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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

#131

Post by analog31 »

electriclove wrote: post #101
beej71 wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not a professor, just a full time instructor, but my salary is 40% what I'd make in industry. But it's worth it for the great health insurance and 4 months off per year. And for the fact that teaching is what I love. The salary is frankly embarrassing to share with my peers in industry. But not all of us take it out on the students. I find free books whenever I can for my courses. I even write books and let the s…

Are you considering becoming a professor? Salaries for many US colleges and universities are much higher than most think.

Everybody's considering becoming a professor. What's your research portfolio look like? How much grant money can you raise?

Demand for those jobs is extreme. Meanwhile the ranks of tenured professors are shrinking as colleges make more use of contract teaching staff.

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

#132

Post by dehrmann »

I'm surprised that will how many people and institutions should be interested, there aren't more textbooks with a Creative Commons license. For anything non-specialized in a mature field, it doesn't make sense to have so many equivalent options all priced at $150. Calculus is calculus.

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

#133

Post by dehrmann »

whywhywhydude wrote: post #28

Won’t things like blanket student loan forgiveness or very cheap student loans make such moral hazards even worse? Publishers, college administrators, football coaches, etc. will try to extract as much as possible from the free student loans provided by the government.

> football coaches

The football team probably brings in enough revenue to pay the coach.

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

#134

Post by EliRivers »

It's been a little over two decades since I first attended university, but I recall that very few of the courses had a textbook. The lecturer wrote notes, be it on paper to hand out or on the boards to be copied and annotated. Now and then a reference was made to a textbook for further reading or for some specific proof or some such, but in no way was any course taught from a textbook in such a way that you simply needed the textbook. This was at a university in London, reading Physics.

I wonder how unusual (or not) that is? Is the heavy textbook emphasis a US thing, or is it more common?

(About a decade later I read Maths with the Open University, which is basically the student on their own for six years learning some trick mathematics; a couple of those modules definitely taught from textbooks, although by no means all of them; some of them again simply provided notes and explanations and problem sheets generated by the university)

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

#135

Post by dehrmann »

giantg2 wrote: post #51

Guess what? You do not need to buy textbooks if you have a smart professor that cares and isn't into the racket. You can use 15% of a copyrighted work for educational purposes. That means you can pick and copy chapters from different books to cover the course material. All free!

A smart professor is the one who wrote the book they sell to their own class.

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

#136

Post by leesalminen »

ddingus wrote: post #123
giantg2 wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Then I was an actual problem not just a troublemaker." Maybe I'm weird, but this sounds like the highest form of compliment.

Nope. I see it the same way. Perhaps we are both weird then.

This is why we’re on “Hacker” news :)

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

#137

Post by skykooler »

roughly wrote: post #34
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…

Yes - why do students feel fine pirating text books? Because it’s blatantly obvious to even the most doe-eyed freshman that they’re being fucked by the textbook company and that the administrators and professors are at best complicit. Welcome to the university, now ignore all that crap on the marketing material and open your wallet - no, the 17th edition of “discrete math” isn’t acceptable, you need the 18th.

Especially because there's no way undergraduate discrete math has changed significantly since last year - the only difference is going to be shuffling the page and problem numbers around so you can't get away with using the older textbook.

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

#138

Post by karaterobot »

gnicholas wrote: post #107
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…

I work in this field, and this is already a thing. It’s somewhat euphemistically called “inclusive textbooks” because the price is already included in your fees. The price is typically significantly lower than you would pay individually because they know that they’re forcing everyone to pay instead of just the subset of students who would choose to pay if given a choice.

I guess the question is whether the students as a group pay more over all. If not, it feels like a sneaky way for the school and textbook publishers to charge an extra fee for textbooks. It's a fee everyone has to pay, and which the schools control the rate of. And if not having to pay for it directly means that people stop paying attention, the price could slowly crept up to previous levels, and relatively few people would even notice. I mean, obviously no university would ever do something so greedy, so this is of course a purely theoretical proposition...

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

#139

Post by mo_42 »

I was in Germany as an exchange student (in 2012). In the library, they had copying machines that photographed from top and processed the images so they looked like perfect scans. You would just go there with a book and USB drive, turn pages for a while and then you had a copy of that book. Needless to say that we distributed the copies. So it was only necessary when we couldn’t find the exact version. The libraries usually had several copies books.

For some courses, professors also just uploaded PDFs of entire books in the learning platform.

There was also an on-campus shop where you could buy the printed slides for an entire course for a few Euros. I still have one of them for nostalgic reasons because I was intensely studying the math in there. By the way it was beautifully done by the professor's team in LaTeX.

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

#140

Post by sitkack »

andruby wrote: post #93
atomicnumber3 wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Freshman year, first semester, I paid $1100 for books, and then we only actually used one of them more than slightly. I still have them all. One of them was a Discrete Mathematics book that cost $250. We used it twice to do a "reading assignment" and since the class was only taught by the teacher who wanted this book just this one semester, the school store wouldn't buy it back at the end of the semester. It still cr…

I studied a semester abroad (Erasmus) in Portugal and I was so surprised that the expectation there was to get the course book photocopied. The university had a copy room where you pay for a literal copied version of the book that someone made with a xerox machine.

In the 90s in the US, for more hard science and math courses, the course was taught against course notes that you needed to buy from one of the many print shops next to the university. This was spiral bound, often a couple hundred pages and costing 20-40$ because that is how much a short run print job costed. These were made by the instructors.

For courses where a book was required, you could check a book out from the reserve and photocopy the whole thing on one of the many high speed photocopiers on campus that all shared a linked card system, so you didn't have to use coins.

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