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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

#91

Post by xur17 »

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)

I'd love for this to be a standard across ALL pricing, not just tuition. Any costs that I am required to pay should be put into the base price that is advertised.

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

#92

Post by zbrozek »

chaosite wrote: post #87
zbrozek wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That's true, but it captures folks across such a wide range of stages of life as to be useless. Breaking it down into two to four buckets would make the point more convincing.

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

#93

Post by andruby »

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 studied a semester abroad (Erasmus) in Portugal and I was so surprised that the expectation there was to get the course book photocopied. The university had a copy room where you pay for a literal copied version of the book that someone made with a xerox machine.

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

#94

Post by [deleted] »

r3trohack3r wrote: post #74

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 choosin…

[deleted]

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

#95

Post by aio2 »

giantg2 wrote: post #80
aio2 wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Oh, okay.

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

#96

Post by hgsgm »

shigawire wrote: post #16
the_only_law wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The recent strategy I’ve heard of is to release new version of books with special online codes needed to access other content. That way, the students can’t even purchase used books.

That's how it works for many courses now. A strategy I thought was fair at my school was - the main text is free, but you can pay for extra practice problems written by the professor for like $50. That seemed fair to me since I know these adjunct professors aren't making anything for the amount of time they spend.

What subject is this that doesn't have thousands of practice problems available for free online or in a $10 used book?

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

#97

Post by xur17 »

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!

I wonder if you can use 15% from each "edition" (since they're all basically the same anyways).

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

#98

Post by hgsgm »

sowbug wrote: post #42
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.

Hang on there. A legal hazard is not necessarily a moral hazard.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moral_hazard

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moral_hazard

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

#99

Post by AHOHA »

loeg wrote: post #77
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?

Canada, of course!(1)

(1) https://vm.tiktok.com/ZMYEGwwSD/

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

#100

Post by wholinator2 »

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…

I attend a school that bundles books and a laptop into tuition. It's honestly a god send and when i want to keep a book i can just go online and buy a cheaper used version. Plus, the discontinued books get sold by the school for $2 each. Most of them are just management and accounting stuff I'm not interested but I've built up a pretty significant biology and chemistry library for less than $30.

And this is the cheapest college in the state for me. It really emphasizes how lots of the cost of college is just the fancy name on the diploma.

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