Slashdot Mirror
For Americans, Imported Textbooks Can Be Cheaper
mblase writes "The NYTimes has an article (free reg required, someone'll post the Google link any minute now) about how the Internet has trumped capitalism yet again -- the very same college textbooks used in the United States sell for half price, or less, in England. One sophomore imported 30 biology books this fall and sold them outside his classroom for less than the campus-bookstore price, netting a $1,200 profit." Wait 'til they shuffle the problem sets.
...about how the Internet has trumped capitalism yet again...
No should be: how the free market internet has enabled capitalism to trump corporate price fixing.
It often takes a couple of months for the duty bill to show up. Ask me how I know. :(
"I'd rather be a lightning rod than a seismometer." -Ken Kesey
At least until he's trumped by the powers of communism (lawsuits by the school or the textbook becoming illegal to import under the DMCA)
No boom today. Boom tomorrow. There's always a boom tomorrow. - Cmdr. Susan Ivanova
Average college tuition is up 40%
Textbook prices have gone up as well.
My paycheck, however, has most certainly *not* gone up 40%. Sad to say that average CEO compensation has gone up 17% over the past year.
No wonder people are importing books.. they can't afford to buy the stuff here!
The ALWAYS charge me like 30-100$ more per book. And I usaully can find new books used on the net. I feel bad for the people who don't take the time to look and end up spending 600$ for stupid text books that they only use like 4 pages from, the system is jacked and I don't see what the professors get out of it. Can someone explain?
I'm sure he'll be smacked down by some obscure provision of the DMCA or something. I mean, put together 1) a benefit to yourself and 2) "intellectual property" and it doesn't matter WHAT it is, somebody will sue you, shut your down, and take your life's savings.
The brits like throwing in an extra vowel here and there. Color vs. colour, etc. -rick
I imported my math book for my freshman math class last year from England. I bought it from a big UK bookstore (I think it was Allwell) and I paid something like $45 shipped for it to the US. Same edition as the one the bookstore had. Same ISBN number. Hardcover, etc...all in all, identicle to the one I would have bought at the bookstore on campus. The bookstore (and all US bookstores) sell that book for $120 or so, even used it's $80 at the bookstore.
I hate textbooks....99% of the time they are total ripoffs. The only textbooks I own that I think are useful I saw in the college bookstore, and bought used on half.com for my own personal use-not needed for any class.
This semester, I purchased several of my books online from sellers in other countries. One of the books, which came from Hong Kong, arrived the morning after I had purchased it. I purchased the book for less than 1/3 of the US price, and the seller was still making enough profit to be able to overnight the textbook to me. If this isn't a sure sign of an overpriced book, then I don't know what is.
There's no sig like SIGSEG
I live in New Zealand, and textbooks here cost about half price in retail shops than they would to import them from the US. In one of my papers a couple of years ago, the lecturer's recommended textbook was only available in the US and cost around $NZ230. Typically, a textbook here will be around $NZ100. Because of this huge cost, hardly anyone bought the textbook, even though the lecturer had arranged a deal where we wouldn't have to pay for shipping. Most of us were very surprised to hear that the situation was the same for most textbooks (ie, about twice the price in the US for exactly the same book).
How much would the duty fee's be? Enough to ruin his profit margin ?
First medicine for the sick and elderly, now college textbooks. Why are Americans pushing profit margins up for these companies by paying higher prices than other prosperous countries?
We must enact strict legilation to protect American citizens from this threat.
For example, tuition alone for undergraduates at Harvard is currently $26,066 a year as compared with $1,840 at Oxford University.
I guess we British students should stop moaning so much.
if someone will post the google link "any minute now", then what exactly is stopping you from taking the 20 seconds required to find it yourself?
slashdot is run by retarded kindergarteners, admit it...
For Americans, Imported Textbooks Can Be Cheaper
...
Yes, they come out of the printer's estate in big cardboxes, are stocked on his car park for a while, then lorry drivers arrive and queue up to load them, they transport them on the motorway to the nearest port, then it's shipped over the pond.
America just has to post the order to get them, and the shipment arrives some weeks later in the port of Bostom. I hear there are complaints about the price of postage stamps to mail the orders though
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
The Internet, if anything, empowers capitalism even more precisely because of this kind of thing. The Internet enlarges the market, making it possible to compete at a level like never before by eliminating geographic boundaries (to an extent) and reduce localization of markets.
Why do these kinds of exclamations make it into the story anyway? I thought there were editors for these things....oh wait, this is slashdot, nevermind.
Funny. I always find it the other way around. Admittedly my only experience is really with Amazon. The UK version often has less books on offer, at higher prices and longer delivery times. It's often been simpler for me to buy at the US store in US dollars and wait the extra 5 days than buy it here.
...when e-books will be accepted as widespread classroom help. In this case, you buy a reader (a laptop?) at the start of the school and then, well, we all know how it's with all software and other data with students... :) No more paying for books!
Ah well, if you're entitled to free education, why can't it be really free?
45 5F E1 04 22 CA 29 C4 93 3F 95 05 2B 79 2A B2
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/10/21/education/21BOOK .html?ex=1067313600&en=f29e2e8bac871ef3&ei=5062&pa rtner=GOOGLE
Once again, it proves that college bookstores aren't "Non-Profit" and like the university as a whole is out to "rape the students".
University cafetria, housing, fees, text books, parking, parking tickets, this feee, that fee...
Which is worse? The "University" or the RIAA?
-Grump
Is it true that more people vote for the winner of American Idol, than vote for the president? -Ali G.
So I have to buy a half inch thick book for $120. Fine, I can put up with that. But next semester, I sell it back and get $20 if I'm lucky (and the bookstore will sell it for $90!). And then there's the whole bs about changing edititions every semester or every other semester. Half the time, I can't even sell my book back for that crappy price because there is a new edition. And when you are buying books for a class and come upon a book with a new edition, you obviously can't buy any used copies so you have to shell out another hundred and change.
Pleh. Pardon my ranting.
Oh wait, those prices were in pounds! Damnit! I thought I was going to be a millionaire.
Does amazon.co.uk pay return shipping???
Things cheaper on this side of the Atlantic?
First I've ever heard of it...
Petrol (Gas) - about US$5/gallon
Cigs - About US$7/pack
Average CD - About US$22
Tiny house, no land - US$300,000 even outside cities.
