The absolute worst thing is "course packs" that some of my classes have. These are PDFs from something like Harvard Business Review that we have to pay for. It's about ~$60 for the digital set, and half the time once I get it I realized I could have found half of the PDFs online for free. Every student has to buy them. In some classes they won't distribute the digital copies so you have to pay even more to go to the insanely corrupt "Campus Copy Center" (private business) and get a printed copy of the same shit everyone else got loosely bound together for $100.
I think this part is slowly changing, but it was in legal limbo for years, so many universities have been insisting on the course-packs-with-copyright-clearance option out of risk-aversion. Most of the cost of the course packs ends up being the royalty payments for the included materials.
Georgia State University was willing to try their luck at arguing that distributing articles and book excerpts to a classroom as reading material is covered under fair use. They were sued in 2008, and eventually mostly won their case in 2012: http://chronicle.com/article/Long-Awaited-Ruling-in/131859/
This doesn't settle every possible version of the case that could come up, but it at least gives a stronger basis for arguing that course packs with copyright clearance are in many cases unnecessary. I've personally been also using just regular hyperlinks to material available as PDFs online (hosted by the article author, usually). But some universities (not mine) require that any reading material necessary to successfully complete the course must be officially available at the university bookstore and listed in the syllabus before the course starts. This started out as a student protection measure, to ensure that completing the course can't depend on weird material students will have difficulty acquiring, but can also have counterproductive effects. However with the outcome of the Georgia State case, it may be possible to satisfy the requirement by putting the articles on electronic reserve at the library instead of printing a course packet, since that's now (probably) legal.
I'm currently taking some classes at my community college.
Besides the insane prices, one things I've noticed is that students don't get their student aid paid out until weeks into the semester, so you either have the choice to buy books at incredibly high prices at the college bookstore (higher even brand new compared to Amazon), or you have to wait 6 weeks before the aid is available for students to shop elsewhere.
I teach at a community college, and as it was explained to me by our financial aid office, student aid isn't paid out until a few weeks in as a mechanism to prevent financial aid fraud. Every year people sign up for classes, collecting their financial aid money, and then never show up. Community colleges are the primary target for this type of fraud, since we have open admissions.
The federal government is not okay with this, so they instituted a system of mandatory reporting where we have to keep track of whether or not a student shows up during the first few weeks. That way they know who not to send aid to when that time is up. If we fail to properly report this then the college is expected to send money to the federal government to make up the difference.
So it's not a trick on our part to get you to use the campus bookstore. I personally encourage my students not to use the bookstore, since I think marking up the prices on textbooks is inappropriate. I've also pushed hard for the adoption of open textbooks in my department, but it looks like that's going to be at least two years away.
Textbooks are insultingly expensive. Why is it a student's first lesson on copyright law is having to choose between a legitimate copy of a textbook at a sky-high price while eating ramen noodles, or getting a pirated copy and living large?
Then there's the paper publishing racket which is just as perverse.
This whole system needs to be disrupted so hard nobody even recognizes it.
Part of the issue is that there are many moving parts in the value chain: students, profs, authors, publishers, distributors, and bookstores. The exploitation has persisted mainly because the decision maker in the sales process is not the client! Mainstream publishers are milking this fact as much as they possibly can. Insultingly so, you're right. The main problem is that schools and universities are incredibly slow to adapt so the racket continues, but with students taking textbook decisions into their own hands things will change.
I'm optimistic that within the next couple of years, the $130 price tags will be a thing of the past. The market says so.
As long as professors are allowed to write textbooks, others in their department will be pressured to require them. Every given textbook will have several coauthors at different schools, each contributing a chapter, making the book required for students spread across the country.
Ordinarily I'd put my bet on market forces, and I really hope you're right... This is so much closer to monopolistic extortion though, I don't see it changing without lawsuits, regulation, or large donations to University presidents contingent on new textbook policies.
The last option is intriguing. Just reorganizing things so that textbooks are covered by tuition and have to be paid for out of departmental budgets could dramatically change the situation overnight.
OK, I bought your stinking book. I learned calculus using Apostol in 1962, so it had better be good. Apostol was stinking hard, so yours had better be easy to understand. :-) I'm not sure what I need it for. My children are all adults, although I did teach them calculus in high school.
For most of the students I know it's more like the choice between having to pool resources between classmates and buy the textbook or pirating it and still living on ramen noodles.
In case you missed it, here's the blueprint for a DepartmentPress revenue model for universities:
> I am trying to get my [[colleagues from the]] department to create an introductory meteorology textbook.
> A pretty decent online book could be written ... we could charge $30 for it
> and use the money for an undergraduate scholarship.
$20 sale price - $10 printing = $10 profit x 300 students = $3000 / semester
We're not braking the bank with these profits, but at least first-year undergraduates will save $100/course/semester, which is money they will use for beer instead.
Realistically, it's money they'll use to buy the Stewart's Calculus ($200) [1] (which, let's be clear, is covering 350 year old subject matter). And then they'll use their financial aid to buy beer.
