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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

#221

Post by adhesive_wombat »

ttul wrote: post #69

In engineering school in the 1990s, a Taiwanese student in our school would order all the books in Taiwan and then their mom would ship a huge box to us in Canada. It costs 50% less than buying the same books in Canada. Textbooks are a racket.

I bought an Indian copy of a microelectronics textbook on eBay, replete with a dire warning on the back cover about not selling it outside the subcontinent. The only difference was the paper is thinner and the diagrams aren't two-tone, they're greyscale. Luckily, however, electrons do seem work the same on all continents.

That said, we weren't required to buy any books at all and and books we were required to read were kept at the library in the "core" section, so there'd always be a number in the building, not lent out. As it turned out, in retrospect, I don't think any specific book was ever actually "required" to be read.

I did buy a few books (about 10 over 4 years), including a copy of Stroud's Engineering Mathematics so old it recommended logarithm tables (otherwise it was perfectly serviceable). I bought those because I actually wanted them to keep and I still have nearly all of them.

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

#222

Post by Enginerrrd »

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 don't buy that. Middlemen typically exist to solve some existing market inefficiency, or they exist through corruption and regulatory capture. The latter is a huge problem, but it's not THE problem. Ballooning administration seems to REALLY be the problem all over the place. But... Why is that?

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

#223

Post by loeg »

nervousvarun wrote: post #122
AHOHA wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Canada, of course!(1) (1) https://vm.tiktok.com/ZMYEGwwSD/

Wow...tiktok is blocked for me at work...is that fixed rate or ARM financing?

My impression is the Canadian government only backstops mortgages up to 25 years, so (without having seen the video) I would guess it's some kind of ARM.

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

#224

Post by pessimizer »

In college, I used https://used.addall.com and one semester got all my books down to $35 with older editions. This only worked because people in class would share photocopies of the problem sets from the new editions. A couple of cool professors would also give exercise numbers for the last few editions; they had previously taught the class with those editions, anyway.

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

#225

Post by pessimizer »

SoftTalker wrote: post #218
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.

TaaS

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

#227

Post by g_p »

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…

When I studied my engineering degree (not in the US) at a pretty high-ranked institution, textbooks were rarely used. I think I only actually purchased and used one, and it was approx $50 (brand new, used was cheaper). Often a course text was set, alongside the instruction of "don't bother to use it" (!) One prof did use his own book (the only time I saw this) for teaching, and had uploaded the book as PDF chapters (searchable text format, no less) to the online course page.

I therefore have a double-take when I read about people spending upwards of $1000 for books in a semester - I just can't imagine what that course would be like, or how students would feel with that kind of teaching that is presumably very heavily reliant on the book.

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

#228

Post by pessimizer »

GartzenDeHaes wrote: post #104
bo1024 wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That’s a good idea, and it should be paired with grants or some other compensation/support for people who develop those open books.

State colleges already receive and enormous amount of public money. For 2024 in Washington State, "For higher education, the budget makes significant investments across the state, totaling $1.2 billion." https://senatedemocrats.wa.gov/mullet/2023/03/20/senate-intr...

> State colleges already receive and enormous amount of public money.

So do the roads. Are you making a case that it's too much or too little?

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

#229

Post by newsclues »

jimhefferon wrote: post #181
newsclues wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Here's a weird idea. Bundle materials into tuition expenses. As a former textbook seller, professors will exploit this for profit by publishing their own textbook at inflated prices and collecting a nice reward. This does happen in some places (or did, I'm out of the industry). Imagine if every state or country developed their own open source curriculum, instead of allowing publishers to exists as owners and gateke…

Couple of points, which as a former seller I suspect you know, but students often do not. 1) There is no best book for a subject. What suits a class in Elementary Statistics in one place or program might be all wrong for another. 2) There's a lot more to developing texts (or, as you say, curriculum) than people think. Besides a book, there are exercises and answers to the exercises. There are in class slides, perhaps…

It's complex, but it's that what governments exist for? Solving large complex problems for the greater good?

1) Totally agree, there needs to be competition and humility to say, "Hey our regions Math book is inferior, let's use X".

2) Absolutely and I don't mean to dismissively hand wave away the hard work that will be required ("just code the app" is a good comparison) but rather trying to simply state another direction to take.

It requires money, but I think less than many suspect (without the publishers margins!). But the investment would pay for itself and would be a good _start_ to tackling the inflated costs of education.

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

#230

Post by pessimizer »

mauvia wrote: post #129

Copying textbooks is explicitly legal in India as part of case law, as "fair dealing". This was decided in 2016 and involved Oxford University Press and Cambridge University press, so the opponents were pretty powerful overall. https://www.thehindu.com/news/cities/Delhi/University-copyin... Wiki article because the hindu is paywalled: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/University_of_Oxford_v._Ramesh...

Fascinating. Was this the basis for Sci-Hub's optimism in India?

https://news.careers360.com/sci-hub-scihub-libgen-alexandra-...

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