So stop bitching already.
-Nano.
American publishers sell their books cheap in third world with the pretext that the students can't afford expensive text books. However, the truth is that they are doing dumping and hurting the local publishing industry. If you can get K & R C programming book for less than $2 in India, why would any Indian professor write another book on C? The only way to prevent such dumping is to send back these books back to US and that would teach a nice lesson to big publishers here
I bought mine K&R C book and many other books from India and good to hear that others too are getting the word out.
Ha! Tricked ya! No Google link here.
Subscribe to NY Times, you GNU hippies!!!
Here's an example for a book I needed this quarter:
Digital System Design Using VHDL
$59 (shipping included) to get it from the UK shipped priority to me in California. $115 at amazon new, $65 or so used. Took only a few days, the same it'd take if I bought it in the US, and probably quicker than the Media Mail that amazon marketplace and half.com usually offer.
Once there was an optional book I wanted to study from that went for about $50-$60 on half.com. Saw a used one on ebay for $15 that looked pretty much new when I got it.
well, some people steal their text books, some people buy them used, some people import them. I on the other hand have a solution that gets me FREE albeit illegal textbooks. borrow the text book from someone, spend a couple hours photocopying it at my fathers office, and i save myself $150. not bad for 2 hours work. sure its illegal, but morally i feel pretty fucking righteous, considering the inflated cost of the text books at the store.
this proves, yet again, that american colleges care more about making money than anything else.
Children in public schools in the US are given textbooks that are full of inaccuracy. It ranges from the misleading, to the incomplete, to the completely incorrect. There is no proper system to have the books reviewed by intelligent people with the interests of truly educating the students. Feynman tells an interesting story in one of his books about what really goes on. Of course this isn't how they screw it up every time. The other half of the time they don't even pretend to have a review process.
I just went to class and took notes (actually I went to the first class, found some girl and stole notes from her for the rest of the semester) and checked the text out of the library. they normally had several copies of the required materials, I never had a problem getting the texts.
Vote Quimby!
Textbooks are cheaper online but the shipping on most books just about makes up for the price difference. Hard cover books are heavy.
The only piece of this that really surprises me is that the kid was able to sell enough books to make up for the overhead of shipping. One would expect some guy selling books to be cheaper than the on-campus store. No rent, not utilities, and no customer service. What happens when, say, someone who bought from this kid finds that half of chapter 6 is missing? He's out of luck. Theoretically, at a book store (I know, I know, university books stores are reknowned for "you bought it, you deal with it" attitudes), you could return it for a whole book.
This kid has become an active participant of our free market economy. Identify a product people want or need (the book), identify a way to cut the cost to that customer (resale and no guarantee), and do business where the customer already is (outside the class where the book is needed).
If you would like to be a leader with a large following...drive slowly down a windy two-lane road
so stop telling us every time! It's annoying!
I think I'd go insane if I imported a text book. All of the misspellings; It's COLOR DAMNIT!!!
Hurray, but whilst you're on Amazon UK just take a look at the price of CD's and DVD's, that's enough to make your eyes water.
Books are one of the few items exempt from the universal 17.5% sales tax imposed by your friendly British Government, much unlike 85% fuel tax or being left with $50,000 worth of debts when you leave Uni after your parents have paid 40% tax all of their working life.
Just wondering, is anything worded or spelled differently in the British ones?
Post URL to some good online bookstores in India, please. (I'm pretty sure the best advertised ones are the most expensive so first hand links are preferred)
A textbook was selling for $120 at my local college bookstore. This was the list price! I bet they would charge more if the list price let them. Anyway, I got the same book on Amazon for $60, free shipping, which was in the US. So it's not the foreign books that are cheaper-- the markup happens in the college bookstore.
Tsunami -- You can't bring a good wave down!
In my 375 level Intro to Marketing class I use an english paperback version of the textbook imported from India of all places... saved me about a bit of money. Brand new would have been over $100, I paid $35 on half.com
:-)
I'm all about it
Hard loop..... huh?
Dynamic Designs
the printing and binding is often pretty bad.
Most of the students from South America and Asia bring these books from home, and often they are essentially softcover photocopies. Still worth it to get a $120 book for $20, as long as you don't need it for a life-long reference.
Both prescription drugs and books -- 10x the price in the USA than anywhere else.
Forget England. My brother wanted a text book that cost 125$, way too expensive for a student. The exact same book cost me Rs.400 in India (thats about 10$)!!!. Sure it wasent hard-bound and the paper quality sucked, but otherwise it was the exact same book. Even with courier delivery my brother saved a cool 100$.
The UCSD Campus bookstore regularly has second-hand textbooks at a higher price than new versions from England.
Looking at the shelf by my head, of the 26 books there, 18 were bought from England.
(about half are technical books, they all came from England. 25% are extreme sport guides and 25% are travel guides, most of these came from the US, and the remainder are popular science books, these all came from England. Oh, and there is a book about brewing real ale which, ironically, came from the US.)
The FDA has already warned everyone about low priced and "possibly dangerous" foreign drugs. We need a new government agency to prevent the terrible prospect of people getting their hands on this potentially hazardous foreign knowledge.
I'd put it under the National Security Advisor and military - they've been pretty good about keeping any reliable foreign intelligence out of the White House...
That is all.
as i recall from my days at uni the profs holy grail was book publishing, alone or with jointly with other profs. publish or perish and all that.
thus there is a small market for these very specialised books. the average joe is not particularly interested in theory and practice of microwave antennas, etc.
my upper level courses all averaged about $100 per course in textbooks...and that was buying them used. everyone i knew sold them back at the end of the semester and hoped they did not have a new edition out, rendering our books worthless.
we also had a number of independent college bookstores up the street, they were kind of cool because they would buy our books back if they were in use at another campus, the bookstore didn't do that, as i recall.
it's giving me the heebie jeebies just thinking about all the time and money i spent in college, my parents gave me about $10,000 and I had $21,000 saved up from a job, plus i worked a ratty part-time to get through. never had any financial aid or grants. i ran up about $7,000 on credit cards, too.
overall i think my 6 years cost me $68,000 here in california but it was worth it now i have it all paid off, twice that amount in liquid assets, a house, motorcycle and two year old truck (all free and clear) and a fun job working on linux stuff so i guess it worked out.
