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High prices make textbook ‘piracy’ acceptable to most students

torrentfreak.com

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Re: High prices make textbook ‘piracy’ acceptable to most students

#111

Post by visarga »

lordleft wrote: post #3

I think that high textbook prices is one of the many little signals we sent young people, for the last 3-5 decades, that we are not interested in creating a better world for them. Isn’t it interesting how little effort has been invested in mitigating the runaway cost of higher education? That we enabled college administrators to turn up the cost dial without speed bumps? No wonder why young people have become cynical…

Goal misalignment - education vs profit, and similarly health vs profit. Both discriminate against poor people by making their services too expensive to reach.

Re: High prices make textbook ‘piracy’ acceptable to most students

#112

Post by danpalmer »

Textboox pricing issues seem to be so country/subject specific.

UK, Computer Science, 10-14 years ago. I was given 5 core textbooks on day 1 of my course – Java, C, 2x Maths, Communications. Probably about £200 worth. After that there were no required books. There were recommended books, of which the university library had copies of all of them with policies that meant they were always available to read but couldn't be loaned out because they were core material. On top of that there were subject reading material that no one used and made no difference. I never once heard of a textbook being part of an assessment - like using questions in the book.

I seemed to have been very lucky, both CS often requiring fewer textbooks and the UK not having quite the same culture of exploitative companies. But it does illustrate how unnecessary the process is. Maybe students need to strike on buying textbooks.

Re: High prices make textbook ‘piracy’ acceptable to most students

#113

Post by raincom »

diffeomorphism wrote: post #26
raincom wrote: post #18

Culprits are always the instructors/professors who teach courses. Aren't they happy with their salaries? How much royalty do these instructors get from selling $200 textbook to their students? These professors should be ashamed of themselves in involving this scammy behavior, while at the same time these unethical/immoral professors ask their students to sign honor code.

Nah, almost never. That is usually forced by the university, publishers and, surprisingly, by the students and their parents: Say the textbook used for the last 5 years costs $300 and now you want to switch to a different, cheaper book. Now you have to convince admin (why switch? The previous one works) and students (I pay $$$ tuition, why are you cheaping out on the book? Is it worse?). > how much royalty do they ge…

I don't need to be ashamed of suggesting that. These professors should be ashamed of themselves for not taking this issue with their administration. If they can't stand for these issues, how can they teach future generations?

Re: High prices make textbook ‘piracy’ acceptable to most students

#114

Post by alistairSH »

giantg2 wrote: post #55
sowbug wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You need to five-whys this before suggesting a solution. Start by asking whether whoever was in charge of requiring the $250 textbook benefited personally from its purchase.

It's more likely they were lazy and conformed to the status quo. You know, the old never attribute to malice what is easily explained by ignorance.

School and professor dependent. I had a few professors at UVA who authored the book being used in class.

I also had a few who made copies of the chapters they wanted from whatever books and had the library hold those copies for us. We would just check them out normally, make our own copy (or read, take notes) and return for the next person.

Re: High prices make textbook ‘piracy’ acceptable to most students

#115

Post by vasco »

Back when I was in uni all the students bought books, sometimes second hand or indian versions or pirated them at copy shops.

Meanwhile me and a few friends got access to all the books for free by hanging out in the library every day. It's not something that would scale to everyone but I always found it amusing. Ended up buying a total or 4 books for a 5 year EECS course, and that's because I wanted those as keepsakes, for nostalgia reasons.

Re: High prices make textbook ‘piracy’ acceptable to most students

#116

Post by gnicholas »

There is one company in this sector that is innovating on price, Perlego. They use a Netflix-style model where you pay one monthly fee and can access all of the textbooks in their catalog. At roughly $18/mo, it is significantly cheaper than buying/renting individual textbooks if 2 or more or your textbooks are in their catalog.

They’re not as well-known as redshelf or vitalsource, but their content largely overlaps. I only became aware of them because they approached my startup about licensing our technology, but since then I’ve been using their platform to read various nonfiction books (they have about a million titles between textbooks and nonfiction).

