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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

#281

Post by Barrin92 »

EliRivers wrote: post #134

It's been a little over two decades since I first attended university, but I recall that very few of the courses had a textbook. The lecturer wrote notes, be it on paper to hand out or on the boards to be copied and annotated. Now and then a reference was made to a textbook for further reading or for some specific proof or some such, but in no way was any course taught from a textbook in such a way that you simply ne…

I went to university in Germany a decade ago (for CS) and I had the exact same experience. On the first day we got a usb stick with a linux distro for programming assignments and every course was essentially done with the expectation that if you attend the lectures you can pass the exams at the end of the semester. Book recommendations were sometimes given but basically always classic textbooks you can just borrow from the library.

I honestly struggle to understand why students would even participate in these textbook extortion rackets.

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

#282

Post by courseofaction »

lordleft wrote: post #3

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. Isn’t it interesting how little effort has been invested in mitigating the runaway cost of higher education? That we enabled college administrators to turn up the cost dial without speed bumps? No wonder why young people have become cynical…

Absolutely. My entire university experience confirmed this: Structurally, the place didn't give a shit. Individuals in the system were great, but the system itself was primarily set up to extract from students while they are too naive to resist it, and indebt them to the financial system.

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

#283

Post by marpstar »

cwdegidio wrote: post #278
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,…

I went to University of Wisconsin-Platteville and they had a book center on campus with every book for every class. "Rental" costs were part of tuition (and something like $300/semester -- ridiculously low).

The idea of having to source these books is mostly foreign to me, though many of my friends went through it. I never did, and still do not, understand why this isn't a thing everywhere...

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

#284

Post by hedora »

aerostable_slug wrote: post #117
hedora wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's a bad idea; tuition is directly subsidized by student loans. A better approach would be to allow student loan debt to be treated like any other debt during bankruptcy proceedings, as it was previously. It was only after bankruptcy protection was withheld from students that the student loan crisis and skyrocketing tuition became problems. It's not like people used to file bankruptcy on graduation day just to sc…

Great idea, but that would lead to lenders making risk-based decisions on who gets what loans, and that would be politically untenable in the United States. I may be a pessimist, but tackling the systemic issues that make loaning a bunch of money to an HBCU student much riskier than loaning a bunch of money to a Stanford student isn't what would happen. The demand would be equal outcomes (loans to all) without addres…

It used to work this way until recently, and none of the problems you describe were real issues.

It’s difficult to argue impossibility in the face of an existence proof.

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

#285

Post by aaplok »

xp84 wrote: post #262
aaplok wrote: post #213

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It’s in the interest of all professors collectively (including those who hope to be real professors someday) to prop up the problematic idea that a book ought to cost $400+ just because it’s a textbook, because professors write textbooks, no one involved in selecting books or publishing them has any incentive to keep the costs reasonable.

> no one involved in selecting books or publishing them has any incentive to keep the costs reasonable.

There is an difference in having no incentive to keep costs down and having an incentive to keep costs up. Some professors are simply indifferent to their students' plights. As far as these professors are concerned their students are just an inconvenient bleep in their oh-so-important life. Extracting money from them is not on their radar.

The vast majority of professors don't write textbooks. In fact there are probably a lot more profs who do care, and assign open books, or no books at all, than professors who make a living writing textbooks.

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

#286

Post by slt2021 »

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…

what ends up happening is Dean/Department head will publish textbook and will force entire university to purchase his textbook and earn $$$.

this is whats happening at some elite/Ivy league universities

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

#287

Post by slt2021 »

dotancohen wrote: post #271
ryandrake wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

maybe Dean is a coauthor and is getting part of royalties as well? Happens more often than you think

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

#288

Post by yieldcrv »

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.

browsers should be able to natively resolve an IPFS uri and CID

especially given the way they are used.

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

#289

Post by mauvia »

pessimizer wrote: post #230
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-...

The photocopy court case is mentioned in that article as a "small precedent", yeah.

Though I can't speculate on how the sci-hub case will actually go since the main reason copying was allowed for students according to the arguments was that before photocopiers existed, they were expected to copy the things themselves.

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

#290

Post by Dalewyn »

whywhywhydude wrote: post #28

Won’t things like blanket student loan forgiveness or very cheap student loans make such moral hazards even worse? Publishers, college administrators, football coaches, etc. will try to extract as much as possible from the free student loans provided by the government.

And now you know why there are substantial and significant oppositions to forgiving student loans. Not only is the notion patently unfair, it doesn't even address any of the actual problems and will just make them worse.
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