The Textbook Industry & Greed: My Story

The print textbooks used in schools in several parts of east Asia have had a rational production process like that (hire experts to determine what is really essential content, and then have pedagogical experts work out the best way to present the content) for years. That's one of the big reasons why, even when Japan, Taiwan, Korea, and Singapore were poor countries (are you old enough to remember those days?), they made good educational progress through effective schooling for the broad national population, and why none of those countries are poor anymore. The United States is still too "fat and happy" (I like that dialectical English term for "complacent") to do something as efficient or rational for its school system.

The quantity of changes may be less relevant than the quality of the changes: i.e. did anything major change in this field in the last n number of years. With a closed source software program, like Windows, it's very difficult to assess the quality of the changes. All we see is the user interface.

So what happened is that in order to be eligible for that 30% part of your final mark, you had to pay an extra 150$. Otherwise, you simply couldn't do and submit your assignments.

In other words, you first pay the university to be taught the course but, oh that's not all. You can't actually get the course for that price; no you have to pay an extra 150$ to really do the course.

After fighting with her for two weeks at the beginning of the term, she gave me the choice between subscribing to the service for 50$ to only get an access code, without the textbook. Or I could get the questions on paper, and submit them manually, but only if I would take a rendez-vous every time to get the questions, and answer them on site for the duration of the rendez-vous, which was ridiculous. In the end I bought the 50$ access code, in shame. Maybe I should have fought my case, but I was already sick of this 2 week fight over one of my 5 other courses.

I think there's a fight to be done there. There must be laws that force the prof to disclose how much money they get from publishers. There must be laws that disallow linking marks to the purchase of some material. It seems obvious to me that once I paid the price of the course to the university, I should be given access to the same share of marks than student who will pay for whatever other extra. Maybe I would have a harder time doing the course without the textbook, but that would be my own decision, and I would still get the chance to have all my marks if I work hard enough.

To end this long post, I'll admit that although I don't agree with piracy, I do use bootleg copies of textbook if I don't consider them of worthy quality. I don't like to be forced into buying something I don't like. However, I will (and do) pay for the books I consider worthy, and be quite happy to do it. For instance, I don't like the book required by my C++ class, so I will most likely use a bootleg copy, and buy another book that I find of better quality.

There are two kinds of bricks - draft textbooks, and collections of papers.

It's quite common to get a draft textbook as a brick one year, then laugh at the students the next year who pay for the textbook when it's finally published.

It seems a bit weird to publish a collection of papers as a textbook, especially at a low undergrad level, but I hear it's happening these days.