
The Textbook Industry & Greed: My Story - lukethomas
http://lukethomas.com/the-textbook-industry-greed-its-getting-worse/
======
impendia
I teach in a university mathematics department. I don't doubt that stories
like this are real, but very few of my colleagues collude with, or indeed have
much patience with, the publishing industry.

Indeed, the opposite is common. Walter Rudin is the author of several well-
known books on mathematical analysis. The publisher, McGraw-Hill, jacked up
the price of his books to stratospheric levels, and Rudin fought back -- which
wasted him a lot of time, and (I believe) cost him a substantial amount of
money. All so that students wouldn't be gouged when buying a copy of his book.

In the end, Rudin eventually lost. $95.56 for a very skinny (and quite
popular) book on Amazon right now.

Moral: As content providers we don't need to figure out better ways to work
with the publishing industry. We need to figure out better ways to work
without them.

~~~
bootload
_"... As content providers we don't need to figure out better ways to work
with the publishing industry. We need to figure out better ways to work
without them. ..."_

Photocopier.

~~~
dredmorbius
Really? How about scanner and OCR?

~~~
bootload
_"... How about scanner and OCR? ..."_

I was thinking of school books & standing in the line for photocopiers for
reference books in the library.

~~~
lynnae
My graduate university kept a good number of copies of required texts in the
library that could be lent out for the length of the course. Reserved copies
(i.e., can't be taken out of the reserved area) were available as well. No
student had to buy any books unless they wanted to.

I think that's my favorite system.

------
dmils4
Custom editions and packaged access codes are the last futile attempt that
publishers bookstores and professors have against cheaper Internet
alternatives. The one thing your writeup didn't touch upon is digital
textbooks- which the publishers actually love since eBooks are usually
rentals, so the secondary markets like Amazon and AbeBooks are cut out.

I am from SlugBooks- a web app that compares prices between the college
bookstore and online options for ~800 universities in US and Canada. This
topic hits close to home. We've been watching bookstores and publishers do
this for years, and it's only getting worse. When professors assign customized
or packaged books, it becomes nearly impossible to save money through sites
like Amazon.

The most surprising thing is how many professors eat up the bullshit that
custom editions actually help. They're supposed to be champions of critical
thinking. Profs WANT to save students money - that's why they opt for custom
editions (since publishers tell them it will save their students money). It's
just sad.

~~~
ohgodthecat3
I had one college course with a custom edition and we still had the option of
using the regular edition, (all the page numbers were the same the custom
editions only difference was a lack of extra chapters that we weren't going to
cover).

The custom edition was cheaper than the regular edition and this is the only
reason the professor did this. The book didn't seem to have very many used
copies being sold as it was an advanced class and people were more likely to
keep the book than sell it.

Just providing context to how a custom edition can be cheaper if the professor
does work.

I've also had many professors write their own book and give it for free in pdf
or let you buy it for $20 at the university copy center already bound with the
option of buying supplemental books that they thought were of good quality.

Maybe my engineering department was different but it seemed most of my
professors tried to work to help the students not have to pay large amounts.

~~~
dmils4
Hey, thanks for this. There are corner cases where custom editions make sense,
but overall they cause far more harm than good.

-The biggest issue is that custom editions segment the global secondary market for a given textbook into slivers of useless fragments. Instead of Campbell Biology, Regular Edition being bought and sold between Stanford students and students at every other college in the country (this significant supply drives the price down), Campbell Biology, Stanford Custom Edition is only ever going to be bought/sold by Stanford students. This hurts students in multiple ways: 1) the bookstore is the only place they can BUY the book from. Period. 2) the bookstore is the only place they can SELL the book too. Custom editions are a perfect storm for bookstores/publishers.

-Custom editions are cheaper than what the regular edition costs in terms of what the bookstore would charge for each, but if you compare prices on the regular edition online, there are usually significantly cheaper prices out there than what the custom is being sold for at the bookstore.

-In the rare case where a custom edition is being used, but a regular edition is acceptable - the bookstore presenting both options and telling you to pick one will almost never result in you considering that the regular edition would be cheaper online. By adding this extra noise, they artificially make custom books look more affordable.