All of these intro texts (at $150-$200) are broken. They do not go into the subject matter deep enough to use as reference later in coursework or a career and their too expensive to disseminate knowledge widely. Realistically at $30 it's still too expensive to compete with free. But until annotation and referencing UX catches up for e-books dead-tree books still win for learning (I know people manage with PDFs and annotation, but I haven't had success with e-books for anything except for recreational reading). And I think there is a hurdle that is difficult to get over with getting other universities to adopt a university press book from a different university especially for an introductory text.
Even worse is when the intro classes mandate the book, only for the professor to not use it because the book is so weak and useless. $150 paperweight that can't be resold to the used book store because they come out with a new edition every year.
I was really happy that a calculus professor of mine told everyone that they could buy an older edition of this book if they wanted, and he would supply his own homework problem sets as handouts rather than depend upon the ones in the book. For the reading assignments, his syllabus listed page numbers for the past three editions, so everyone could keep up.
For $25 I was able to buy a copy two editions prior, which was what pretty much everyone else in the class was using too.
Of course this doesn't help actually solve the problem, since someone else had bought that book for $200 and they then saw it depreciate by $175 when they sold it to me used.
In India, at least at IITs, we get assignments and course material on email or as hardcopy kept at campus photocopy centre from where students can get copies at cheap rates. We hardly bought textbooks. The once we bought were very cheap. I think the most expensive one I bought was for $8 at current rates. Don't you guys have libraries ? Whenever I needed to consult a textbook I used to go to the library and read it there.
Moreover we get "Indian" edition of those books which are written by Americans and those used to be as cheap as Indian author text books.
On flipkart (Indian version of amazon) Introduction to algorithm is for INR621 which is roughly $10
When more than a student or two has the idea of using the library's copy, it becomes a battle over who will be able to check out the limited number of copies. Sometimes this becomes serious enough that the library will freeze the availability of a book if it's been assigned that semester.
Obviously there is something to be learned about the price differences in the different versions, but there is also a non-trivial difference in quality. I've had International Versions that were missing whole 10-page sequences, pages out of order, and different problem sets whose answers had factual errors. Also the lower grade paper is an obstacle to book reuse.
By this I don't mean to be negative, I just believe the final answer involves more reasonable digital distribution; I'm sick of the myth of "getting the exact same book for cheaper" because I've been burned by it a number of times.
The campus library may well only have one copy on reserve for a course with 300 students, or they may not stock the newest edition.
The latter part gets to be a problem in the instance where the textbook publisher decides to publish a new edition every year or two just to ensure that you'll be doing the wrong homework exercises unless you're using the same new copy the professor has.
Crazy, all the reading list on my course are provided as pdf to the students and included as part of the course fees. Maybe that's one of the reasons it was voted UK University of the Year, 2013.
My UK experience on a science course was that any mentioned books were highly optional and all course material was available for free on the internal network: lecture notes, slides and question sheets. Any reading material was only a suggestion, and available in the libraries anyway. Courses where you had to get books, e.g. history, the texts were in libraries. There was even a slight kerfuffle when the only way to get notes for one of the lecture courses was to buy their book, rather than giving them away as PDF as was normal. The idea of being forced to spend hundreds of £s on textbooks is crazy.
Likewise. The professor/lecturer taught the material in the class, with spoken word and blackboard scrawlings, with some paper handouts for the occasional supplement and for question papers. Recommended books were for those who wanted to go deeper in a particular area and were available for loan in the library and were very much indicated as so; you could pass every exam with no more than notes taken in class.
The idea that a book would be necessary for a class that a teacher should be teaching seems crazy.
Same experience here. In the rare case where a key text was unavailable in the university library, the lecturers would usually email us scans of the relevant chapters. Alternatively, interlibrary loans - typically from the British Library, so we had access to pretty much any published text - were free of charge.
It doesn't fix the "custom book" problem, but if you're an instructor you should encourage your institution/bookstore to mandate price comparison for textbooks.
We run white-labelled price comparison sites for about 350 campuses, and the stores at those campuses end up winning 80% of the sales. The need to look competitive against online retailers is a really powerful incentive for the local store to do everything possible to get lower-cost options on the shelves (and we do things like help them get more used/rental books, lower prices strategically, etc).
I love verbasoft! It's like a university-sponsored price comparison site. I believe the model is that instead of having a central university bookstore that sells the canon copy, students are directed to a site like http://davis.verbacompare.com/ that shows textbook prices on Amazon, Albris, Half.com, and a few others.
For students at universities that haven't yet partnered with verbasoft, I made a textbook search engine in college that does essentially the same thing: http://textbooksplease.com
None of the books I bought in school can be sold. The class requires the latest edition, and the homeworks are just slightly different. You are force to buy new ones every semester, and the window for selling it back is getting smaller and smaller.