I ended up saving $150+ this semester by buying textbooks online from private individuals. Many of them from overseas. A systems analyst and design book that normally goes for $100 in the states I got for $25. Same book, except that it was an edition that was only supposed to be sold in India. A calculus book I needed went for $30 instead of $100...the list goes on. My trick is to go to the University bookstore and lookup which books are required for my class, then record their ISBN numbers so I can find it online!
"The life of a repoman is always intense!" --Harry Dean Stanton
I refer my students to addall.com. Instead of paying nearly $100 for one of the best CS books ever, they paid about $30 per copy. I hope the authors still get their share.
I argued with my teacher that armor could also be spelled armour in english.
Damn you Lord British!!!! Ultima III was my speak & spell.
Boomer Sooner
"This is outrageous" was among the comments heard fom Jack Ripov, spokesman of the TBAA, the Text Book Association of America.
He also stated that, "Selling those books at such low prices in America is obviously going to hurt quality. We spend a lot of money to make that our customers only receive top notch quality products. Now the market gets swamped with british textbooks that spell words like color or aluminun wrong, hurting the spelling of many students here, yes, very undermining what this country stands for. But we will not watch this idly!"
This comment is obviously a reference to the soon to be introduced move to region-encoded textbooks.
When asked how region-encoded textbooks would work, Mr Ripov was kind of enough to supply us with some basic details.
"You see, everyone who wants to use a textbook will get a new device implanted into his brain ensuring that they only use textbooks from their Region. If you would start to read a textbook from another region, the device would simply tap into a neural interface and deactivate your eyes, effectively stopping you from violating our IP rights."
When asked what about persons who would not have such a device implanted into their brains, Ripov replied: "Well, obviously we will have to deal with those unamerican IP-terrorists as well, but we have a strong case there that reading a textbook without a brain control device is in violation of the DMCA, and we will not hesitate to enfore our rights in court."
Ash nazg durbatulûk, ash nazg gimbatul
ash nazg thrakatulûk, agh burzum-ishi krimpatul.
We need to start pirating textbooks because they're too damn expensive. If we had enough people kind enough to scan their books and distribute them in PDF form, starving students around the world(not so starving that they have access to computers) could save a pretty penny. I'm not advocating piracy in any way; I just think that it's really cool and everybody should do it.
wow, just checked it out and sure enough, Boyce & Diprima's ODE book is $126.40 from Amazon US and 31 pounds (~$54) from amazon.uk. It's 7 pounds for airmail shipping to CA so I can get it for under $70. The scary thing is that I paid less than $50 for this book in 1985 and I'm sure the underlying math hasn't changed since then. :(
The Guardian reprints a story that may explain some of the difference in price.
For what it's worth, books in India are cheaper yet; I know people with some books (e.g., Radia Perleman's "Interconnections") purchased at a tenth the US price. It's a special India-only edition (or so it says).
In the latest news, since the PMCA (Printed Millenium Copyright Act) has passed in the last few hours, the BIAA (Book-ing Industry Association of America) has started printing on books that "books printed in other regions of the world are not to be imported in the USA. First offence is punishable with a reprimand letter, and if the felony is repeated, the crime is punishable with 10 years in prison."
The guidelines for one relevant section invoking Non-Patriotic Book-ing Transactions in the drafting the PMCA had been lifted from the MPAA strategy of dividing the world into "regions" so that products were deliberately crippled to work in only one region out of many that had been drawn up by the MPAA. In addition, the redrawing of the printed-book regions drew upon the recent legislative successes in the re-districting of Texas, also called Xtreme GerryMandering.
In an other related development, the Patriot Act has been invoked to open and check all book packages coming into the US. Additionally, the Ashcroftian-Feds have started entering public libraries and private libraries (i.e. book collections in the homes or dorms) to enforce these laws. As they do not have to intimate the suspects before and after the act, most people are unaware that the feds have been rummaging thru their books. Some private diaries have been exposed, and a clique of people referring themselves as /.'s (WTF) have especially been targeted for subversive reading of "filtered" news that has been the special target of the POTUS.
To see a world in a grain of sand, and then to step back and see the beach where the sand lies
It is longstanding, it makes economic sense, but it's not necessarily legal. More specifically, banning imported books in the US is illegal (everything else is fine, and business as usual).
When a company puts that "not for sale in the US" sticker on a book, they are artificially creating two markets. This is ONLY legal if the company is not a monopoly - it's the basic definition OF a monopoly! And I have yet to see one of my textbooks distributed by more than one publisher. (Hint: anyone heard of a legal case involving someone disobeying a "not for sale in the US" sticker?)
My take:
Importing "International edition" and selling it on the cheap = OKAY.
Publishers sueing/punishing/criminalizing imported books and importers = NOT OKAY.
But then again, I'm just a Slashdotter, IANAL, who's gonna listen to me? :-)
A witty [sig] proves nothing. --Voltaire
New Paper DRM created by the Publishing Indusrty Association of America (PIAA). The book is shrink wrapped in a EULA that you agree with upon breaking said wrapping. The EULA makes it illegal to to take the ship the book out of your specific region. It utilizes a small GPS chip in the back of the textbook, upon leaving a publisher designated geographic region or tampering with said chip, the digital "paper" the book is printed on turns black.
-----------just kidding-------------
Quick! patent this technology! Before they do!
We need to start pirating textbooks because they're too damn expensive. If we had enough people kind enough to scan their books and distribute them in PDF form, starving(not so starving that they have access to computers) students around the world could save a pretty penny. I'm not advocating piracy in any way; I just think it's really cool and everybody should do it.
This time it actually works!
1) Import expensive textbooks inexpensively from other countries
2) Sell them at a much more expensive-yet-less-than-they-sell-it price
3) PROFIT!!!!!
BTW, TJI: NYTimes requires you to register to see the story. Just wanted to keep you in the loop.
so. regardless of how cool it is to be getting your books online, thats not the cool part. Ive been doing that for three years. Youd be surprised how fast books get here via DHL from Honk Kong or anywhere else. You have to check to make sure the problems match up - but they usually do
Like I said, the real cool part is how easy it is to get solution cds to the books now. I can get the entire solution manual scanned into pdfs or jpgs on a cd for maybe 30 bucks. Thats a huge timesaver when I need the answers to problem sets before a test, or when I need to prove to myself that a book's answer is wrong.