I agree - there are tons of professors that are on the right side of this
fight. Textbooks SHOULD be free. And the fact that custom editions are even
adopted is proof that professors care about students. They're just a terribly
poor solution which reinforces the problem instead of solving it.

Give the publishers credit - custom editions are a genius business move.

~~~
lukethomas
As unhappy as I am with the publishers, I agree that custom textbooks are a
brilliant business move. It's no wonder why they send in sales teams - it's
very lucrative!

------
crazygringo
I'm amazed that universities ALLOW their professors to make payment-required
textbook-tied online exercises part of their courses.

You're already paying tuition, you shouldn't have to pay extra just to do the
homework. That's insane. It's no different from having to pay additional money
to take the midterm.

After all, the professors and publishers make money from this, not the
university. As far as I can tell, it can only reflect badly on a university --
so why don't they have policies in place against this? Correct me if I'm
wrong, but it seems like a blatant abuse of power for financial gain on the
part of professors.

~~~
absolute-ly
Absolutely agree with this. It's crazy. But if you only have to do it a few
times, e.g., as a young undergraduate, you're unlikely to think about it much.
You just pay the fees and think nothing of it. You've got other things to
think about.

But if you got through some more rounds of education, then you might start to
think. A professor that requires her students to buy a textbook she authored
is something to think about.

What I found interesting in one of the degrees I got was that students did not
even need the textbooks. The assignments and handouts were not tied to
textbooks, though textbooks were certainly recommended and required as usual
on the syllabi. So I decided not to buy any textbooks. I just used ones from
the library. I learned more doing it this way than I ever did from mindlessly
buying textbooks.

Still, the whole time I kept thinking, if every student tried this it would be
unworkable. Professors did put materials, including texts, on reserve though,
so "sharing" a copy of a text is not itself a crazy idea. Fortunately, few of
my fellow students were keen to read the library's textbooks. As such, they
were always readily available. I would routinely have about 7 texts checked
out at any one time.

One of the things that kept the other students away from the library's
textbook holdings was, I think, that they believed only the latest editions
would be useful. Syllabi tell students to buy some specific edition of some
textbook. And students, if they are fresh undergraduates, are very obedient.
They will do as they are told.

But I found the dates on these texts mattered little. In some cases the best
texts I found were "dated". But when you read lots of differenet texts, you
get a much clearer picture of a subject area. And you can see the coverage as
it has evolved. You can tell what's changed, and that itself is very useful
knowledge. Now I'm absolutely hooked on this method of learning. I always seek
out old texts as well as new ones.

The idea that "only the latest edition will work for this course" is another
of the textbook publisher's little schemes. I'm sure they try to get faculty
to use only the latest editions.

Interestingly, one can see the same dynamics played out in software. The
hunger for the "new" thing, the bleeding edge, without any regard for history
and how we got here. The obedience aspect is there too. To pick a random
example, Microsoft tells people that they need Windows 8, and they obey.
Little may have changed in 10-20-30-or-more years, the changes might be only
cosmetic, but lots of people wouldn't know any different, because they focus
only on what is considered "current". Like fresh undergraduates, they want to
be told which edition to buy without ever thinking much about it.

~~~
yuhong
Though major releases of software typically does have a lot more changes than
editions of textbooks.

~~~
absolute-ly
Indeed I have noticed textbooks often only contain minor changes from version
to version. In other cases, entire subject areas can change as research
progresses. But sometimes the only way you get to know that is by looking at
older texts.

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.

~~~
yuhong
Most of the time, software vendors do document new features and changes.

~~~
absolute-ly
There's a difference between a list of "new features" (staying with the
Microsoft example) and being able to diff the source code against a previous
version and evaulate the changes for yourself.

It's like the syllabus that says you need the latest version of the textbook
but does not tell you why the previous version will not do.

Look at it this way: in "most cases" (whether it's software or textbooks),
from version to version, there's more substance that stays the same than
substance which changes.

Not sure about you but I'm a little wary of buying the latest version of an
expensive textbook in order to gain a small number of reatively minor changes
that I could easily identify, and take note of, by comparing the latest
version with the previous one.

------
ericdykstra
It took me three years to realize that I didn't actually need textbooks. My
senior year, I didn't buy a single book, just the course packs put together by
my professors (if they had them).

