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The Textbook Industry & Greed: My Story

lukethomas.com

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Re: The Textbook Industry & Greed: My Story

#81

Post by Wingman4l7 »

impendia wrote: post #43

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…

How did fighting back cost him money (if you don't count his wasted time)?

Kudos on him for valuing the spread of his work over any personal loss in royalties!

Re: The Textbook Industry & Greed: My Story

#82

Post by jcampbell1 »

impendia wrote: post #43

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…

I know a couple of people in textbook sales. Their job sucks, and the way they describe it is that there are two type of professors: those that won't talk to them, and those that try to maximize personal gain from the sales process.

The professors they deal with know the game, and just string them along with soft promises and keep asking for more nights on the expense account. The day to day job in textbook sales is just bribing professors with expense accounts.

Re: The Textbook Industry & Greed: My Story

#84

Post by Wingman4l7 »

The publishing industry is creating a monster with their practices, and they have only themselves to blame. I've seen torrent trackers which are dedicated to textbooks, frequented by students sick of the "new edition" games. I've also heard of students pooling their money to buy a copy of a text, which is then sacrificed to a sheet-fed scanner. Everybody gets an electronic copy that way, for a fraction of the price. Then you have DIY book scanners, which don't even destroy the text (which means you can return it after copying it and sharing the pirate e-copy with everyone).

Re: The Textbook Industry & Greed: My Story

#85

Post by Wingman4l7 »

scottfr wrote: post #48
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..

Well, the biology textbooks put together by states north of the Mason-Dixon Line should be alright... =P

Re: The Textbook Industry & Greed: My Story

#86

Post by yuhong »

absolute-ly wrote: post #76
yuhong wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Though major releases of software typically does have a lot more changes than editions of textbooks.

Indeed I have noticed textbooks often only contain minor changes from version to version. In other cases, entire subject areas can change as research progresses. But sometimes the only way you get to know that is by looking at older texts. The quantity of changes may be less relevant than the quality of the changes: i.e. did anything major change in this field in the last n number of years. With a closed source softw…

Most of the time, software vendors do document new features and changes.

Re: The Textbook Industry & Greed: My Story

#87

Post by greeneggs »

ericdykstra wrote: post #26

It 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…

Even if you don't need the textbooks, they might still be well worth it. For me, at least, they cost a small fraction fo the tuition. If you are paying $50K a year for your education, you need to maximize the value extracted. I got more from lectures when I had read the relevant chapters first.

Re: The Textbook Industry & Greed: My Story

#88

Post by Wingman4l7 »

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…

Applying software development models will fix it! =P

If all you have a hammer, everything looks like a nail. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_of_the_instrument

Re: The Textbook Industry & Greed: My Story

#89

Post by absolute-ly »

yuhong wrote: post #86
absolute-ly wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Indeed I have noticed textbooks often only contain minor changes from version to version. In other cases, entire subject areas can change as research progresses. But sometimes the only way you get to know that is by looking at older texts. The quantity of changes may be less relevant than the quality of the changes: i.e. did anything major change in this field in the last n number of years. With a closed source softw…

Most of the time, software vendors do document new features and changes.

There's a difference between a list of "new features" (staying with the Microsoft example) and being able to diff the source code against a previous version and evaulate the changes for yourself.

It's like the syllabus that says you need the latest version of the textbook but does not tell you why the previous version will not do.

Look at it this way: in "most cases" (whether it's software or textbooks), from version to version, there's more substance that stays the same than substance which changes.

Not sure about you but I'm a little wary of buying the latest version of an expensive textbook in order to gain a small number of reatively minor changes that I could easily identify, and take note of, by comparing the latest version with the previous one.

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