Granted, you can abuse these solutions easily and lose the motivation to actually do your homework. Still, I think the availability of these solution discs is a huge boon to my college education. -nrs
So why do my damn textbooks cost so much?
I have 2 professors - with no textbooks.
One writes his notes neatly for the overhead projector, and passes copies of the notes out to the class, so you don't even have to scribble while he talks - THIS MAN IS A GOD.
The second professor had students break into groups of 2, and each day a group presents all the useful info they could find on their assigned topic, then the professor would add additional info from the latest publications. By the end of the semester, we will have assembled a state-of-the-industry textbook!
THIS MAN IS A MEGA-GOD!
Math, Physics, Chemistry, History - all this info needs to be free - without the 'textbook tax' universities insist on charging students.
p.s.
CAN WE SUE THE PUBLISHERS FOR BACK INJURY?
This is a rather long essay I wrote a while back on the subject, so bear with me on this.
Deep within downtown Seoul, on the bottom floor of one of the city's innumerable high-rises, is the Kyobo Bookstore, the largest of its kind in Asia. Along the West wall of this 2.3 million title shopping center is a selection of English books, and a selection of college textbooks larger than that many American campus stores. A visiting American student majoring in for example mathematics would be astounded upon browsing the selection, not because of the wide variety of books available, but because the exact same book which he or she spent over $120 on for the previous semester is available here for $30.
Many of the business practices of the textbook industry are well known, if only subconsciously, to all college students. The nearly oligarchical cartel in the textbook industry drives the price of schoolbooks to unreasonable levels, between three to five times fair market value for equivalent non-scholastic texts in North American school bookstores (even though they can be purchased cheaply overseas), by means of a captive student population who does not have a choice in which textbooks they much purchase and price-control mechanisms such as frequent yet marginal revisions to short-circuit any used book market and "value-added" features such as subscription-based Internet site access, partly so as to satiate an expectation of high profits by textbook authors in an over-saturated industry.
The fact that textbooks are extremely expensive is difficult to debate. A quick browse in Amazon.com's textbook section shows that the average price for the top five books in each of their categories, is currently $89.47. Only one book in their top Mathematics section is sold for less than $99--and that book is only available used (Amazon). Since it is not uncommon for professors to require more than one book for a class, the financial burden on students can easy top five hundred dollars per semester. Furthermore, the cost of textbooks severely outpaces inflation: the United States Department of Labor indicates that the wholesale price of textbooks has increased 65 percent in the past decade, nearly six times the average increase in producer prices on the whole (Hubbard). In contrast, it is quite rare to find a hardcover book online or at a physical bookstore, even technical in nature, that retails for over $45.
The traditional method for students to offset these costs is the used book market, usually also facilitated by the campus bookstore. However, the industry has several methods of short-circuting this market. Most obvious is the frequent revisioning of textbooks, with as little as six months between versions, make previous versions economically worthless because even if the changes are as mundane as rearranged exercises (not uncommon in math and physics texts), publishers will stop printing the older edition, forcing professors to switch to ordering the new editions or risk alienating students who cannot find used copies of previous editions. or adding in "value-added" items such as CD-ROMs, magazines, or Internet Web Site access which are rarely used by instructors but serve to prevent used book sales.
In an effort to get instructors, departments and school boards to adopt a text, publishers go to great lengths to entice faculty. Perhaps one of the most ridiculous instances of textbook publishers trying to win instructor favor was an attempt to woo Richard Feynman, one of the most prominent physicists of the 20th century and a professor at the California Institute of Technology. Mr. Feynman was offered some 300 pounds of textbooks to review and recommend, and the promise that "We'll get someone to help you read them." One book he was asked to review was blank ("We just need a recommendation"), and when he delayed for several days (allowing a bidding war which cost the publisher two million dollars), Feynman was offered gifts ranging from fruit baskets to an all-expense-paid tou
-- the opinions stated above aren't those of my employer. in fact, they're probably not even my own. you know what, ju
the way this country is getting, with taxes and corporate price gouging, we as citizens need to apologize to Great Briton for that mess back in 1770's and rightfully surrender to the British Crown, since this country's government and business' burdens with taxes and corruption its citizens much worse than the British ever did...
as a repentant US citizen i surrender to the British...
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/10/21/education/21BOOK .html?ex=1067313600&en=f29e2e8bac871ef3&ei=5062&pa rtner=GOOGLE
There's your google link.
You're welcome.
You should use AdiumX on your Mac.
The Student is the only group that doesn't have a voice. They really can't just choose another school, but pehaps they should. Parents, Alumni, teachers, admins, and govt all have a say...with the students' lifestyle and hard-earned cash! So it's easy to always "blame the students" for what's wrong. It would be an interesting experiment to see students destroy a school by transfering a large percent of the students out. In Michigan, there are enough state schools close enough to do such a thing...consider it a economics lesson! Students [customers] that put up with such abuse without shopping around are "commies" right..it's their patriotic duty to uphold their rights as consumers. And they wonder why schools are so "liberal".
And the Internet teams up with it again. "Leveling markets here there and everywhere! Let's ride, trusty chum!"
"A great democracy must be progressive or it will soon cease to be a great democracy." --Theodore Roosevelt
Amazon.com. Introductory Linear Algebra with Applications (7th Edition). 3 0182656/>
e id=3073&vbcid=1409>.
3 _02_10_05>.
n ity/eCS/Store/en/-/USD/PL_BookInfo-Start?Click=Cc& barcode=6100130182653
t ail.asp>.
o oks.htm>.
Canterbery, Ray. CW Resource. <http://myphlip.pearsoncmg.com/cw/mpviewce.cfm?vc
Feynman, Richard P. Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman! New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 1985.
Hubbard, Kristen. Group Files Complaint Against Cost of Books. <http://www.ucsdguardian.org/cgi-bin/news?art=200
Kyobo Bookstore. Introductory Linear Algebra, 7/E <http://www.kyobobook.co.kr/is-bin/INTERSHOP.enfi
National Association of College Stores. Collegiate Retailing Industry: Higher Education Retail Market. <http://www.nacs.org/public/research/higher_ed_re
Paulson, Tim. Textbooks Publishers Profiting From Students' Loss. <http://www.corporatemofo.com/stories/020519textb
Wilen, John. GW Students Network, Take On College Textbook Industry. Washington Business Journal 16 Dec. 2002, 34-36.