The course packs were either all original material, or an original composition
of parts of case studies, essays, and text books; they were almost always
under $50 (except in the case where licensing the copied portions drove the
cost higher).

If a professor is actually just teaching out of a standard text book, all the
relevant information is taught in lecture. If there is an express need for a
textbook, it's on reserve at the school library.

I would urge every student to only consider purchasing a textbook if they
really think they need it two weeks into class. Textbooks are overpriced, only
a small amount of the information is relevant to the class, and the
information is often redundant and can be found in lectures/slides. (if the
idea of coming to class without a book is scary, check your school book
store's policy on returning books)

~~~
tedunangst
Did you read the article? It wasn't actually the textbook he needed, it was
the unique online access code. They don't keep spares of those in the library.

~~~
artursapek
The comment is still on-topic. I've begun to have the same realization halfway
into college.

------
mherdeg
Really, in order to complete your coursework you need a one-time-use "access
code" that came with your textbook, and no one can share books with anyone
else or borrow them from the library?

It boggles my mind that Stallman went out and spelled out a totally crazy-
sounding future in "The Right to Read" (<http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-
to-read.html>), and yet somehow bits and pieces of that future keep arriving.

------
dpkendal
It's shocking how close this dilemma is to the one facing the protagonist in
Richard Stallman's essay, "The Right to Read."
(<http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.html>) In fact, though its
depiction of the future is still far-fetched in some respects, the salient
points seem to have turned out exactly as he predicted.

------
aprofessor
The system that people here would like to see disrupted is a system that may
be going away by itself. Publishers see that it is going to be too hard to
sustain a revenue stream by selling books in the future --- they have been
moving to services for quite a while. Students are too good at getting books.
My students buy foreign editions at 10% of the US price. They download pdf
scans from torrents. There are many ways to find used books. Stupid measures
like the "useless new edition every 3 years" are just delaying tactics.
Instead, publishers are selling services, like online testing and homework
grading (cf. Pearson partnering with Coursera). These require students to
purchase access codes keyed to individuals, and may be harder to get around.
(The textbooks are often thrown in for prices around $20. That should tell you
where the money is.) The publishers know they have a great market here.
Professors hate grading papers, it hardly counts at all toward professional
advancement, and it takes time and energy away from research, which does
count. All that said, the circumstances described in the original article are
appalling.

~~~
HarryHirsch
> Instead, publishers are selling services, like online testing and homework
> grading (cf. Pearson partnering with Coursera).

This is the place where it's going to get worse. The traditional model is that
testing and homework exercises are done by TAs, but universities are finding
out that you can contract out these services to the textbook publisher.

------
startupfounder
My first business was a college textbook trading site for UMass Amherst. I was
approached for a partnership by i2hub which later became connectU. I was a
sophomore in college, couldn't even afford a laptop or computer and was blown
away at how much students were loosing when selling their textbooks back at
the end of the semester. There are 25k students spending $1k/year on books and
selling them back for a max of 25% of the purchase price. The community was
loosing $10m every year. I started the site cause I was pissed off and was
scratching my own itch. I didn't have time for politics. My site looked like
shit, but within a few months over 10% of the population was usin it and I was
making money.

~~~
ShellyBeach
This is sort of OT, but I always love to share this little tidbit of my time
at Xavier (I graduated in 2001). At the end of the semester, the bookstore
would put out these huge boxes and when they would refuse to buy back people's
books (because the same book was not being used the following semester),
people would just chuck their books in the boxes. I'm sure the bookstore was
just selling those books to some other efollett (or whatever) bookstore. I
used to go and snatch tons of books out of those boxes and sell them on
half.com or amazon marketplace...similarly, profs would put the sample
textbooks outside their office doors for people to take if they wanted
them...those went on half.com and amazon marketplace too...I at least took a
bite out of my textbook expenses that way.

------
px1999
Pretty much everything surrounding tertiary education needs disruptive
companies to come in and restructure it - but particularly the dodginess
around textbooks / school bookstores.

On the surface the conditions even almost seem ideal - you have an existing
oligopoly where each player has huge overheads and then on top of this add
huge markups. You have a somewhat captive market (the students are entirely
captive, while the professors are generally pretty free to choose the books
that they want), and a product that's targeted towards younger, educated
people (people to whom technology isn't a huge burden).

