The Textbook Industry & Greed: My Story • Hacker News Board

Re: The Textbook Industry & Greed: My Story

#121

Post by HarryHirsch » Mon, Aug 20, 2012, 4:17 PM UTC

AYBABTME wrote: post #78

I had a similar problem with a Chemistry professor who thought it was brilliant to let students do their homework on a website held by Pearson. The access to the website was conditional to the purchase of a code found in the textbook, which code was expiring at the end of the semester (4 months after registration). She also found that it would be a brilliant idea to give 30% of the term's mark on homework; it would g…

The reason that happened wasn't because the lady is getting kickbacks from the publisher, it was that she wanted to unload the setting of questions and the grading on someone else. It used to be that you had TAs for that when the workload became to large for the professor to handle, but we are seeing third parties moving into this market niche. (Hey! An idea for a startup!)

There is not enough information here to decide if the professor is lazy or the university is overworking her - we would need to know about her course load, class sizes and other duties. However, there is no excuse for this stealth increase in tuition, this cannot be allowed to happen.

Re: The Textbook Industry & Greed: My Story

#122

Post by jrousey » Mon, Aug 20, 2012, 5:21 PM UTC

dan_yall wrote: post #114

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.

You guessed it! Absolutely terrible...

Re: The Textbook Industry & Greed: My Story

#123

Post by stephengillie » Mon, Aug 20, 2012, 5:42 PM UTC

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?

Smartphone, big microSD and a few hours are the best version. Then OCR later if you need to - chances are you'll still be wasting your time and will never touch your photographed textbook.

Re: The Textbook Industry & Greed: My Story

#124

Post by greedo » Mon, Aug 20, 2012, 7:00 PM UTC

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…

Universities are in the business of making money, not education.

I worked for a company in 2004 that was a spinoff of a professor's project to create randomizable equations linked to a text book. Students would get a unique key/ID from their textbook, and log into our system to take practice exams and work on examples. Each question would be unique, and hopefully pedagogically correct.

Textbook publishers loved this idea, especially the fact that it required a unique key for each student. We had all of the major college textbook publishers as customers, either using our hosted system or licensing our software to use on their own web servers. If I recall correctly, we charged around $20-30 per student.

Eventually we were acquired, but I assume the software is still being "marketed" to the students.

The professor's project was funded by a DoE grant, and then he turns around and commercializes it with the explicit approval of the university.

Re: The Textbook Industry & Greed: My Story

#125

Post by jrjarrett » Mon, Aug 20, 2012, 9:02 PM UTC

Wow. Textbook prices have gone out of control. 25 years ago as a comp sci/math dual major, the MOST I ever spent in one semester was $300.

Re: The Textbook Industry & Greed: My Story

#126

Post by robotresearcher » Mon, Aug 20, 2012, 10:13 PM UTC

HarryHirsch wrote: post #41

There is an issue that hasn't come up yet: why does a professor recommend a certain text for a class instead of the students buying the textbook that they like best? After all, for each kind of course the various publishers each have a textbook on offer. Here's the dirty secret: with the teacher's edition there comes access to the solutions and a bank of exercises and test questions. If there's a set text it's likely…

What's dirty or secret about that?

If your instructor uses Tanenbaum's perfectly good question about page eviction strategies from "Modern Operating Systems", rather than writing (and debugging) essentially the same question over again, they can spend more of their time talking to you and helping you.

Also, some set texts are really excellent, and the instructor would not be able to produce as good a resource themselves. Some people are better teachers, others writers. Writing good, unambiguous questions that produce decent answers is much harder than it sounds.

Re: The Textbook Industry & Greed: My Story

#127

Post by ShellyBeach » Tue, Aug 21, 2012, 10:15 AM UTC

startupfounder wrote: post #61

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…

This is sort of OT, but I always love to share this little tidbit of my time at Xavier (I graduated in 2001). At the end of the semester, the bookstore would put out these huge boxes and when they would refuse to buy back people's books (because the same book was not being used the following semester), people would just chuck their books in the boxes. I'm sure the bookstore was just selling those books to some other efollett (or whatever) bookstore. I used to go and snatch tons of books out of those boxes and sell them on half.com or amazon marketplace...similarly, profs would put the sample textbooks outside their office doors for people to take if they wanted them...those went on half.com and amazon marketplace too...I at least took a bite out of my textbook expenses that way.

Re: The Textbook Industry & Greed: My Story

#128

Post by stevetursi » Fri, Aug 24, 2012, 6:28 PM UTC

wisty wrote: post #80

learc83 wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

They sound what my uni called "bricks" - a bunch of licensed copies of reading material, all stapled together. They cost about $10-$50, as opposed to $50-$100 for a 101 text (note, this is Australia, the US has more expensive additions of textbooks for no good reason). There are two kinds of bricks - draft textbooks, and collections of papers. It's quite common to get a draft textbook as a brick one year, then laugh…

It seems a bit weird to publish a collection of papers as a textbook, especially at a low undergrad level, but I hear it's happening these days.

Took a macro-economics class at my local community college. One of the required texts was a collection of essays that the professor had written (much of it incoherent blabble but that's a different topic), collected into a 130-page paperback that looked like it might cost $3.99 at the local BN. Cost: $55. No copy available in the library.