High prices make textbook ‘piracy’ acceptable to most students

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 students (and everyone) freely use them. If there are good for-profit books out there, I only use them if they're cheap and something useful beyond college.

I got it from Dad, who was also a teacher. He got tired of book prices and wrote his own. Students still had to buy it, but they could do so at cost at the college print shop. Dad made no money from it.

Bundled prices and and a lack of price visibility often promote extortionate pricing, bribes, etc.

The value of the current arrangement is students can't ignore the prices.

I'd bet a nice lunch that if books were part of tuition, the net dollars flowing to publishers would increase.

It’s so much worse than you think.

Many textbooks come with license keys specifically so you can’t buy used books anymore.

Students who do buy a used book are typically coerced into buying the license key to do digital homework, or whatever other reason.

When I was teaching during a graduate fellowship I accepted paper assignments for students who bought used books, or who shared books with other students. The Pearson representative complained and I was given a talking to by the graduate student dean about consistency or some such nonsense. Eventually I would be reassigned to teach classes that didn’t involve digital components.

We called it the textbook industrial complex.

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 meal plans: when I went to college, meal plans were priced horribly, but you were forced to pay for at least a base meal plan, even if you lived off campus. It was just another way for the college to make money off of students who had no other choice. When meal plan prices rose $100 in a single year, or the college eliminated the previous cheapest meal plan, it's not like any students are going to transfer over a couple hundred dollars a semester. But it still sucked. Seems to me like bundling doesn't solve issues, it just reduces transparency and results in more "hidden fees" that might not show up in standard tuition costs.

That's exactly what we were doing at a previous employer. It was called "Equitable Access"

https://get.vitalsource.com/vitalsource-advantage/equitable-...