The only thing that's really standing in the way of someone shaking things up
is in convincing the professors that your option is better than whatever's
being offered by the incumbents. I really, really hope that at some point soon
someone takes on the publishers - with a serious product, they'd have the
potential to win, and more importantly, to do something useful for making
education more accessible.

~~~
HarryHirsch
> Pretty much everything surrounding tertiary education needs disruptive
> companies to come in and restructure it - but particularly the dodginess
> around textbooks / school bookstores.

Textbooks for introductory courses don't change much between editions. The
pagination may change slightly, as might the odd illustration, and that is
that. What needs to happen is that the students need to get off their
collective asses and buy the previous edition of the text from their
colleagues from the year before. Nothing else will bring prices down. It's not
likely to happen, considering just how spoonfed students at your average
college are.

~~~
px1999
I mostly got away without buying new textbooks after first-year - there were a
couple of classes where I needed them, but in a lot of cases I knew people
who'd taken it before and lent me the book / the prof had kept with the old
version (or in some cases gave old as well as new question/page references),
but I've found that it's the first year courses where they mix up the books
the most.

My own personal experiences have been with archaeology texts where the
chapter-end studies were replaced with a different culture, physics texts
where the figures within the questions were changed and maths texts where the
questions were the same but reordered. Yeah, you can learn the same stuff from
the textbook's main content, but if you get assigned a list of questions to
complete and those questions don't match with this years' then buying the
previous textbook is essentially useless. In my later years, the homework was
never "do these questions from the book", so the texts dated less.

------
jfaucett
Here's a proposed solution: Do away with textbooks. Have tax payer money go to
a national comittee of member professors who work on updating the standard
curricula (with good version control), any time there's a change or new
hotspot in the area of say cell biology, they can review/update and "push"
their changes to the master for merging. Then the teachers can just "pull" the
updated version to their pc's in the classroom, students could do the same.
Have the same thing at the college level. If a student for some reason has no
internet access (shouldn't internet access be a right by now, try functioning
without it), he can receive a printed version. There are so many positives to
this (environmental, educational), but I suppose the interest groups involved
who profit from "learning" (which should be the most important free/open thing
we promote), would never let this happen ...

~~~
scottfr
A master textbook designed by a committee? It would probably be the most
boring dull thing ever.

Worse, this is effectively what you already have in state school systems like
Texas where you have a committee approving the sanctioned books for the public
schools.

The results of this is the inclusion of intelligent design, downplaying of
evolution, etc... etc..

~~~
Wingman4l7
Well, the biology textbooks put together by states north of the Mason-Dixon
Line should be alright... =P

------
AYBABTME
I had a similar problem with a Chemistry professor who thought it was
brilliant to let students do their homework on a website held by Pearson. The
access to the website was conditional to the purchase of a code found in the
textbook, which code was expiring at the end of the semester (4 months after
registration). She also found that it would be a brilliant idea to give 30% of
the term's mark on homework; it would give a chance to student who had a hard
time on the exams.

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.

~~~
HarryHirsch
The reason that happened wasn't because the lady is getting kickbacks from the
publisher, it was that she wanted to unload the setting of questions and the
grading on someone else. It used to be that you had TAs for that when the
workload became to large for the professor to handle, but we are seeing third
parties moving into this market niche. (Hey! An idea for a startup!)

There is not enough information here to decide if the professor is lazy or the
university is overworking her - we would need to know about her course load,
class sizes and other duties. However, there is no excuse for this stealth
increase in tuition, this cannot be allowed to happen.

------
metafour
CU Denver undergrad students seeking a degree are forced to take a few 3000+
level courses to meet a cultural diversity requirement. Most other general
education requirements can be met by taking equivalent courses at a community
college which is what I did. I've always speculated that these are required in
order to help the college get some extra money from students. Some of the
options for these courses have required materials that can only be purchased
from the university bookstore and they consist mainly of printouts of
wikipedia articles.

~~~
learc83
My school changed it so that the AP US History test only counted if you got a
5. If you got a 4, you were exempt from taking US History, but you didn't get
credit, so you had to take another history class instead.