-- the opinions stated above aren't those of my employer. in fact, they're probably not even my own. you know what, ju
....the google link already!?!?
I inherited a friend's old college textbooks from the 1960s and I was surprised at how small they were. They were the size of normal hardcover books, not the gargantuan monstrosities that I see in the local college bookstore.
Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
> One sophomore imported 30 biology books this fall and sold them outside his classroom for less than the campus-bookstore price, netting a $1,200 profit."
I bought 10,000 wooden noses from Japan and tried to hawk them outside the Student Center. I'll be lucky to pay off the loss before I retire...
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
As a graduate student in the US, I find it convinient to just get it from my Chinese or Indian friends visting their home countries during semester breaks. Cost savings are just tremendous ,although, there is a noticable difference in paper quality.
Just to illustrate the price difference ; chk this out:
1) US Price
2) Asian Price
All of the math is in metric units. Enjoy! ;)
----- rL
My aunt used to be a managing editor for HBJ, which publishes a lot of textbooks. The whole thing is a scam. They make sure text books are "revised" every year, usually by changing one line (thats right) and calling it a new edition.
Publishers like HBJ make money hand over fist on textbook sales.
CDE open sourced! https://sourceforge.net/projects/cdesktopenv/
I hear that some foreign biology text books talk about a concept called "evolution" that is considered to be immoral in many US states.
Xix.
"Everything is adjustable, provided you have the right tools"
"SUCKER!"
Now that's balls.
"A great democracy must be progressive or it will soon cease to be a great democracy." --Theodore Roosevelt
"The practice of selling U.S. products abroad at prices keyed to the local market is longstanding. It's not unusual, it doesn't violate public policy and it's certainly not illegal. But publishers are still coming to terms with the dramatic change in the law."
Just you wait - I wager that new laws and publisher licensing rules will be created that manages to severely curb such importation. Heck, it works with prescription drugs: "oh, the drugs are unsafe in Canada!". Bullshit!
Congress is all for screwing all of us. Freakin' fascism is back.
When I went to UNC in 1989, in-state tuition was something like $300/semester, plus maybe $100 worth of books. (Math books were expensive even then, maybe $250 for a semester of books by senior year).
You guys today are getting totally raped by the Banks & Credit lenders -- they're the ones conspiring to launch you into life $100,000 in debt and spend the rest of your life that way. You bitch about Haliburton and the oil companies -- but it's the Equifax/Visa/&c.s of the world that are your true enemies.
Surely the Food, Drug and Books administration along with BEA can enforce the controlled textbook act. Purchasers with have to fill out a form 451 before receiving a prescription that can be only be filled by an authorized federal librarian.
There actually are digital textbooks available. I had a couple of CS classes this past year that had a CD available with copies of various books on it. Dr. Dobbs produced them, and if I recall they were $80 or something? A good deal for what you get though. I got the dead tree versions because I hate trying to read a book on a display. Guess I'm just old fashioned.
Scanning textbooks looks like a pretty work-intensive process. Definately require automation of some type.
(free reg required, someone'll post the Google link any minute now)
/. article?
/. will be taken to court if they where to post the link on the front page, if thats the case then the person posting the link could be taken to court too, couldn't they?
I understand that this is not on the topic of the article and that it may have been answered before but can someone please enlighten me as to why the google link can't be posted directly from the
I could have a guess that it is to do with the agreement between google and the NYTimes, maybe
Before we all start blaming the bookstores for this, let me make it clear that I have worked with shipping/receiving/pricing textbooks, and I know that the publishers set the prices. My campus bookstore has about at 23% margin on textbooks, which basically covers paying rent to the Union, paying employees, and paying for the shipping costs to get the books. They are fortunate enough to be under the Division of Student Affairs, which means that they have a mandate to get as many used books as possible. They also pay well for used books that are needed.
OK, so now we get to the blame part. I, too, have purchased several texts from the UK (usually Blackwell's, but I always search AddAll first to find the best price. I don't know why the publishers can afford to sell things for 50% of the US price overseas, but it's atrocious. There's a comment on here about International Editions, the cheap paperback reprints sold in the Asian market, and I should be clear that the ones from the UK are the same quality hardbacks (with the exact same content) as the US editions. However, publishers have started catching onto the fact that US students are importing the books, and now there are some books that they won't let UK retailers export (e.g., Haviland's Anthropology ). The publishers are a bunch of money-grubing bastards, and most of them aren't even US-owned, so it makes it even more fun.
I've said it before, and I'll say it again. BLAME THE PUBLISHERS, not your campus bookstore. The best thing you can do is to search for these deals and take advantage of them. Be warned that the shipping time to the interior of the US (say, North Dakota) can be a little long, even with Air Mail, since it's no longer Air Mail when the USPS gets its hands on it.
"You will only be remembered for two things: the problems you solve or the ones you create." Mike Murdock
My experience with math texts.
Compare Walter Rudin's _Real and Complex Analysis_ on Amazon and at Amazon.co.uk. In the states, only the hardcover is available at the price of $136.35. In the UK, a paper back version is available for 31.99.
The same is true of Richard Durrett's _Probability and Examples_. The US Hardcover is $115.95. The UK paperback is 37. Again, the paperback is not available at all in the states.
What is even more ridiculous is that every order I have made from Amazon.co.uk has arrived faster than any order, via ground shipping, from Amazon.com. And this is for shipping to the West Coast.
I'm teaching some introductory humanities courses and every semester I receive a big pile of unsolicited desk copies of textbooks that would never consider using. It seems like our department mailboxes are stuffed full of mysterious FedEx packages from publishers whenever I show up at the department. The books are printed on crappy paper with terrible binding.
But it gets worse. It's at the point where we have textbook pushers roaming the halls and crashing my office hours. I kid you not! Instead of watches lining their trenchcoat, they try to "hook me up" with desk copies of textbooks that I don't need.
Of course, what they don't tell you in their pitch is how much the students are being charged for their books. The idea appears to be: Why should I care when they're free for me? Out of curiosity, I checked. A shoddy (both in content and construction) 140p small paperback textbook which was being offered to me would cost almost US$80 for each of my students. That's about $70 more than a paperback novel of comperable size and print quality. Of course, the cost of all the sleazy hard selling the publishers do gets passed on to the students.
