For ENG 205 at UMaine, my professor required us to purchase his own novel for the class, and offered extra credit to anyone who reviewed the novel on Amazon...
http://www.amazon.com/Tartabulls-Throw-Henry-Garfield/dp/068...
The Textbook Industry & Greed: My Story
31–40 of 128 posts
Re: The Textbook Industry & Greed: My Story
#32I'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?
Typically there are 1-2 copies on reserve at the library, but you can only check them out for a couple hours at the time. With a class of 50+ students that's not a workable solution for most. And most don't even try anyway..
Re: The Textbook Industry & Greed: My Story
#33I'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?
Typically there are 1-2 copies on reserve at the library, but you can only check them out for a couple hours at the time. With a class of 50+ students that's not a workable solution for most. And most don't even try anyway..
Wow. We had dozens of copies of the important books, and you could borrow it for 2-4 weeks at a time (depending on the book).
Re: The Textbook Industry & Greed: My Story
#34Really, in order to complete your coursework you need a one-time-use "access code" that came with your textbook, and no one can share books with anyone else or borrow them from the library?
It boggles my mind that Stallman went out and spelled out a totally crazy-sounding future in "The Right to Read" (http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.html), and yet somehow bits and pieces of that future keep arriving.
Re: The Textbook Industry & Greed: My Story
#35Pretty much everything surrounding tertiary education needs disruptive companies to come in and restructure it - but particularly the dodginess around textbooks / school bookstores. On the surface the conditions even almost seem ideal - you have an existing oligopoly where each player has huge overheads and then on top of this add huge markups. You have a somewhat captive market (the students are entirely captive, wh…
> Pretty much everything surrounding tertiary education needs disruptive companies to come in and restructure it - but particularly the dodginess around textbooks / school bookstores.
Textbooks for introductory courses don't change much between editions. The pagination may change slightly, as might the odd illustration, and that is that. What needs to happen is that the students need to get off their collective asses and buy the previous edition of the text from their colleagues from the year before. Nothing else will bring prices down. It's not likely to happen, considering just how spoonfed students at your average college are.
Re: The Textbook Industry & Greed: My Story
#36I'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.
Which ones?
Re: The Textbook Industry & Greed: My Story
#37I'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…
It is a bit surprising that universities allow this practice — not so much because textbook costs are unbundled from tuition (things have been that way for a while) but because textbook company kickbacks may now constitute substantial fraction of an instructor's salary.
In the short term, this setup helps universities keep their teaching costs low — they can pay instructors a lower base wage and let the instructors make up the difference in textbook-company kickbacks if their conscience allows. This kind of cost-cutting might be attractive in a scenario where instructors are more "contractors" (adjunct faculty) than "employees" or "the reason the university is here and more important than administrators" (tenured faculty).
Schools should soon realize that it's a bad idea for their employees to have another revenue stream and, essentially, another supervisor influencing how they do the same job.
Re: The Textbook Industry & Greed: My Story
#38I'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…
Mine doesn't. At least not without explicit written permission, and if I tried to pull such a dick move (as a professor) then my chair would quite rightly tell me to go to hell.
http://www.sc.edu/cte/guide/policies/index.shtml#selfauthore...
Re: The Textbook Industry & Greed: My Story
#39Earlier quoted context omitted.
So you are essentially a search engine for textbooks?
Yep, kayak for textbooks. You can either search by book or search by school/course. If you really want to get angry, look up MATH 203 at Medgar Evers College in NY. A textbook with a list price of $174 is being sold for $330 new, $240 used - available from online sites for less than $10. There are over 16,000 classes across the country that can save >$100 on their books. Haven't run the numbers yet but the use of cus…
Can you share a link with us? You're being too modest.
Re: The Textbook Industry & Greed: My Story
#40Earlier quoted context omitted.
Typically there are 1-2 copies on reserve at the library, but you can only check them out for a couple hours at the time. With a class of 50+ students that's not a workable solution for most. And most don't even try anyway..
Wow. We had dozens of copies of the important books, and you could borrow it for 2-4 weeks at a time (depending on the book).
That's never been my experience. One or two books only, and I'm not even sure students were allowed to sign it out of the library.