If you made a 4 on the AP US history exam, you most likely learned more than
the average student who made an A in college US History.

They also severely limit credit by examination. It's all about making people
pay for classes.

------
HarryHirsch
There is an issue that hasn't come up yet: why does a professor recommend a
certain text for a class instead of the students buying the textbook that they
like best? After all, for each kind of course the various publishers each have
a textbook on offer.

Here's the dirty secret: with the teacher's edition there comes access to the
solutions and a bank of exercises and test questions. If there's a set text
it's likely that the students pay for the convenience of whoever teaches the
class.

~~~
tedunangst
Nothing prevents you from reading any textbook you like. But, among many
reasons why there's a standard text, is so that you can tell the students
"Read chapter 5 about fluid dynamics, it's on the exam." Then after the exam,
nobody can complain "my textbook didn't cover the same material, you need to
adjust my grade".

------
pytrin
I'm a bit surprised at this article - I studied Physics in the Tel Aviv
Univesity (Israel), and I could borrow every course book from the library.
Those weren't even necessary, all of the course materials were available from
the course website as summaries, formula handbooks and so forth.

U.S universities don't stock their libraries with multiple copies of their
course books?

~~~
dmils4
Typically there are 1-2 copies on reserve at the library, but you can only
check them out for a couple hours at the time. With a class of 50+ students
that's not a workable solution for most. And most don't even try anyway..

~~~
pytrin
Wow. We had dozens of copies of the important books, and you could borrow it
for 2-4 weeks at a time (depending on the book).

~~~
autophil
That's never been my experience. One or two books only, and I'm not even sure
students were allowed to sign it out of the library.

~~~
pytrin
Are you referring to TAU? what department were you in?

~~~
autophil
No, business.

------
noonespecial
We used to pass around photocopies of "the diffs".

These were just what you think. The scant things added to this years "edition"
so that you couldn't use last years used one. They were rarely more than a few
pages long and mostly full of hints on where things got moved to instead of
legitimately new content.

~~~
Wingman4l7
Not to mention the typos and inaccuracies that remain year after year.

------
stevencorona
I would love to see the textbook industry disrupted.. but how? It's so
ingrained in the system. Textbook rentals are a start, but still expensive.

I even knew some college students that looked "down" on buying used books,
like you were buying someone's used underwear.

~~~
jedberg
I had a professor, way back in the early 00s, who was helping solve this
problem. We had no textbook in the class. Instead, our readings were all
recently published papers. On the class website he linked to all the papers so
we could download and print them if we wanted to. He also negotiated with the
author of each paper for the rights to reprint the paper. You could buy the
"textbook", which was just a bound photocopy of the papers, for $10 (the cost
of printing).

If more professors did this, then the problem would be solved.

~~~
mjn
I'm doing this with a class I'm teaching, but I think it works better for
small research/discussion-oriented seminars than larger introductory courses,
where recent papers are most relevant. For intro courses, coming up with good
intro materials is a fairly hard problem. If I were teaching an intro course
on theory of computation, for example, I would probably still use Michael
Sipser's _Theory of Computation_ , because it's good, and I don't think I
would be likely able to put together an equally good replacement out of freely
available materials. I would, though, try to make sure that the course didn't
prevent students from using the previous edition (which is now available
cheaply).

------
amiltolia
Full disclosure - I run Reference Tree (<http://reference-tree.com>) we rent
textbooks by chapter from Publishers including those mentioned in the post
focussed on the UK higher education market.

Many professors in the UK resist attempts for custom editions and for single
access to textbooks, indeed there are those who even go so far as to _avoid_
textbooks pushed in this way - preferring academic relevance over expense
account dinners.

I am surprised, in fact very surprised that a university would allow such a
connection between a book and a course. it goes against principles of higher
education and education in general. What happens if you take the course but
can not afford the text (and did not have the patience and drive shown by
Luke?) How lacking in belief in their own capabilities to teach and research
must an academic be if they must think of these types of activities to shore
up their own income?

Many UK academics we have spoken to would rather use the best content for
their course from a variety of sources than either custom editions from a
single publisher or a single textbook.

Indeed work such as those by Flat World Knowledge and Bookboon.com on a market
level as beginning to chip away at this market dominance, however you will
still have unscrupulous professors. The growth of Flat World Knowledge in
terms of adoptions, shows that there is a clear market out there for
accessible alternatives to mainstream textbooks.

------
JonnieCache
This kind of thing seems like a prime opportunity for some good old fashioned
student agitation. When I was at uni people occupied the library just because
they weren't given 24 hour access to it. They turned it into a free peer to
peer skills exchange for a couple of days. They eventually got what they
wanted IIRC. This was only about 5 years ago.

Couldn't he at least have given the professor's name? I guess when uni becomes
such a massive financial hedge, agitation goes out the window.

------
jerf
I'd be interested in seeing a table of contents, to take a brief look at
seeing how much of the textbook is public domain. There isn't enough data to
quite be able to tell from the post; an English class could cover mostly PD
classics, or mostly 20th century stuff (which I expect to fall into the public
domain about the time we just give up on copyright... your guess is as good as
mine as to when that is), or anything in between.

------
jrousey
For ENG 205 at UMaine, my professor required us to purchase his own novel for
the class, and offered extra credit to anyone who reviewed the novel on
Amazon...

[http://www.amazon.com/Tartabulls-Throw-Henry-
Garfield/dp/068...](http://www.amazon.com/Tartabulls-Throw-Henry-
Garfield/dp/0689856717)

