231–240 of 322 posts
But I mainly pay for books because it tends to be cheaper than printing them myself.
If I were born as a westerner with my mom and dad being there always to catch me if I fall I would always pay for knowledge, sure. But I pretty much feel entitled to free knowledge. I will happily pirate a 200 eur math textbook, 200 eur for me is a lot more than for your average westerner.
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I was told they scramble the order of problems so they can keep the books the same but force you to buy new editions in order to have the same problem numbers at what gets assigned. Basically minimizing cost to extort more cash.
I had a class where the textbook did that. I always would get last year's books to save more than a few coins, but the professor of this class would go through the problems in-class, and they were all different from what was in my book. I went to his office hours to understand why the problems he went over were different from the ones in my book, and he immediately lectured "Ahhhh you must have bought an older book f…
Can you imagine going to McDonalds and the guy won’t serve you your drink unless you buy a cup from his side business?
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.
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Middlemen. Our economy has become increasingly more parasitic in all spheres.
I always thought the tech revolution would mean cutting of traditional middlemen
It was either a joke or schools and universities have an incredibly tight grip on their market.
Picture what illusive product one can make in those settings. You can have insane prices, the only limit would be what people can afford. The maximum price then becomes maximum debt. While at the same time you can rush out a product that is complete crap, borderline believable but only for the ones who make the relevant decisions.
I see a docu one time about a semi-commercial chinese education formula. Each subject is cut up into tiny modules, seemingly as tiny as possible. One tiny booklet and 1-2 classes. You remember dependency hell? That was it, on steroids. The cert for the module, combined with others did give you access to additional modules and the bundle of coupons eventually turned into a more milestone like diploma but this wasn't the interesting part! You could take a different path after doing a module and become an instructor assistant, become an instructor and then become an instructor assistant instructor! If someone discovered a hard question there was always additional gray matter above you in the food chain.
They had people who could barely bang 2 rocks together TEACHING how to bang the rocks as if the universe revolved around it.
Others build a parkour tightly packed with modules one after the other. If they failed anything they got stuck eventually as you cant do C without A+B
The early adopters of the MLM program had their hands full assisting the teachers teachers teachers. It looked humbling to say the least.
edit: I forgot the part where one could start a business and continue to enjoy the advice from those you paid to teach you and the job offers listing specifically what modules were required.
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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.
I think its too new and cumbersome to use for that, everyone is just used to torrent now.
If I were trying to make IPFS remotely popular, I’d start by hosting the same kinds of things that made http, gnutella, and BitTorrent popular.
Back in the 90s, copy shops across from the university would have entire books photocopied, and we could get them for $20 instead of $150. Some of the international students would go back home to Hong Kong or India for the summer and take orders on next year's books, because they were much cheaper in Asia. This is a racket that has been going on for decades but only got exponentially worse these days, and I completely support starving these robber barons of any revenue.
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 lapt…
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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?
I personally love to buy textbooks because I think a physical book is easier to retain. Printing and binding a PDF at Fedex is usually a similar cost, and I’d rather have the nice physical copy decorate my bookshelf, like a hard-won trophy.
I would make the argument that textbooks should cost more than novels because I can read a novel at a page per minute or two, but a textbook is probably more like a page per 30-60 (on average). Then again, many Dover books cost around the same price as novels.
That being said, you might need to consult 3 or 4 different textbooks for a course, and on a student’s budget, this is absurd. Anybody that doesn’t have parents in the upper middle class and beyond will suffer. Science is an engine of social mobility for the intellectually gifted and nobody should feel bad for pirating textbooks. I think, like pirating journal articles, the only people that disagree with you are publishing companies.
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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 direc…