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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

#271

Post by dotancohen »

ryandrake wrote: post #162
gonehome wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

  > failed to pay for the correct book.
The failure here was not the student's. Not the cutie professor, really. It was the dean who allows this who failed.

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

#272

Post by chris_wot »

ryandrake wrote: post #162
gonehome wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

And thus was the start of a new pirate, and Dr. Shithead lost even more money.

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

#273

Post by justinclift »

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…

> Universities hold themselves up as virtuous.

That's just marketing. For a lot of degrees it's effectively a version of child care for people out of high school. That some people manage to learn something meanwhile almost seems accidental.

I kind of think that 2/3 of university students would be better served to instead do an apprenticeship in the trades. eg: Plumber, electrician, and similar

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

#274

Post by RajT88 »

Firmwarrior wrote: post #175
LanceH wrote: post #170

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. 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…

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?

Tearing down buildings which millions of dollars were spent on, to put up new buildings which they spend millions of dollars on.

Often the old buildings were not that old at all! They just no longer project the kind of prestige the university thinks is needed to persuade students to enroll.

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

#275

Post by pierat »

omginternets wrote: post #235
jacooper wrote: post #233

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think its too new and cumbersome to use for that, everyone is just used to torrent now.

It’s arguably less cumbersome than torrents, but yes, the “new” and “alternative” aspects of IPFS certainly seem like limiting factors. 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.

Indeed. Earlier on, it was definitely a thing we pie-rats were watching. I mean seriously... A bittorrent-git repo where nobody could ever kill a hashed content? Fucking hell!

And there's big problems. The biggest was that the privacy branch of 'IPFS over Tor/I2P" was dismissed outright from main branch. Handwaving aside, the biggest reason was it wouldnt make the creators money. Filecoin would. Other problems is that it's a memory and network hog. Like mucho hog.

But right now, IPFS is one of the most invasive protocols I've seen. That fucking thing will splatter your: public IP, all your private IPs, VPN IP, and any others as part of the dHT for your machine and any content hashes' associated to your machine. Even for deanonymized networks, this things nutzo.

Ananymize it better, easy support for Tor and I2P, and deemphasise the shitcoin, and it would definitely be a thing.

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

#276

Post by ardkf »

ourmandave wrote: post #54

Serious question. Anybody actually keep and use their old textbooks? Way back in the day, I only ever kept an algorithms book and used it once a never.

I kept my compiler textbooks, my computer architecture textbooks, and my algorithms textbooks. These include Crafting a Compiler, Engineering a Compiler, Code (by Petzold), Computer Architecture (by Hennessy). By far the one I reference most is Skiena's Algorithm Design Manual. I actually bought the new edition of that one for myself since it's in color now. My $250 differential equations textbook was ritualistically burned at the earliest opportunity.

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

#277

Post by deepspace »

systems_glitch wrote: post #142

Virginia Military Institute's math department decided they'd solve it by just writing their own open source books: https://www.vmi.edu/academics/departments/applied-mathematic... My wife is a professor there and wrote their APEX precalculus book several years ago (why precalculus is needed for college students is another matter). The print price was raised this year but is still well under $20. I think I paid around…

In my first year, our chemistry and physics professors both authored their own textbooks for their courses. It was in the days before copyleft and open source, but the physics prof ran a print shop in his backyard, hand-bound the textbooks and sold them to us at cost (which was about 10% of similar published books).

The chemistry prof, in contrast, contracted with a publishing house, and made sure to make a few changes every year, including re-numbering the exercises to discourage buying and selling of old textbooks. The (expensive) textbooks came with accompanying lab-books, which cost almost as much as the textbooks themselves. Lab assignments were only accepted on pages torn out from the official lab books.

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

#278

Post by cwdegidio »

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…

There are "new model" institutions that are doing that. I got my BSCS from Western Governors. Tuition covered everything. Books, certifications, etc. Any material I wanted beyond the course text was either available in their digital library or I would search for used to get a dirt cheap price on an older edition.

My partner is doing her degree now and her institution, in two cases... a math course and biology course, opted to use OpenStax text books. After looking through them, I liked them enough that I pick up the print editions for sub-$40 new and use them for refreshing things.

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

#279

Post by xp84 »

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…

You have a fair point, and that’s that tuition is another item where customers frequently don’t even shop on price. Many students decide on school with only a vague idea of price, some are on scholarship so they don’t pay, some are not that sophisticated with money so they just ignore the price and take out expensive loans for whatever they tell them to pay.

But the main reason why the idea would help is that colleges set tuition based on what they think the market will bear. The actual cost of the books though would be the school’s problem. Administration might actually pressure professors to NOT use custom self-authored editions that cost $200 more. Also, if the books are included, the school would want to buy used ones from any students who didn’t want to keep them, since it would save the school money. So they would be incentivized to tell professors to not switch to the yearly “new edition” which just resizes a few callout boxes each chapter in order to screw up the pagination, and randomly shuffles the exercises.

* note: I’m imagining here that tuition is set to a fixed amount for everyone just as it is today, not that everyone’s tuition is computed custom for them to include the books their particular professors picked.

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

#280

Post by Nasrudith »

aaplok wrote: post #213
LanceH wrote: post #170

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. 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.

I had a professor mention that they were apathetic to piracy of their own books because they received about a nickel per copy.
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