I'm very happy I went to a University that had text book rental. When I was in school it was $7 per credit. So taking a full 16 credit load would cost $112 per semester for text books. Regardless of if the course used one, ten, or no books the fee was included. So I paid $7 for text book rental for water polo (1 credit "class" with no books), $21 for an upper level CS course with perhaps 1 book, and $21 for an English class that may have required reading 10 books. We never had to deal with selling the books back since we never bought or owned the books. If after a course, particularly a course in your major, if you wished to keep the book you could by paying for it.
EDIT: I have heard that most people would spend $112 on a single course, let alone even a single book. I don't think the publishers and text book companies really like(d) my University. Yes, this is in the U.S. too. I think if a school's student body comes together and "demands" text book rental they can get it. Talk to your student council and apply pressure on the staff and faculty to incorporate it.
These guys just got a deal with Mark Cuban on Shark Tank. They let you rent textbooks for $5 a day. http://www.packbackbooks.com/
When I was in college, I figured out the textbook scheme by my second semester. We would buy expensive books and next semester the bookstore wouldn't buy them back because they were "outdated editions."
So every year after that, I never bought any textbooks. I would either find the professor's powerpoints online, or make a friend who did buy it and make copies of their book. If I absolutely needed a book I would rent it from Chegg or buy used off Amazon, but now Pack Back books looks like an even better solution.
I think most of the HN crowd is too old to have experienced this, but even worse are "course textbook access codes" that some schools require students to buy a stupid token that locks them into a high price regardless of whether or not the purchased unit is used, new, or pirated. This especially goes on at certain lower-tier institutions like cc's, FPUs, etc.
Several of my younger friends in the 20s or going to continuing ed have reported on this phenomenon.
I can vouch for those access codes. Until there's some sort of bulletproof DRM (that negates even taking screenshots), there will always be the availability of pirating any sort of print-based media.
You can't get a search function with that hard-cover stuff.
In France, the universities and engineering schools I know use polycopiés, which are teacher-made, paperback bound books (sometimes actual LaTeX-formatted text, sometimes just printed versions of course slides), given to students freely or priced according to their actual printing cost (in average, 200 pages long, ~5€).
Granted, sometimes the quality is not as good as that of a rich textbook, but it is usually sufficient for the course. And much lighter to carry around as well.
Besides, the university library contains a small amount of textbooks, which is usually sufficient for those few interested students which want to learn more.
The author left out one major reason textbooks are so expensive-- course adoption lists (i.e. which books go with which courses) are kept private or disorganized so that students or businesses can't offer rival "Search by Course" type sites without scraping the local bookstore. As a result students go to the bookstore which knows their requirements unlike Amazon.com.
There was a law that was supposed to make this easier, to make it so that students have more time to look for books rather than the week before the semester starts.
Starting in 2010 schools that receive federal financial aid are required to list the ISBN and title of books (or author, title, publisher, and date if an ISBN is not available) at the time of course registration.
In practice, though, one wonders how many courses have their texts listed as "TBD" up until the week prior to the semester.
The law was called the Higher Education Opportunity Act, and the bookstores responded to it mainly by offering seperate, inconvenient search forms. If you found your way there, you you'd then have to copy and paste the ISBN.
The law was good in spirit but in letter it didn't require making the data available. A good law would just be that every school has to offer all the data they send to the bookstore to everyone for bulk download.
Yes. I've pirated books from online and among peers. Most of the text books I have used are available on the Internet. Only a few exceptions.
But as I take upper level classes I have stopped purchasing text books unless required and necessary. I still like holding a book or reading it off my iPad but most of the time I prefer not to read anything but my notes. Quality of textbooks vary, just like quality of online sources vary. Textbooks should be reference. Teachers are the one supposed to explain the details to me, but few can do that well :/ well, teaching is hard.
After about a year into undergrad through an online program I've been pleased to find that most of my classes have used affordable books affordable, mass-market sources.
In one case I simply opted for an alternative course rather than pay $148.00 for the textbook.
At the same time I've been doing ID Verified courses on edX. edX courses and materials are a fraction of the cost with vastly superior interfaces for everything.
Rather than just fixing the cost of materials at traditional Universities I hope to see the whole racket of higher education broken by the MOOCs.
I understand how textbooks can be expensive. It's simple supply and demand. Fewer people buy textbooks than other types of books, so they cost more.
That's where my empathy ends. It seems to me that there's a huge problem with unethical sales practices and underhanded tricks to reduce the used textbook market. This article's title should have been about the shady textbook companies rather than simply the prices of new books.
This becomes especially clear when you look at the prices of international editions of the textbook, which are often 1/10th of the price of the us equivalent book. Such a price difference isn't caused by a publisher worried about volume. If it sells for lower elsewhere, why not here.
There are plenty of sites dedicated entirely to or with sections of college textbooks.[1]
A good starting point is to simply Google the title of the work you are looking for and append a "filetype:PDF."
For example, I found no less than six copies, all hosted by various universities, of Rosen's Discrete Mathematics this way.[2]
If you are talking about a market for having pirated physical copies mailed to you my I ask what advantage would that service have over a print shop like Kinkos? Do places like Kinkos refuse to print copyrighted material?
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