I imagine that people complained. I didn't formally (I did recently throw a pusher out of my office somewhat undiplomatically). To appease us, publishers have stopped imprinting desk copies as such, foregoing the familiar "evaluation copy, do not sell" markings. Colleagues of mine are just selling these things back to the bookstore where they reemerge as used textbooks for the following semester (apparently, some professors somewhere do teach from that crap). I think I will sell mine as well, but I initially felt dirty about it, because strictly speaking, all those unsolicited and unwelcome gifts were paid with the money of my students. So I decided that I will throw my students a "textbook feast" at the end of the semester. I'm serious, I'll be able to buy quite a few large pizzas.
Another reaction to all this unpleasantness: for the first time, I'm teaching a class with no textbook at all. All the readings are "on reserve," which is handled through online PDF's that I encourage the students to print out. It's a lot of printing, but only of the stuff they have to read, and they would have to do some of it anyway, since there is no anthology that has all the readings I want to cover. It's worked out great, and I want to encourage others who are in my position and have this option to follow suit.
I've had at least one class where the professor who was teaching the class also wrote the textbook, and I know other people who have had professors teach out of textbooks they wrote. Not that there is anything wrong with that, but it's one way to ensure that your book will have at least some sales.
Although in the class where I had this happen, the professor hadn't updated the book in around 10 years, so all the copies were used. I don't even think it was still in print.
I have blog like everyone else
I compared one book I needed for this quarter with the listing at the UK site and I noticed this.
Pretty soon books will be like DVD's, and will have a region code to ensure they're only available where the corporations want them to be.
"Nothing exists except atoms and empty space; everything else is opinion." - Democritus
I have observed that most textbooks can be bought from here. Drawback is that the Indian Editions are paperback, the print quality is also a lot poorer. Advantage is, the books are usually a tenth of what they cost in the states.
I have been using Indian Editions all my student life, so the relatively poor quality does not pertrube me much.
Santosh Dawara
It's not so much that Brits throw in an extra vowel, as Americans started taking out vowels over the past hundred years or so. Having to adopt to a new spelling is kinda annoying, though in some cases the new spelling makes more sense (aeroplane vs airplane). Despite the advantages, however, I'd really prefer to keep the original spelling; partially out of historical interest.
This may work for you, but it really says a lot about your classes. Real classes need real books. I can guarantee Jackson, Tanoudji, and Griffiths aren't "ripoffs." If you aren't taking classes that challenge you, that says even more about you.
Speaking of text books, I knew that I was in big trouble when I got to grad school. In my first semester, the applied math prof (continuum mechanics) somewhat scornfully stated:
"There is no text book for this class. The things that I'm going to teach cannot be found in a text book."
Well, some of the things that he taught could be found in a book, but usually in a much different form (derivation) than how he taught it. Almost failed the class but I pulled a miracle in the final exam, which was worth 80% of our final grade (we had no mid-term exams, just homework).
Oh well, at least a few bucks.
Pedantic. Do s/1201/602/g and it becomes correct. U.S. copyright law, 17 USC 602, bans commercial importation of copies of copyrighted works into the United States without the copyright holder's permission.
Will I retire or break 10K?
Commercial importation of copies of copyrighted works is already considered infringement. Explanation
FWIW, when publishers sell to book stores, the bookstores receive a very large discount--sometimes as high as around 40% (bookstores will sometimes refuse to buy books unless they are given such discounts). The Bookstores make a huge killing in this business.
A train leaving New York at 8:00 AM heads west at 70 Miles per hour. At 9:00 AM, a train leaving Washington heads East at 85 MPH. At what time do the 2 trains meet?
This problem will totally confuse the students in England, if not for the geography, but for the metric system. (And for the lack of distance given)
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/10/21/education/21BOOK .html?ex=1067313600&en=f29e2e8bac871ef3&ei=5062&pa rtner=GOOGLE
This looks like free market in it's usual form.
They look like monopolists to me,and monopolist are are kind of capitalists.They are quite formidable and generally harmful to a free society, but they are not communists.
but why not?
This was the topic of my Economics class this afternoon, and I've heard about it from other faculty. The professors at UMPI are considering buying (or have the bookstore buy for them, which is actually an option if we specifically request for the bookstore to order from another place) all of the books for a few classes from Britian as a test run to see how well it works. Even with VAT, shipping, and import taxes, the books generally work out to be aproximately $30 cheaper per book. One example that has been tossed arround is a Systems Design and Analysis class:
Amazon.com (USA) = 127.10 USD
Amazon.com (UK) = 37.99 BPS (british pounds sterling?)
Sources:
USA Amazon
UK Amazon
I used the same ISBN number to get more acurate results, and this is based off of amazon's selling price, *NOT* some third party who you can get it from cheaper in the "New or used" section. granted, the American one is not availible at the moment, but the list price is still there.
We don't need an "overrated" so much as we need a "you completely missed the parent's point, dumbass..."
One thing I was always wondering is why some state pays 10 million or some other vulgar amount for some kid's textbooks. Wouldn't it be cheaper to write a new one and print your own? Probably the corporate kickbacks prevent any common sense from coming into the decision making process. I'd hate to sound bitter, but it isn't like a math text needs tons of work - there isn't any research to be done (The expectations are already laid out in some document, all that is necessary is to show how to do it and give a couple dozen problems), nor any legal concern about sources, and certainly no shortage of folks who have a masters in math. Of course, I never learned anything from a math book anyways. Granted, history, etc, might be a little more difficult, but it should still be done. If the state invests in a new press, that should cut down the costs of actually printing the book. It is insane to spend upwards of $100 on a single textbook. That's $3,000 for a single class, for one book that will be thrown out in 2 years. It makes more sense to invest the money into better teachers. Of course, that would require common sense.
More valid with younger kids, but hey.
BTW, a 4MP digital camera and books held on reserve at the library work to save you money quite nicely. alt.binaries.textbooks or something similar would also be money saving solution until the TMAA starts serving lawsuits.
1q2w3e4r5t6y7u8i9o0pqawsedrftgthyjukilo;p'azsxdcf
Turns out that a lot of the textbooks for sale on Half.com are the international versions. I managed to get all but 1 of my textbooks there for at least $30 less than my bookstore was charging. My ELEC 305 textbook was almost half as much. They were softcover, though. So that probably contributed to the price as well.
