The US textbook lifecycle where they are updated unnecessarily each year but cost hundreds of dollars is basically just an add-on fee that circumvents the university organisation, like a budget airline charging for food and hold baggage.
You might not realize it, but some of the textbooks are less expensive in other parts of the world partly because they are subsidized by sales in the US. It’s a complicated industry.
I’d rather pay more to use better textbooks. My experience is that for any given subject, there are often only a few really good textbooks. Sometimes you run into professors who have their own materials which substitute for a textbook, but that’s rare and where I’ve seen it, the notes have been built up over many years of teaching the same courses. Sometimes those notes will get turned into a textbook, which is what happened with Kolmogorov.
I’ve known some professors who’ve written textbooks and it’s basically a second job that takes time away from both research and teaching. It’s a very labor-intensive process with low reward.
The place I’ve seen it where it really made sense was where a foreign language professor I had also ran a foreign language education department.
> My experience is that for any given subject, there are often only a few really good textbooks.
Yeah, but they don't stay really good if they have to go through a mandatory new edition every couple of years to keep students from buying used textbooks. And the writers who get sucked into that treadmill generally aren't the ones who are capable of writing the really good textbooks in the first place — writing textbooks doesn't pay enough to make it a profitable alternative to practicing in a highly skilled research field.
Really good textbooks also rarely stay really good when they're translated from English into Spanish, Chinese, Arabic, or whatever. There isn't a free market in translation — whatever dipshit landed the contract to sell a local translation of Horowitz & Hill or whatever, that's whose shitty translation you have to buy, unless you fancy struggling through electrical engineering and an overcomplicated foreign language at the same time. Copyright is a scam to keep poor countries poor.
So generally the textbooks you have to pay more for are the worse ones.
> Yeah, but they don't stay really good if they have to go through a mandatory new edition every couple of years to keep students from buying used textbooks.
Buy an older edition on eBay and get problem sets from classmates or the library. This works well unless the publisher has some skeezy online component.
> So generally the textbooks you have to pay more for are the worse ones.
Not generally true. Maybe true for some subjects. My experience is that in upper-level STEM classes, there might be only one or two good books that you’d want to use.
For example, take algorithms. There are a couple good algorithms textbooks, one of them is The Algorithm Design Manual by Skiena. I can see that it costs $33 on amazon.com for a digital copy, but if I go to amazon.in it’s available for ₹866, about $11.50 at current exchange rate.
That isn’t even a specialized subject. If you’re in an advanced subject in an engineering field or one of the sciences there might be even fewer choices available.
Skiena's book is universally acknowledged to be great, but as you point out, it costs US$33 in the US, not US$150 (though Amazon tells me it's US$52.06, so I guess the price isn't very stable), and it isn't one of the ones that comes out in a new edition every two years with the problems slightly tweaked; it's in its second edition and its 23rd year. So it's an example of the dynamic I'm talking about, not a counterexample to it.
I'm talking about things like https://www.amazon.com/Computer-Science-Overview-Brookshear-... (Brookshear & Brylow), which Amazon tells me is US$155.49 for the Swindle or US$79 in paperback (new) and is in its 13th edition after 35 years; the first edition was evidently in 1985, so they've averaged roughly three years per edition. As far as I can tell, the only novel work Brookshear has ever published (not counting textbooks and papers about teaching) was a two-page paper in 1978 on projective prime ideals; and Brylow is hardly a more accomplished researcher, having published a couple of papers about formal methods for real-time software in 2001–3 and a few less-cited papers up to 2012. However good the book was in 1985, I wouldn't consider teaching from it today.
Skiena's book is an example of a really good textbook. Brookshear's book is an example of paying more. I did try to find a book like that about algorithms and data structures, but unsuccessfully; the closest I could find was Brookshear's chapter 5, which spends 50 pages to cover Euclid's algorithm, sequential search, insertion sort, and binary search (as well as, lamentably, bubble sort), all in terrible Python and 1958-style flowcharts, while giving terrible programming advice and performance numbers so wrong they weren't even right in 1985.
It's true that this kind of thing is limited to entry-level courses and more popular majors, as far as I can tell. Upper-level STEM courses don't attract enough students for it to be worth the effort to rip them off this way, even for world-class ripoff experts like academic publishers.
India has a significant advantage over Perú, Egypt, or mainland China, in that English is a second language to most of its population but not a foreign one, so the translation obstacle isn't nearly as serious.
There are some measures to make sure you don't buy used books either. Things like including software licenses in the purchase or having a new edition every year or so. Sometimes these are even written by the professor teaching, so it is then part of their income.
You have to pay for college? And buy your own text books?!
Why don't they just... build campus libraries..? With all the required books there?