~~~
dan_yall
How was the novel? It sounds amazingly bad.

~~~
jrousey
You guessed it! Absolutely terrible...

------
Androsynth
The OP paid an extra $150 to take a class that guarantees A's. The alternative
was to pay an extra $0 and have to actually earn his A. He got greedy and
bought his A.

The system is broken, but to give in to a corrupt professor's bribe in order
to get an A isn't the fault of greedy publishers.

------
aroberge
I'm going back to teaching this year after being an administrator for 13 years
and stories like this just make me mad. I'm committed to join others that make
their material available for free (under a creative commons license) and
encourage colleagues from other institutions to do the same. The good news is
that I soon will have completed a textbook for introductory linear algebra.
The not-so-good news (for most of the HN crowd) is that all I write is in
French. Fortunately, there are already free textbooks in linear algebra
available in English. If enough of us make a stand, within 5 years there might
be enough material written to shame anyone showing this kind of disgusting
behaviour.

------
petercooper
I appreciate writing and teaching are reasonably different lines of endeavor,
but I'll go out on a limb and suggest that a professor who can't write his/her
own textbook on his/her field of endeavor is not a professor I would be
interested in learning from.

------
Wingman4l7
The publishing industry is creating a monster with their practices, and they
have only themselves to blame. I've seen torrent trackers which are dedicated
to textbooks, frequented by students sick of the "new edition" games. I've
also heard of students pooling their money to buy a copy of a text, which is
then sacrificed to a sheet-fed scanner. Everybody gets an electronic copy that
way, for a fraction of the price. Then you have DIY book scanners, which don't
even destroy the text _(which means you can return it after copying it and
sharing the pirate e-copy with everyone)_.

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ghshephard
I remember when I took Digital Design, Cmpt Science 290 (My first introduction
to state tables) - the instructor a ton of custom information just for his
course - several hundred pages. For $10 he'd offer to give us a custom develop
photocopy-package he and his grad students had put together, or, we could just
copy off of someone else ourselves.

Interesting to see the behavior of people who are interested in teaching.
Anything that gets in the way is seen as a barrier to be overcome.

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phaedryx
Utah is about to try out open textbooks for huge savings:
<http://opencontent.org/blog/archives/2134>

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prawn
Does the education sector need a website naming and shaming classes/professors
doing this, or proclaiming those that make efforts to keep learning
accessible?

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ambiate
I had a networking prof, which allowed us to use a $15 book for our
programming, but required a $225 book to cover the 7 layers. He understood the
issue, but could not address all of it realistically. I've had 3-4 1301
classes in which the professors make money off the books/keys. Mostly, after
generics, the text book battle seemed to be less exaggerated. There is a
trend:

2009-2010 $3100/books

2010-2011 $1500/books

2011-2012 $1000/books

2012 $255/books

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tammer
I saw the same situation happen for many classes at Rutgers... I was lucky and
didn't get burned too badly, but I know those who did.

