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The Textbook Industry & Greed: My Story

lukethomas.com

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Re: The Textbook Industry & Greed: My Story

#91

Post by ghshephard »

I remember when I took Digital Design, Cmpt Science 290 (My first introduction to state tables) - the instructor a ton of custom information just for his course - several hundred pages. For $10 he'd offer to give us a custom develop photocopy-package he and his grad students had put together, or, we could just copy off of someone else ourselves.

Interesting to see the behavior of people who are interested in teaching. Anything that gets in the way is seen as a barrier to be overcome.

Re: The Textbook Industry & Greed: My Story

#93

Post by kellishaver »

neutronicus wrote: post #20
stevencorona wrote: post #7

I 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 even knew some college students that looked "down" on buying used books, like you were buying someone's used underwear. For what it's worth, I did not know anyone with this attitude. Everyone bought either used or international versions off of Amazon.

My husband, who starts back to university tomorrow, just spent $230 on a new textbook, when I found a used copy on Amazon for $48, because he wanted a new book. I spent a while banging my head against the desk and sighing loudly over that one.

On the other hand, he's excited about finishing his degree, which he has put off for many years now, so if this is what does it for him, it's a small price to pay.... at least that's what I keep telling myself. I suspect that once the excitement of the first couple of semesters of "hey, I'm actually doing this" wears off, he'll be buying used books like the rest of us.

Re: The Textbook Industry & Greed: My Story

#94

Post by dredmorbius »

bootload wrote: post #63
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…

"... 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.

Really? How about scanner and OCR?

Re: The Textbook Industry & Greed: My Story

#95

Post by bootload »

dredmorbius wrote: post #94
bootload wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"... 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.

Really? How about scanner and OCR?

"... How about scanner and OCR? ..."

I was thinking of school books & standing in the line for photocopiers for reference books in the library.

Re: The Textbook Industry & Greed: My Story

#96

Post by mediocregopher »

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…

Alternatively, buy the international edition, which is usually the exact same book but soft-cover, at half price. You can usually make it back, or even turn a bit of profit, at the end of the year.

Re: The Textbook Industry & Greed: My Story

#97

Post by Androsynth »

The OP paid an extra $150 to take a class that guarantees A's. The alternative was to pay an extra $0 and have to actually earn his A. He got greedy and bought his A.

The system is broken, but to give in to a corrupt professor's bribe in order to get an A isn't the fault of greedy publishers.

Re: The Textbook Industry & Greed: My Story

#98

Post by Trezoid »

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…

I (fortunately) realized this in first year when I, at the end of a semester had opened exactly one of the 4 textbooks, and then only read The alternative to buying a copy of texts you really need (and I know there are a lot of legal issues with this) is "finding" the book online (and I haven't yet had a book I couldn't find trivially). A couple of PDF's instead of a pile of dead trees, and I have the added advantage of in-text search.

Re: The Textbook Industry & Greed: My Story

#99

Post by wisty »

dmils4 wrote: post #22
ohgodthecat3 wrote: post #12

Earlier 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…

It's like Windows - Windows 7 OEM is about $100 and is tied to your mobo, while a retail Windows 7 can be used on a different machine. The retail version probably has a lower TCO.

Re: The Textbook Industry & Greed: My Story

#100

Post by JonnieCache »

This kind of thing seems like a prime opportunity for some good old fashioned student agitation. When I was at uni people occupied the library just because they weren't given 24 hour access to it. They turned it into a free peer to peer skills exchange for a couple of days. They eventually got what they wanted IIRC. This was only about 5 years ago.

Couldn't he at least have given the professor's name? I guess when uni becomes such a massive financial hedge, agitation goes out the window.

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