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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

#81

Post by robotburrito »

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…

The bundle would be too hard to pull off IMO. How is my 100k of debt going to cover all these administrative employees, the new climbing wall AND some books?

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

#82

Post by 6510 »

raverbashing wrote: post #56
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…

Or, universities should forbid any teacher from requiring the purchase of any book Having it as a reference? Sure. Requiring its purchase for a semester, as in, your grades will depend on it? No no

Exactly, lets take it a step further and forbid selling (teaching) things you don't own.

If I desire to charge people to teach them what an array is I must provide the explanation of the array myself.

If the book is really to good to skip a teaching license must be acquired that names the specific chapters and their purpose. The rights holder doesn't have to sell by chapter but if anyone wants to make a more specific version at a better price they can.

Ideally work towards a single book for each year with a wiki for educators to debate changes and updates.

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

#83

Post by latency-guy2 »

zbrozek wrote: post #62
fallingknife wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The number is around 32 for boomers, and 34 for millennials.

The age range is very specific, say 95th percentile onwards, else you can just say 18 - 39, but you would find that even more unreasonable, despite it including roughly the same population.

It's not wide. Mortgage payoff is not tracked as much as anyone would like.

> A modest increase in income or net worth is meaningless if housing has skyrocketed in comparison.

If the housing prices are temporarily inflated or stagnate for a few years, then it truly does not matter as much as you would like it to be. No generation is immune to market conditions, nor should be.

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

#84

Post by ketkev »

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 teacher/professor would be able to buy the book and can then copy and hand out the parts they are actually using for their classes.

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

#85

Post by ecspike »

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…

I spent a lot of time in undergrad researching to find the books cheap online or buy the Indian paperback version that is only hardcover in the US. The oncampus bookstore gave peanuts when you sold it back and some profs were oblivious and would just require the newest version when the older version would work.

There needs to be a minimum amount of content that has materially changed in order to call it a new edition. Moving questions around and adding a word here or there is not cool.

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

#86

Post by bo1024 »

efitz wrote: post #58

States should mandate that public universities use open textbooks. Federal government should make open textbooks, open journals, and FRAND licensing of patents mandatory as a condition of subsidies and other largesse like student loan guarantees.

That’s a good idea, and it should be paired with grants or some other compensation/support for people who develop those open books.

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

#87

Post by chaosite »

zbrozek wrote: post #62
fallingknife wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I mean, you're not wrong, but note that in 2023, Millennials and "25-to-39-year-olds" are one and the same. That is, I agree that this is not the best comparison, but the age range isn't arbitrary.

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

#88

Post by hgsgm »

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…

A prof being greedy or thrifty or uncaring about textbook isn't strongly correlated to teaching ability.

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

#89

Post by xur17 »

gonehome wrote: post #76
8organicbits wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I still remember my math teacher that specifically told us to get a certain version of the textbook, and the version he specified was 1 or 2 editions old. Ended up costing me something like $20 to buy used vs $100 new.

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

#90

Post by hgsgm »

x0x0 wrote: post #23
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…

Bundled prices and and a lack of price visibility often promote extortionate pricing, bribes, etc. The value of the current arrangement is students can't ignore the prices. I'd bet a nice lunch that if books were part of tuition, the net dollars flowing to publishers would increase.

Why would schools send money to publishers that they can hoard for themselves?
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