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High prices make textbook ‘piracy’ acceptable to most students

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

#151

Post by i_am_jl »

vanilla_nut wrote: post #27
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…

Maybe I'm misunderstanding, but this feels like it'll cause even more issues. Today, clever students can share books, buy used, share electronic copies, or skip the book entirely if they don't think it's necessary. With this system, every student is forced to buy their textbook indirectly through tuition, which will of course rise significantly based on the cost of a textbook for an average class. It's kind of like m…

>Today, clever students can share books, buy used, share electronic copies, or skip the book entirely if they don't think it's necessary.

I went back to college in the early 2010s. Even then it wasn't uncommon for a text book to come with a license code for an online learning module that was both required for classwork and non-transferable.

So yes, I could share the book, buy a used copy, or rip a PDF from an ebook, but that doesn't get me into the online class module that my professor is requiring for class, because that's hosted by the textbook's publisher and I don't get access unless I buy the book new.

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

#152

Post by NoMoreNicksLeft »

Basic ethical principles should make it acceptable.

We live in an age where you no longer need a printing press to manufacture and distribute books. And public universities already get enough of my tax dollars that they should be publishing the text books required for their clases. For free. Public funding equals public availability and ownership.

When a university demands a $300 book from some private publisher, it amounts to fraud and all involved should be investigated, prosecuted, and convicted of federal felonies. Stop the grift.

What the fuck are we paying professors for, if not to write the written materials they deem requirements to learn the curriculum they teach? Get to work motherfuckers.

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

#153

Post by rg111 »

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…

> Bundle materials into tuition expenses.

This is a very very poor idea that binds advanced students to the standard of a place.

This is very elitist and will deepen the divide.

If you are a really smart individual in a bad college due to your socio economic situations, you need to be able to read what MIT students are reading and not your below average peers are reading.

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

#154

Post by SnaggyJoker »

i_am_jl wrote: post #151
vanilla_nut wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe I'm misunderstanding, but this feels like it'll cause even more issues. Today, clever students can share books, buy used, share electronic copies, or skip the book entirely if they don't think it's necessary. With this system, every student is forced to buy their textbook indirectly through tuition, which will of course rise significantly based on the cost of a textbook for an average class. It's kind of like m…

>Today, clever students can share books, buy used, share electronic copies, or skip the book entirely if they don't think it's necessary. I went back to college in the early 2010s. Even then it wasn't uncommon for a text book to come with a license code for an online learning module that was both required for classwork and non-transferable. So yes, I could share the book, buy a used copy, or rip a PDF from an ebook,…

I ran into this issue in the most unexpected of classes.

I took some vehicle repair courses as electives and there was an online module despite the majority of class time being spent in a shop environment doing actual work on vehicles.

It was ridiculous.

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

#155

Post by spike021 »

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.

I went to San Jose state university a decade ago. It wasn't unexpected to find that some books could be bought there similarly where you pay for basically a photocopy bound with a spiral binding.

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

#156

Post by r9550684 »

I came to America poor, and went straight to a public university, on scholarship and no money to even pay for food (grad seminars and special events with free sandwiches and pizza is how I learned about things like quaternions as an undergrad). But as an eastern European hacker, i had a complete disregard of copyright, I also grew up in the 90s when hacker ethos included strong anti-authoritarian elements. No way I was going to pay those ridiculous book prices.

So first thing I did was setup a DC server (direct connect, early 2000s p2p sharing protocol) with a friendly grad student on university infrastructure, where we shared books, encouraged other students to upload books, we also built a dyi book scanner (there's one popular design that comes up first on google). the bookscanner at some point had a near 24/7 utilization, and people were coordinating time slots by dc messages. the room with the scanner (which is also where the DC server was) turned into a kind of unix room/hackerspace, because there was always somebody there working on something only vaguely related to university courses as such.

reminiscing on things like that always makes me realize just how much hacker culture has changed, to a significant extent as a result of societal pressure. I was extremely lucky, because when the handful of us got inevitably discovered, what followed was a series of meetings with department dean and university heads, lots of stern talking, which basically ended after they were convinced that they put sufficient fear of god in us. I'm particularly grateful to one networking and os professor who showed up to every single one of those meetings to advocate on our behalf. said professor had a significant contribution to computing in general, was strong supporter of old school hacker ethos, and is just all around great guy.

only a few years later aaronsw was thrown to the wolves by the cowards and bureaucrats (but I repeat myself) at MIT over his JSTOR downloads, which in my personal perception of history was the end of this kind of "oh captain my captain" university hacker culture.

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

#157

Post by soperj »

tenacious_tuna wrote: post #145
sitkack wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 th…

I graduated from a US university in 2018 and my favorite math course was taught by a professor who told us at the start that the textbook was just his course notes, which he provided a PDF for, and we were welcome to (and encouraged) use the text as open-notes in our exams so long as we had a printed version of the notes. The class proceeded to be one of my favorite math classes, and it was so incredible to have a te…

There are teachers who care, and then everyone else.

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

#158

Post by [deleted] »

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.

[deleted]

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

#159

Post by gnicholas »

karaterobot wrote: post #138
gnicholas wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 peopl…

I imagine the overall revenue is greater than if students were given the choice to purchase or not. I've talked with recent college grads who purchased 1-2 textbooks during all four years, and who indicate this is common at their college. The discount given for "inclusive textbook" programs is substantial, but I don't think it is substantial enough to outweigh the fact that many students choose to purchase textbooks only once in a blue moon.

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

#160

Post by theboogieman »

As a recent grad, I can speak on this a bit:

My biggest problem with the current textbook industry (among many) is that each textbook manufacturer uses their own proprietary format for reading the books and doing assignments. Wiley and Sons uses WileyPlus which, in its original incarnation, used Flash until the very last day Flash was officially supported. Don't want a potential security hole installed onto your laptop? Too bad, transfer to a different school because this one has been bought out by Wiley and Sons. And the interface was absolutely horrid. If you were doing division in their math website and entered a "/", they never set up the Javascript to state you were typing in a textbox so Firefox would open the "search this page" prompt.

This system made doing my homework more frustrating, not less. I dreaded doing math homework every day from age 16-20, not because I didn't want to learn, but because I was constantly fighting WileyPlus' "quirks" instead of just doing the math.

All of these websites, not WileyPlus alone, also have horrible uptime. There were often times I had pressing homework to do and would be met with a "Servers are down for maintenence" screen. Since the textbook publishers cut predatory deals with the universities, professors are completely unable to switch to another publisher if these availability problems get out of hand. This leads to worse education outcomes, frustration with the professors who are constantly wrestling with the website, and students being forced to take out predatory loans to pay for these horrible books.

I do not miss college.

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