I think they have a good shot at changing how students pay for books, and as their library grows their model will become even more attractive to students.

Re: High prices make textbook ‘piracy’ acceptable to most students

#117

Post by aerostable_slug »

hedora wrote: post #44
kelseyfrog wrote: post #8

Here's a weird idea. Bundle materials into tuition expenses. It incentivizes the right people with the power and market participation to optimize for the right thing. Presumably, teachers and departments would have to justify costs from a materials budget to an admin forcing real downward pressure on the textbook market. The current state of textbooks acts like a surprise fee(dark pattern) where you purchase a produc…

That's a bad idea; tuition is directly subsidized by student loans. A better approach would be to allow student loan debt to be treated like any other debt during bankruptcy proceedings, as it was previously. It was only after bankruptcy protection was withheld from students that the student loan crisis and skyrocketing tuition became problems. It's not like people used to file bankruptcy on graduation day just to sc…

Great idea, but that would lead to lenders making risk-based decisions on who gets what loans, and that would be politically untenable in the United States.

I may be a pessimist, but tackling the systemic issues that make loaning a bunch of money to an HBCU student much riskier than loaning a bunch of money to a Stanford student isn't what would happen. The demand would be equal outcomes (loans to all) without addressing why there's any disparity to begin with, which would lead to demands of some kind of guarantee the lender wouldn't be screwed over, which pretty much leads us back to where we are. Defaulting on a loan if you don't matriculate is a rational choice, especially since by definition those declaring bankruptcy aren't sacrificing much (they are almost certainly not in a position where bankruptcy would hugely impact their life in their 20's).

There would be pamphlets published on how to shed this debt. It would be a disaster for the lenders. Purely public funding probably can't work either, because to control costs you'd need to ensure students are prepared for higher education (likely via testing like everyone else in the world), and tests are already politically problematic in the United States.

Re: High prices make textbook ‘piracy’ acceptable to most students

#118

Post by benjaminwootton »

danpalmer wrote: post #112

Textboox pricing issues seem to be so country/subject specific. UK, Computer Science, 10-14 years ago. I was given 5 core textbooks on day 1 of my course – Java, C, 2x Maths, Communications. Probably about £200 worth. After that there were no required books. There were recommended books, of which the university library had copies of all of them with policies that meant they were always available to read but couldn't…

I took something close to CS at a similar time, and remember spending £X00 a year on textbooks and being pushed to buy latest editions. It might be institution and course specific and I always had my suspicions that someone was making a commission somewhere along the line.

Re: High prices make textbook ‘piracy’ acceptable to most students

#119

Post by nervousvarun »

flybrand wrote: post #71
Aeolun wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why wouldn’t the dean tell them to go pound sand? Does Pearson do anything for the university except extracting money?

because that Dean is likely responsible for receiving payments - maybe not personally, but to the school - from that same business.

Or that business simply gives small preferred publishing deals to the Dean's professors. Often these professors have their own books that are required for the class (and nobody else uses these books).

You end up with books that sell I graduated from a large state university engineering school 20 years ago and this was the case so I'm sure it's only become more "enshittified".

Re: High prices make textbook ‘piracy’ acceptable to most students

#120

Post by hayst4ck »

kelseyfrog wrote: post #8

Here's a weird idea. Bundle materials into tuition expenses. It incentivizes the right people with the power and market participation to optimize for the right thing. Presumably, teachers and departments would have to justify costs from a materials budget to an admin forcing real downward pressure on the textbook market. The current state of textbooks acts like a surprise fee(dark pattern) where you purchase a produc…

> It incentivizes the right people with the power and market participation to optimize for the right thing.

But it doesn't. What incentivizes people in power right now is the AirBnB and TicketMaster fee schedules. That's why we have those things.

You can describe a better solution, one you could enact if you got into power, but you might never be allowed to get into power because you have that idea as a solution. The policy makes the power structure less than the power structure determines policy.

I would argue to you that piracy is the power structure answer to poor incentive structures in academia.

Do you think we would have experienced streaming as it is today without the piracy of old?

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