Wish I had thought of getting multiple copies and selling them, though.
Who doesn't like free music?
Here's what I use to shop for books:
BestBookDeal
Book Pool
...region encoded books!
How do you know it's not stolen?
Or do you not care?
college textbooks are ass rape. and i'm not the kind of weirdo to use that phrase left and right- but college books are horrifically priced.
:-]
I'm poor. Dirt poor. I have to take out larger loans every year to pay for my monthly loan payments. But I've been lucky enough not to buy a textbook for over a year, three semesters worth of books I've not had to buy.
What's my trick? ILL. Inter Library Loan. That's all I will say.
Working toward a usable PDA environment in the spirit of Newton OS: Dynapad
Its a catch-22 situation. Save money by buying used books when available, this drives up the cost of new books you have to buy.
When I was in school I was able to witness the "birth" of a textbook. I learned that students are in part responsible for the high prices. Textbook publishers try to recoup their costs (advances, manufacturing, marketing, etc) in the first year since there is a severe dropoff in sales for later years even when the text is still in use. This is due to the sale of used books, the publisher/professor gets nothing from these sales.
I wonder if the British bookstores buy books back and resell them in later semesters?
The textbook was $183, I got the same book from Amazon in less than a week for $92... But problem is, for a lot of the book, they just keep coming out with new edition and change like 3 paragraphs and you can't sell your book back to the bookstore...
Prices can be determined by how much someone is willing to pay for a particular good or service. People get up-in-arms about stories like this (and stories about how Amazon.com is giving different prices to different customers) because they believe that if a price differs between people there is some sort of discrimination happening. The fact is that the price differs because different people have different demands. Consumers freak out about price above cost -- producers freak out about price below demand.
Furthermore, I think that this sort of pricing, if taken to its logical conclusion, would enable greater diversity in the sort of goods and services everyone enjoys. That, in turn, would enrich everyone's life.
For instance, I could care less about sewing. That means my demand is less for a book about sewing, and the price of a sewing book would have to be very low indeed for me to buy it. However, as the price declines I become more and more tempted to pick it up on a whim. If I do buy it (presumably above cost) that is at least one more sale the retailer, wholesaler, publisher and author wouldn't have otherwise had, and I would still know squat about mending my ratty old sweaters.
On the other hand, I would be extremely interested in, say, a book containing genetic algorithms in Python. My demand is high, and I would pay a higher price than what was offered to someone who wasn't interested in the subject.
Of course everyone would rather pay less for what they want, but the alternative - a single offer price per good or service - would end up widening the rift between lower and middle classes, and force everyone into narrower areas of interest.
Do the campus bookstores in the UK buy used books from students and resell them? Ironically this is partly responsible for the higher prices of new books. The publisher gets nothing for the resale but the bookstore make nearly the same profit from new or used. This topic is far more complicated than most people realize.
I feel really, really bad for all those chem and bio majors out there... one of your textbooks costs as much as my textbooks for an entire semester. Anyway. Abebooks.com is a collection of used book retailers across the world. I know that this won't help science majors (as major revisions for textbooks occur what, every three years?), but for us in the humanities, it saves a ton of money.
Condemnant quod non intellegunt.
I sure don't get any kickbacks for "forcing my classes to use 'upgraded' textbooks". I've never heard of such a practice. These days, I'm lucky if I can even get the publishers to follow the traditional practice of sending me a free desk copy for evaluation purposes; more and more often, publishers want me to pay for the text before I consider creating a captive market of 40 student customers for them.
I share your anger about the problem of publishers charging unreasonable prices for textbooks. If I could find a low-priced textbook which is a reasonably academically sound choice, I'd choose it. Unfortunately, for every course I've ever taught, all of my choices have been overpriced. So what I'm forced to do is to make the best tradeoff I can between picking the most academically suitable text vs. saving my students as much money as I can.
The only other option I see is to create my own inexpensive in-house textbook, but this is a huge amount of effort; it's much easier for me to simply use a prepackaged text. Producing my own text would be easier is if someone in my field would organize a single, well-ordered, referreed online repository of open-source chapters, exercises, etc. If such a thing existed, and if the college infrastructure existed so that I could just hand off my camera-ready pages and have the bound text effortlessly appear on the bookstore shelf without my having to rassle with copying, binding, and pricing details, then I'd consider putting the extra time into doing this.
However, unrefereed course packs don't count as publications, and if you don't have enough publications, you don't get tenure--simple as that. If I spend time creating a cheap alternative for my students instead of writing research articles for peer-reviewed journals, then I'm significantly reducing my propects for my own survival. Those are the pressures I'm responding to.
It would be nice if students organized and lobbied the administration to change their tenure evaluation criteria on this point. If it helped us to get tenure by creating inexpensive in-house texts, more of us would be doing it. Unfortunately, I don't foresee students doing this; the point is probably too abstruse from the perspective of students who never come into contact with the tenure process.
I finally broke down and bought the textbook for my class in compilers from my school bookstore, at a price, including tax, of what amounts to nearly $110 US. Even on amazon.com, it's $84.95.
But, lo and behold, amazon.co.uk has it for the equivalent of less than $47 US!
Good thing I still have my receipt!
Manufacturing is cheaper in China.
And you can hire scientists for nothing in Soviet Russia (err... I mean Russia).
Welcome to the globalized economy, comrade. It's gonna take a lot of protectionism to keep things this way for a long time because money flows fast and easy in this world. Witness Zimbabwe - screw over the white farmers, abolish property rights, and watch the investment dollars run away and ruin your economy in less than 2 years. Who didn't predict that one?
Publishers and drug companies aren't exempt from the laws of supply and demand. The drug companies have the FDA and legal scare tactics to protect their monopolies, but unless you start bundling EULAs with textbooks, it's gonna be pretty hard to keep people from doing this.
Every once in a while I see a professor who uses a free or low cost textbook. I've seen a few very high-quality books and problem sets available for free or dirt cheap on the internet.
Also, everytime I read a technical book in the sciences (even physics and engineering), with only a few exceptions, I buy a Dover book. They almost always the best books. Many have problem sets. Most don't have solutions sets! Is that the problem?
I've even gone as far as not using the textbook (accept when/if I do homework) and used the Dover substitute.
Why do I brag about these books. Because more often than not, they're classics in the field. More often, "college textbooks" are written by people I've never heard of (not always). Look at Courant and Hilbert's Calculus book. Who is this Stewart guy?
