My first business was a college textbook trading site for UMass Amherst. I was approached for a partnership by i2hub which later became connectU. I was a sophomore in college, couldn't even afford a laptop or computer and was blown away at how much students were loosing when selling their textbooks back at the end of the semester. There are 25k students spending $1k/year on books and selling them back for a max of 25% of the purchase price. The community was loosing $10m every year. I started the site cause I was pissed off and was scratching my own itch. I didn't have time for politics. My site looked like shit, but within a few months over 10% of the population was usin it and I was making money.
The Textbook Industry & Greed: My Story
61–70 of 128 posts
Re: The Textbook Industry & Greed: My Story
#62I 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…
This would only apply to upper level classes. The thing about this, there can some specialized classes where reading source papers makes sense. But honestly, even for those classes, usually a good survey book can be better, more concise than the source papers. It depends. But I don't think this would make sense of Algebra or Calculus ... or probably any class besides more specialized ones. I mean, you could teach a Distributed Systems class with source papers; I think that would be OK but it would probably be good to have a textbook as a reference.
Re: The Textbook Industry & Greed: My Story
#63I 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…
"... 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. ..."
Photocopier.
Re: The Textbook Industry & Greed: My Story
#64Does the education sector need a website naming and shaming classes/professors doing this, or proclaiming those that make efforts to keep learning accessible?
Re: The Textbook Industry & Greed: My Story
#65It 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 co…
Did you read the article? It wasn't actually the textbook he needed, it was the unique online access code. They don't keep spares of those in the library.
The comment is still on-topic. I've begun to have the same realization halfway into college.
Re: The Textbook Industry & Greed: My Story
#66I'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…
"this setup helps universities keep their teaching costs low — they can pay instructors a lower base wage"
It's a cost increase for students that's not as easily noticed as a "base" price increase in tuition. Which paying more to professors would require. As well as payroll taxes on the salary increase. So getting $1500 directly from publishers the same $1500 from the University costs extra in additional payroll costs (and then gets multiplied by any salary percentage increase in future years as well).
This is also somewhat analogous to what some elementary schools are doing (sorry no citation) with requiring parents to buy school supplies that were previously provided by the schools. It's a way of cost shifting that allows you to pass a tax that isn't recognized as a tax increase.
Other example may be an auto mfg. only raising the price of a new model slightly but removing and making certain features options, options that the majority of buyers will end up adding on anyway. (If the price of the car were higher many people wouldn't enter the showroom at all.)
Re: The Textbook Industry & Greed: My Story
#67Here'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…
Digital textbooks are a pain.
Re: The Textbook Industry & Greed: My Story
#68Utah is about to try out open textbooks for huge savings: http://opencontent.org/blog/archives/2134
Re: The Textbook Industry & Greed: My Story
#69Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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 e…
I think you rather misunderstood the post.
Adjuncts do not generally write textbooks and get kickbacks for them. They choose one of the 'standard' textbooks, and use the online problem set for that book. They do this not because they get compensation for it, but because it's the path of least resistance.
I find it kind of sad that you would speculate like this, without any specific examples (let alone proof of a general trend!) about the motives of the adjuncts. :(
Re: The Textbook Industry & Greed: My Story
#70Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 e…
Are adjuncts writing textbooks? Almost all of my texts, when I bothered to read the author bio, were written by the XYZ (endowed) Professor. Frequently they were the chair of the department.
Some of these custom "textbooks" aren't really textbooks.
From what the blog author was describing it was just like something I had to buy once or twice--spiral bound copies of poems, essays, and excerpts.