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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

#71

Post by flybrand »

Aeolun wrote: post #35
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…

Why wouldn’t the dean tell them to go pound sand? Does Pearson do anything for the university except extracting money?

because that Dean is likely responsible for receiving payments - maybe not personally, but to the school - from that same business.

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

#72

Post by flybrand »

cmurf wrote: post #40
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…

I'm not sure the situation calls for such diplomatic language. You are fucking with this company's fief. There, that's what's really going on. They feel entitled to earning money and are pissed they need any customers at all to get it. Public libraries are now paying more money per use for licensing fees than an individual would pay. Libraries are pretty much looking into the abyss, no more permanent copies of anythi…

Yes, this is the right issue - it's their fief.

They're farming money off the students. Don't mess with the crop, even if you are the crop.

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

#73

Post by Robotbeat »

AHOHA wrote: post #70

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 forge…

Gas is insanely cheap in the US compared to almost any other developed country.

Food is fairly inexpensive as well.

Housing has major problems in part stemming from over-regulation via zoning, NIMBYism, etc.

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

#74

Post by r3trohack3r »

DRM is also frustrating for textbooks. I’m fine buying books, I have a “trophy case” in my office of unopened books because I like holding onto physical copies and supporting the creation of books that I find valuable.

But I don’t want to lug around 40lbs of paper everywhere I go. So I get a DRMless pdf copy of the book too.

I’d get the OReily subscription in a heartbeat if I could read it on the device of my choosing. But I can’t so I don’t.

I want to download the ebook to the ereader of my choice (ReMarkable) where I have instant access to my entire library, the ability to markup the document without defacing it (notes are separate layers), and the ability to add blank pages for notes between the real pages (this will damage the binding of a real book).

Books are objectively inferior for studying unless you need to rapidly flip between pages. And I’m going to optimize for my own time and efficiency every time.

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

#75

Post by esafak »

ncallaway wrote: post #61
vanilla_nut wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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)

And can pay with a low interest rate loan.

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

#76

Post by gonehome »

8organicbits wrote: post #68
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…

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.

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.

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

#77

Post by loeg »

AHOHA wrote: post #70

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 forge…

Where can I get one of these 70 year mortgages?

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

#79

Post by esafak »

chongli wrote: post #41
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…

Most of the professors I've had taught the course entirely with free materials. I think they went out of their way to avoid having students spend money. A top-down policy forcing all students to buy textbooks sounds like a way to take control away from these professors in order to further enrich the school and the publishers at students' expense. I don't view textbook costs as a "dark pattern", they're an honest sign…

These expensive books are usually for mandatory, introductory classes. I don't know if the students have that much choice here.

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

#80

Post by giantg2 »

aio2 wrote: post #64
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?

The library, potentially. The other option that I've seen is that the professor buys one copy of the books and then copies the parts they want so they can distribute to the students.
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