstores/publishers.
-Custom editions are cheaper than what the regular edition costs in terms of what the bookstore would charge for each, but if you compare prices on the regular edition online, there are usually significantly cheaper prices out there than what the custom is being sold for at the bookstore.
-In the rare case where a custom edition is being used, but a regular edition is acceptable - the bookstore presenting both options and telling you to pick one will almost never result in you considering that the regular edition would be cheaper online. By adding this extra noise, they artificially make custom books look more affordable.
I agree - there are tons of professors that are on the right side of this fight. Textbooks SHOULD be free. And the fact that custom editions are even adopted is proof that professors care about students. They're just a terribly poor solution which reinforces the problem instead of solving it.
Give the publishers credit - custom editions are a genius business move.
Re: The Textbook Industry & Greed: My Story
#23Earlier quoted context omitted.
I had one college course with a custom edition and we still had the option of using the regular edition, (all the page numbers were the same the custom editions only difference was a lack of extra chapters that we weren't going to cover). The custom edition was cheaper than the regular edition and this is the only reason the professor did this. The book didn't seem to have very many used copies being sold as it was a…
Hey, thanks for this. There are corner cases where custom editions make sense, but overall they cause far more harm than good. -The biggest issue is that custom editions segment the global secondary market for a given textbook into slivers of useless fragments. Instead of Campbell Biology, Regular Edition being bought and sold between Stanford students and students at every other college in the country (this signific…
As unhappy as I am with the publishers, I agree that custom textbooks are a brilliant business move. It's no wonder why they send in sales teams - it's very lucrative!
Re: The Textbook Industry & Greed: My Story
#24I would love to see the textbook industry disrupted.. but how? It's so ingrained in the system. Textbook rentals are a start, but still expensive. I even knew some college students that looked "down" on buying used books, like you were buying someone's used underwear.
I had a professor, way back in the early 00s, who was helping solve this problem. We had no textbook in the class. Instead, our readings were all recently published papers. On the class website he linked to all the papers so we could download and print them if we wanted to. He also negotiated with the author of each paper for the rights to reprint the paper. You could buy the "textbook", which was just a bound photoc…
I'm doing this with a class I'm teaching, but I think it works better for small research/discussion-oriented seminars than larger introductory courses, where recent papers are most relevant. For intro courses, coming up with good intro materials is a fairly hard problem. If I were teaching an intro course on theory of computation, for example, I would probably still use Michael Sipser's Theory of Computation, because it's good, and I don't think I would be likely able to put together an equally good replacement out of freely available materials. I would, though, try to make sure that the course didn't prevent students from using the previous edition (which is now available cheaply).
Re: The Textbook Industry & Greed: My Story
#25Earlier quoted context omitted.
Hey, thanks for this. There are corner cases where custom editions make sense, but overall they cause far more harm than good. -The biggest issue is that custom editions segment the global secondary market for a given textbook into slivers of useless fragments. Instead of Campbell Biology, Regular Edition being bought and sold between Stanford students and students at every other college in the country (this signific…
As unhappy as I am with the publishers, I agree that custom textbooks are a brilliant business move. It's no wonder why they send in sales teams - it's very lucrative!
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Re: The Textbook Industry & Greed: My Story
#26It took me three years to realize that I didn't actually need textbooks. My senior year, I didn't buy a single book, just the course packs put together by my professors (if they had them).
The course packs were either all original material, or an original composition of parts of case studies, essays, and text books; they were almost always under $50 (except in the case where licensing the copied portions drove the cost higher).
If a professor is actually just teaching out of a standard text book, all the relevant information is taught in lecture. If there is an express need for a textbook, it's on reserve at the school library.
I would urge every student to only consider purchasing a textbook if they really think they need it two weeks into class. Textbooks are overpriced, only a small amount of the information is relevant to the class, and the information is often redundant and can be found in lectures/slides. (if the idea of coming to class without a book is scary, check your school book store's policy on returning books)
Re: The Textbook Industry & Greed: My Story
#27The system that people here would like to see disrupted is a system that may be going away by itself. Publishers see that it is going to be too hard to sustain a revenue stream by selling books in the future --- they have been moving to services for quite a while.
Students are too good at getting books. My students buy foreign editions at 10% of the US price. They download pdf scans from torrents. There are many ways to find used books. Stupid measures like the "useless new edition every 3 years" are just delaying tactics.
Instead, publishers are selling services, like online testing and homework grading (cf. Pearson partnering with Coursera). These require students to purchase access codes keyed to individuals, and may be harder to get around. (The textbooks are often thrown in for prices around $20. That should tell you where the money is.) The publishers know they have a great market here. Professors hate grading papers, it hardly counts at all toward professional advancement, and it takes time and energy away from research, which does count.
All that said, the circumstances described in the original article are appalling.
Re: The Textbook Industry & Greed: My Story
#28I'm amazed that universities ALLOW their professors to make payment-required textbook-tied online exercises part of their courses.
You're already paying tuition, you shouldn't have to pay extra just to do the homework. That's insane. It's no different from having to pay additional money to take the midterm.
After all, the professors and publishers make money from this, not the university. As far as I can tell, it can only reflect badly on a university -- so why don't they have policies in place against this? Correct me if I'm wrong, but it seems like a blatant abuse of power for financial gain on the part of professors.
Re: The Textbook Industry & Greed: My Story
#29I'm amazed that universities ALLOW their professors to make payment-required textbook-tied online exercises part of their courses. You're already paying tuition, you shouldn't have to pay extra just to do the homework. That's insane. It's no different from having to pay additional money to take the midterm. After all, the professors and publishers make money from this, not the university. As far as I can tell, it can…
Some universities take it a step further and include the cost of textbooks in tuition. Be glad that isn't happening globally. That's the worst case scenario here - students are just billed for course materials without having any say in the matter.
Re: The Textbook Industry & Greed: My Story
#30I'm a bit surprised at this article - I studied Physics in the Tel Aviv Univesity (Israel), and I could borrow every course book from the library. Those weren't even necessary, all of the course materials were available from the course website as summaries, formula handbooks and so forth.
U.S universities don't stock their libraries with multiple copies of their course books?