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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

#211

Post by SoftTalker »

TT-392 wrote: post #190
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…

How about a system like the one dutch highschools use. In that system, the students get the books from school at the start of the year and return them at the end of the year (the school owns the books). That way the books are for sure reused, and the price is reduced.

American high schools use the same model. It's only at university where you are expected to buy your books.

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

#212

Post by pessimizer »

Any price is too much. 99% of the time 99% of people in university are not learning anything cutting edge, they're learning old things to prepare them to learn new things. There are plenty of works out of copyright (or that never were in copyright) that can be used themselves, or that could be stitched together to create complete courses.

This seems like a basic thing that governments should be doing, but governments never do anything that would "crowd out" rent-seekers, because they're the servants of rent-seekers.

Maybe, if you're a multi-billionaire, use one of those billions to put together enough unencumbered material to fill a wide-ranging university program? Or if you're a university, while you're committing to open-access, make a commitment to your students that all of the materials that they'll need will be available freely, on the net, if at all possible? So many billions sloshing around, so many people claiming the problem is so complicated, when it looks very simple. It's as manufactured a problem as the idea that taxes are so complicated that the IRS can't figure them out.

edit: and succinctly,

> 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.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36186362

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

#213

Post by aaplok »

LanceH wrote: post #170
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…

> Freshman year, first semester, I paid $1100 for books, and then we only actually used one of them more than slightly. This really bothers me. Universities hold themselves up as virtuous. Then students hire them to provide to provide an education. Instead of being agents for the students, the students are instead treated like a captive market. There is a very real conflict of interest in universities profiting off t…

I'm not sure lecturers profit off textbooks. What you are witnessing is more likely indifference and hubris from the academics than a deliberate strategy to extract more money out of students. This doesn't make it less unethical, but unless it's a textbook they themselves authored, it's probably not a conflict of interest.

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

#214

Post by omginternets »

r9550684 wrote: post #156

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 w…

A part of me really wants to see this kind of thing revived by projects like IPFS, but somehow it just isn't happening. If IPFS had been a thing in the early 2000's, the first thing to be uploaded would have been porn, followed closely by music, movies, video games and textbooks.

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

#215

Post by [deleted] »

ehvatum wrote: post #187
Firmwarrior wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's complete bullshit You can now comfortably afford to hire a staff of PhD students to tutor you 1on1 in every subject you want to learn more cheaply than going to a university. So where the FUCK is all that money going?

> So where the FUCK is all that money going? Please be aware that higher education is a massive dumping ground for the lowest-performing segment of the politically-connected managerial class, who are too cowardly and lazy to run for elected office, and too stupid and impulsive to make it in industry. Academia is perfect, for them: a gigantic stage for demonstrating moral superiority and hiring friends, with no fundam…

[deleted]

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

#216

Post by pessimizer »

nervousvarun wrote: post #121
bredren wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is done around all key stages of life where insecurities can be exploited. The wedding industry from wedding rings to venues, new babies, even interviewing for white collar jobs used to be accompanied with the need for a new suit. Once it can be established something is important and to be revered, rent seeking knows no bounds.

All true and don't forget that even death you're not safe (the funeral industry is one of the worst offenders).

The American Way of Death by Jessica Mitford.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_American_Way_of_Death

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

#217

Post by Jiro »

eli_gottlieb wrote: post #206
Firmwarrior wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's complete bullshit You can now comfortably afford to hire a staff of PhD students to tutor you 1on1 in every subject you want to learn more cheaply than going to a university. So where the FUCK is all that money going?

Administrators, to stop us academics from doing our jobs too productively. >That pretty much answers the question of why we don’t have teleportation devices or antigravity shoes. Common sense suggests that if you want to maximize scientific creativity, you find some bright people, give them the resources they need to pursue whatever idea comes into their heads, and then leave them alone. Most will turn up nothing, bu…

We don't have teleportation devices or antigravity shoes because making those things is not possible, and you can't make impossible things possible by throwing money at them.

And of course this becomes worse if you're using other people's money. If you're throwing your own money at an impossible task, you'll run out (or your investors will run out). If you're collecting the money as taxes and then throwing it at the impossible task, you can waste as much of it as you want. If you're telling people "do this impossible task or I shoot you", you end up doing a lot of shooting and not much teleporting.

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

#218

Post by SoftTalker »

jwie wrote: post #25

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 Pearso…

The move to online or digital textbooks was supposed to drastically cut prices. No paper, no printing expense, no shipping expense, no storage expense, fewer bookstore employees to pay, etc.

What actually happened is textbook publishing houses like Pearson just leveraged the digital tecnology to make duplication or resale difficult or impossible, and kept all the cost savings to themselves.

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

#219

Post by omginternets »

Robotbeat wrote: post #73
AHOHA wrote: post #70

Almost everything in North America is criminally priced with almost zero regulations, and all political parties are responsible for that: wanna buy a house, enjoy your 70y mortgage, wanna study, enjoy your student loans and expensive textbooks, oh you actually got sick, how rude?? Pay a hefty price or enjoy your 10hrs waiting time in the ER, Restaurants?! Pfft, pay the inflated prices for garbage food and don’t forge…

Gas is insanely cheap in the US compared to almost any other developed country. Food is fairly inexpensive as well. Housing has major problems in part stemming from over-regulation via zoning, NIMBYism, etc.

[flagged]

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

#220

Post by charlieyu1 »

pydry wrote: post #199
Firmwarrior wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's complete bullshit You can now comfortably afford to hire a staff of PhD students to tutor you 1on1 in every subject you want to learn more cheaply than going to a university. So where the FUCK is all that money going?

Middlemen. Our economy has become increasingly more parasitic in all spheres.

I always thought the tech revolution would mean cutting of traditional middlemen
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