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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

#61

Post by ncallaway »

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…

That’s the thing, any mandatory costs (textbooks, meal plans, etc) should be bundled into the standard tuition price. It needs to be bundled into the top line price that people are actually aware of when they’re making their “purchase decision” (where to go to college)

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

#62

Post by zbrozek »

fallingknife wrote: post #24
PreachSoup wrote: post #4

Besides bleak job market, horrible healthcare, being potential homeless due to skyhigh housing cost, stark contrast to the boomer's easy life, the more extreme weathers and the climate change, textbook is probably an afterthought. It's not even in top 10 things to worry about

Millennials have more money than boomers did at the same age. There was no "boomer's easy life." That's a myth. https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2023/05/millenn...

50 percent of Boomers owned their own home as 25-to-39-year-olds, compared with 48 percent of Millennials, hardly a difference deserving of headlines or social-media memes.

That's a ridiculously wide age range to use for comparison. And you'd be better off showing the median age of first home purchase or mortgage payoff. A modest increase in income or net worth is meaningless if housing has skyrocketed in comparison.

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

#63

Post by aio2 »

WhereIsTheTruth wrote: post #59

We are gate keeping access to knowledge/education too much, I wonder if this has any effect on the rate at which a society evolves, how many smart minds didn't make it due to lack of funds, perhaps one of them could have revolutionized the battery tech?

Take my word for a grain of salt, I think it's just trying to control who can access what. Richer get more stuff.

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

#64

Post by aio2 »

giantg2 wrote: post #51

Guess what? You do not need to buy textbooks if you have a smart professor that cares and isn't into the racket. You can use 15% of a copyrighted work for educational purposes. That means you can pick and copy chapters from different books to cover the course material. All free!

How would you be able to pick and cover specific covers without buying the book?

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

#65

Post by omoikane »

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 still have my "Fundamentals of Physics" (5th edition, I think they are on 12th edition now). This one I still occasionally read from time to time just for the fun of it.

The other textbooks I still keep just for when I need weighted objects to stack something. I don't actually read them.

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

#66

Post by submeta »

atomicnumber3 wrote: post #17
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…

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…

I would have gone to the book store, fotographed the two chapters. - When I was a university student, our professor would copy relevant chapters and hand them to us (in Berlin). We would only buy those books we used extensively.

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

#68

Post by 8organicbits »

atomicnumber3 wrote: post #17
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…

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…

I also remember an expensive discrete math book. I came home for the holidays and was doing some exercises when my dad found his copy from when he was at university. Most sections were word for word idential, but the problems were all different. His had a chapter on Fortran too.

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

#70

Post by AHOHA »

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 forget the 15%tip and credit card costs is also on you!! Gas is expensive? Yeah sorry despite the trillions we didn’t invest much in public transportation or bike/walking infrastructure. And so on.
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