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The Textbook Industry & Greed: My Story

lukethomas.com

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Re: The Textbook Industry & Greed: My Story

#111

Post by HarryHirsch »

aprofessor wrote: post #27

The system that people here would like to see disrupted is a system that may be going away by itself. Publishers see that it is going to be too hard to sustain a revenue stream by selling books in the future --- they have been moving to services for quite a while. Students are too good at getting books. My students buy foreign editions at 10% of the US price. They download pdf scans from torrents. There are many ways…

> Instead, publishers are selling services, like online testing and homework grading (cf. Pearson partnering with Coursera).

This is the place where it's going to get worse. The traditional model is that testing and homework exercises are done by TAs, but universities are finding out that you can contract out these services to the textbook publisher.

Re: The Textbook Industry & Greed: My Story

#113

Post by tedunangst »

learc83 wrote: post #70
tedunangst wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yeah, I had plenty of those too. But they never came with access codes to web portals. Or publishers you could email at all.

Re: The Textbook Industry & Greed: My Story

#114

Post by dan_yall »

jrousey wrote: post #31

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...

How was the novel? It sounds amazingly bad.

Re: The Textbook Industry & Greed: My Story

#115

Post by kellishaver »

rayiner wrote: post #103
kellishaver wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

To be fair, used textbooks have highlighting in them. I gave up on used books in law school because the existing highlighting and margin notes were often wrong and distracting, and got in the way of my own highlighting which was a big part of my workflow.

I'm sure this was part of his reasoning. Now that you mention it, I'm not sure I would buy one from Amazon for this reason. I bought used textbooks from the university bookstore all the time when I was in school, because I could flip through them and find one that wasn't badly marked up, but you can't exactly do that with an online retailer.

Re: The Textbook Industry & Greed: My Story

#116

Post by lifeformed »

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 got by with purchasing "international editions" from India on eBay, which had the same content in English, but with cheaper quality printing and no color. It was about $15 for a normally $150 book. Between that and downloading PDFs of other textbooks, I got through each semester with just around $50 of textbook budget.

Re: The Textbook Industry & Greed: My Story

#117

Post by amiltolia »

Full disclosure - I run Reference Tree (http://reference-tree.com) we rent textbooks by chapter from Publishers including those mentioned in the post focussed on the UK higher education market.

Many professors in the UK resist attempts for custom editions and for single access to textbooks, indeed there are those who even go so far as to _avoid_ textbooks pushed in this way - preferring academic relevance over expense account dinners.

I am surprised, in fact very surprised that a university would allow such a connection between a book and a course. it goes against principles of higher education and education in general. What happens if you take the course but can not afford the text (and did not have the patience and drive shown by Luke?) How lacking in belief in their own capabilities to teach and research must an academic be if they must think of these types of activities to shore up their own income?

Many UK academics we have spoken to would rather use the best content for their course from a variety of sources than either custom editions from a single publisher or a single textbook.

Indeed work such as those by Flat World Knowledge and Bookboon.com on a market level as beginning to chip away at this market dominance, however you will still have unscrupulous professors. The growth of Flat World Knowledge in terms of adoptions, shows that there is a clear market out there for accessible alternatives to mainstream textbooks.

Re: The Textbook Industry & Greed: My Story

#118

Post by justin66 »

Wingman4l7 wrote: post #83

Don't forget international edition textbooks, which just help prove how much of a sham the whole thing is -- they're analogous to region locking on DVDs...

They're a bit worse. I had one international edition math textbook in which numbers in some of the math problems differed from the US edition. I learned this primarily because I bought the US edition "student solutions guide," which is a whole other racket, and the solutions were often slightly different.

Just enough that someone doing those problems out of the book for an assignment would be hosed. It didn't hurt me because my prof assigned his own homework problems, but still, hugely annoying.

Re: The Textbook Industry & Greed: My Story

#119

Post by Wohlf »

raverbashing wrote: post #104
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…

Maybe more teachers could use CafePress and self-publish

I think you could do it with Lulu as well.

Re: The Textbook Industry & Greed: My Story

#120

Post by peejaybee »

absolute-ly wrote: post #54
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…

Absolutely agree with this. It's crazy. But if you only have to do it a few times, e.g., as a young undergraduate, you're unlikely to think about it much. You just pay the fees and think nothing of it. You've got other things to think about. But if you got through some more rounds of education, then you might start to think. A professor that requires her students to buy a textbook she authored is something to think a…

"The idea that "only the latest edition will work for this course" is another of the textbook publisher's little schemes. I'm sure they try to get faculty to use only the latest editions."

When I took thermal physics waaay back in the 80s, my professor hated the newest edition of the text, and gave us all photocopies of the first edition.

The funny thing is that I was annoyed by this, falling firmly into the "undergradate mentality" you mention.

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