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The Textbook Industry & Greed: My Story

lukethomas.com

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Re: The Textbook Industry & Greed: My Story

#41

Post by HarryHirsch »

There is an issue that hasn't come up yet: why does a professor recommend a certain text for a class instead of the students buying the textbook that they like best? After all, for each kind of course the various publishers each have a textbook on offer.

Here's the dirty secret: with the teacher's edition there comes access to the solutions and a bank of exercises and test questions. If there's a set text it's likely that the students pay for the convenience of whoever teaches the class.

Re: The Textbook Industry & Greed: My Story

#42

Post by HarryHirsch »

mherdeg wrote: post #37
crazygringo wrote: post #28

I'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 m…

> but because textbook company kickbacks may now constitute substantial fraction of an instructor's salary.

[[citation needed]]

Re: The Textbook Industry & Greed: My Story

#43

Post by impendia »

I teach in a university mathematics department. I don't doubt that stories like this are real, but very few of my colleagues collude with, or indeed have much patience with, the publishing industry.

Indeed, the opposite is common. Walter Rudin is the author of several well-known books on mathematical analysis. The publisher, McGraw-Hill, jacked up the price of his books to stratospheric levels, and Rudin fought back -- which wasted him a lot of time, and (I believe) cost him a substantial amount of money. All so that students wouldn't be gouged when buying a copy of his book.

In the end, Rudin eventually lost. $95.56 for a very skinny (and quite popular) book on Amazon right now.

Moral: As content providers we don't need to figure out better ways to work with the publishing industry. We need to figure out better ways to work without them.

Re: The Textbook Industry & Greed: My Story

#45

Post by dmils4 »

autophil wrote: post #39
dmils4 wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The link is just http://www.slugbooks.com - cheers.

Re: The Textbook Industry & Greed: My Story

#46

Post by ambiate »

I had a networking prof, which allowed us to use a $15 book for our programming, but required a $225 book to cover the 7 layers. He understood the issue, but could not address all of it realistically. I've had 3-4 1301 classes in which the professors make money off the books/keys. Mostly, after generics, the text book battle seemed to be less exaggerated. There is a trend:

2009-2010 $3100/books

2010-2011 $1500/books

2011-2012 $1000/books

2012 $255/books

Re: The Textbook Industry & Greed: My Story

#47

Post by dmils4 »

surement wrote: post #36
dmils4 wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Here's just one of them Northwest Missouri State (scroll to the bottom) - http://www.nwmissouri.edu/admissions/laptop/index.htm

Note that their stats about how rentals save students $1160 a year are sort of BS. On books where renting saves you a lot of money over the full retail price (which no one ever pays anyway), you can usually just buy the book outright for the same amount on Amazon (and then sell it back when youre done for a ridiculously lower total cost of ownership).

Re: The Textbook Industry & Greed: My Story

#48

Post by scottfr »

jfaucett wrote: post #21

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 cla…

A master textbook designed by a committee? It would probably be the most boring dull thing ever.

Worse, this is effectively what you already have in state school systems like Texas where you have a committee approving the sanctioned books for the public schools.

The results of this is the inclusion of intelligent design, downplaying of evolution, etc... etc..

Re: The Textbook Industry & Greed: My Story

#49

Post by mherdeg »

HarryHirsch wrote: post #42
mherdeg wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 m…

> but because textbook company kickbacks may now constitute substantial fraction of an instructor's salary. [[citation needed]]

Adjunct faculty are typically paid on a per-course-taught basis and can make as little as $400 per subject [1], although it's most common to see pay of about $1500–$2500 per subject. To pick one well-documented discipline in particular, psychology professors make a median of $2500 per subject taught at the graduate level [3].

This blog post guesses without giving evidence that the instructor may be making $5 off of each of his 250 students (who each paid $150 for a textbook), which would represent total textbook-company revenue of $1250.

To be sure, not all faculty are paid as poorly as adjuncts — [2] cites an estimate that adjunct faculty earn 26% less than tenured professors — but there is not a lot of money in teaching undergraduates, and for many kinds of instructors, textbook fees have the potential to become a substantial alternate revenue stream.

[1] http://mtprof.msun.edu/win2000/wickun.html [2] http://cehs.unl.edu/edad/partnerships/facultyResearchDocs/Ad... [3] http://www.apa.org/workforce/publications/11-fac-sal/table-3...

Re: The Textbook Industry & Greed: My Story

#50

Post by noonespecial »

We used to pass around photocopies of "the diffs".

These were just what you think. The scant things added to this years "edition" so that you couldn't use last years used one. They were rarely more than a few pages long and mostly full of hints on where things got moved to instead of legitimately new content.

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