~~~
lukethomas
So the professor wrote his own book & then forced students to purchase it
every year? Care to explain a little more?

~~~
naner
I had the same thing happen at Georiga Tech years ago. My calc professor had
the class buy a rough draft of the textbook he was writing. That wasn't as
egregious as the situation described here, we could share books. The books
were worthless at the end of the semester, though, since he'd have a new
iteration out by then.

The book was as terrible as his teaching.

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hrrsn
I am so glad I don't have to put up with (most) of this stuff at my university
(The University of Auckland). We do have some online/extra material from
Pearson for a number of courses, however this is provided separately from the
textbooks and is included in the course price.

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kd0amg
Last place I was requires a conflict of interest review when a professor
requires a self-authored textbook for class. Their recommended course of
action is to donate all royalties from those books to the university.

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Crake
Yeah, this matches my experience pretty well.

Buying an access code just to be able to do the homework really sucks. (Trying
to input mathematical notations onto blackboard is possibly the only thing
that sucks more.)

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Wingman4l7
Don't forget international edition textbooks, which just help prove how much
of a sham the whole thing is -- they're analogous to region locking on DVDs...

~~~
justin66
They're a bit worse. I had one international edition math textbook in which
numbers in some of the math problems differed from the US edition. I learned
this primarily because I bought the US edition "student solutions guide,"
which is a whole other racket, and the solutions were often slightly
different.

Just enough that someone doing those problems out of the book for an
assignment would be hosed. It didn't hurt me because my prof assigned his own
homework problems, but still, hugely annoying.

------
jrjarrett
Wow. Textbook prices have gone out of control. 25 years ago as a comp sci/math
dual major, the MOST I ever spent in one semester was $300.

------
chris_wot
Which college did they attend? I'm interested in finding out who this
professor is...

------
guscost
I'd like to deal with the textbook industry someday.

------
anifow
I work for a company in the Canadian academic publishing industry.

In Canada, it is illegal to require students to pay for their own testing. By
law, those textbooks which come with the Access Code for an online quiz are
not allowed (if the teacher actually collects the marks for those quizzes).
The funny thing is that this law is hardly being enforced! Other posters are
right in their encouraging students to make a stand, because the law already
backs them up here. With all of the protests in Montreal, I wouldn't be
surprised if Quebec were to be the first to fall.

There's a twist to this story, however, and it's analogous to Cold War
military spending. During that time, the government was in a position of not
knowing how much was enough, so they poured in as much as they could, and that
probably lead to a lot of innovation from minds that might not have gotten a
chance to do this stuff without the money being there. Granted, it also made a
lot of people in American academia pretty fat and happy.

The company I work for is an innovator. We are taking advantage of this high-
margin market to fund TONS of desperately-needed R&D in education and provide
new kinds of learning products. The axe will come down one day, inevitably,
but in the meantime, I at least hope to move the dial on learning methods from
1912 to 2012 and beyond.

Once students do take a stand, the good thing is that they at least won't be
getting ripped off directly. Sooner or later though, teachers are going to be
demanding their online quiz software back. That'll be a perfect opportunity
for a company such as Blackboard to swoop in and add licensing fees to their
own embedded quizzing software. This will be easy to digest for school
administrators who can see the advantage of the upgrade. But that's when
things get back into a stalemate position. Sure, it might be possible to build
technology that vastly enhances the understanding of a subject through
modelling, etc, but why fund it if either it doesn't change the money coming
in to Blackboard or costs the schools too much (would be eating directly into
staff salaries, unless you make an argument for the need to hire fewer
TA's...).

At that point, I would bet that you might be seeing more innovative models
coming from nationally-funded development programs for textbooks (as mentioned
in another post), similar to the extremely high innovation that comes out of
an organization such as the National Film Board of Canada
(<http://www.nfb.ca/>), clearly run by smart brains. Government orgs aren't
generally known for innovation, but it really only takes one country somewhere
to do it and others can copy. Otherwise, we will probably have some areas
where the model is still predominantly that of selling directly to students,
and they would have the funding at least to do this kind of development
(though there's probably a 10% chance they would squander what's left of the
tits they've been milking for years).