Niels Henrik Abel once wrote, "It appears to me that if one wants to make progress in mathematics one should study the masters and not their pupils"
Martin Gardner (in "Calculus Made Easy",another excellent cheap book although it's not quite suitable for a full blown calculus course for math majors) states that most books are so thick because writers are afraid to leave anything out, so as not to alienate their buying audience (the professors).
Ironically, despite years of education, most of what I know about Math and CS (among other things) have come from self study. Most come from slim, concise, cheap books.
The whole education system is at fault. From accrediation boards (who probably ultra-scrutinize textbook choices), university administration, lazy or greedy professors (it takes a little more effort to use cheap books and they can't make money like they would if they wrote books), and book publishers (you know what they do).
I hate to knock everybody, but if I ever teach a class, I will do everything in my power to use a Dover book or some cheaper alternative.
see http://www.doverpublications.com
What do you mean my sig is repetitive? What do you mean my sig is repetitive? What do you mean....
The use of tablet type pc's is poo hooed! However the long term solution to text books is exactly that!
Billy Gates knows this. Problem is he has to crush Adobe PDF first. Power Point is a joke, and for teaching is really useless. The real break through for Linux could come with the help of Adobe and a hardware manufacturer consortium. This could change the paper world that universities live in forever. Microsoft insistance on OS/software domination and the publishing/paper industries have held this back for too long. The time for the real revolution is now and it is open source based.
OH THE SHAME I fell off the wagon and use sigs again!
I was curious, so I did a bit of searching. And proceeded to be flabbergasted.
:)
American publishing houses seem to operate secondary arms in India specifically for English-language technology books.
Check this out:
Introduction to Algorithms, 2nd ed: $79.95
Introduction to Algorithms, 2nd ed: $5.73
The C Programming Language [K&R]: $40.00
The C Programming Language [K&R]: $2.10
Design Patterns: $54.99
Design Patterns: $7.11
Granted, you have to wait a while for them. And there's probably tariffs that you have to pay. But still, I know where my next book purchase is coming from.
hmmm, lets see, this year here is my reciept for textbooks. I am in first year computer science BTW
C How to Program - $120
University Physics 11th Edition - $120
Philosophic Classics - From Plato to Derrida - $73.95
Calculus: One and several Variables - $120
Solutions to Calculus: One and several Variables - $50
Discrete (don't have the book here and can't remember the exact title) - $120
Solutions to Discrete $50
Total - $653
(All prices are in Canadian
Yeah, I got raped. I checked out the used book sale to see if I could pick up any copies used. Nope. All my textbooks came out with new editions this year (except one but I couldn't find it there). This would mean I would have to do the problem mapping stuff, take twice as long and be right half the time (the maps aren't very good, nothing like getting 0 on an assignment because you did the wrong questions).
As for the C book, I ALREADY KNOW C. I am going to learn nothing new in the entire course. Currently we are tackling the immensly hard problem of arrays. For fucks sake I have gotten paid for writing programs , arrays are a bit basic. The only reason I need that textbook is because he will assign problems out of it.
Don't get me wrong, it is a great textbook for those just starting out in C/C++, but it gets up to basic classes at the very end (the last bit is C++).
If publishers wouldn't come out with new editions ever year then I might have a chance in hell of saving some money. In the mean time I am driving as little as possible to save gas (to school, then straight home). Have stopped drinking pop (a hard habit to kick but pop is expensive), and have asked for blank CDs for christmas because I can't afford them myself.
History will be kind to me, for I intend to write it - Sir Winston Churchill
I usually get all my textbooks for India. The books are published by the same publishers, and the paper quality is the same, with the only difference being that the books are paperbacks. It's really not a big difference to me considering the fact that the books are lighter and I'll probably not use them after a couple of semesters anyway. :-). I wonder why publishers never give people a softcover option out here!
The difference in cost? An engineering textbook costs at least $100 in the campus bookstore - the same textbook never costs more than $7 in India.
Oh, and by the way, all the textbooks that I use here are available over there
"When the only tool you own is a hammer, every problem begins to resemble a nail." - Abraham Maslow (1908-1970)
Here's my little story:
My French course's textbook was $100, so I went online and found the Teacher's Edition of the same text for $30. Amazing.
drug companies are reluctant to sell high cost drugs into poor countries at below cost.
Who the fuck taught you to use apostrophes to indicate plurality?
tree's means TREE IS or BELONGING TO (the) TREE
I bought a math book book off half.com for around $40.00. I looked at the price tag and it said 395.00Rs. This book costs like $120.00 in America. This is around $8.70(!!!!). They're marking stuff up by 1000+ %! Imagine getting ripped off and saving money by it.
Region-1 Encoded
Only difference is they didn't encrypt the book. But they still alter the costs based on locale.
I don't understand why this is a surprise to so many.
huh? show me one Griffiths book that isn't a complete waste of money. if you really meant 'real books' then lose Griffiths from that list - the guy is only good at making money.
If your Canadian, don't bother...
It is illegal to import textbooks without the Canadian publishers permission.
That goes for used textbooks as well.
Dude, both QM and ED are just about the best introductory texts out there. They might not be reference books, but they're very helpful for learning the material.
Yeah. You can import cheaper college textbooks from England and rake in $1200 on campus, but try doing that with cheaper prescription drugs from Canada and they throw you in jail.
Jesus god... doesn't anyone here have a fucking sense of humor? The line about 'not advocating piracy' is clearly a joke. Is there anybody here who's higher mental functions haven't been eroded by caffiene and ritalin?
Please, kill yourselves. Yes, right now. Yes, I'm talking to you. Blowdryer goes in bathtub, car starts in closed garage. You have been on this planet long enough; please, no more.
As the owner and operator of a small college bookstore in the U.S., I can tell you that customer service is at the top of my list as long as I will not lose money in the long run on the endevor.
For example, students who buy a defective book in any shape or form (as long as they bought it from my store, and are not trying to pass off on me an on-line purchased book; that's why they have to have a receipt) will typically get an exchange with little or no questions asked.
I agree with you completely on the issue of overhead: the student selling those books outside of the classroom faces none of these issues.
Although this kind of thing hurts my business I would be *very* reluctant to notify the authorities of this student's (illegal) activities (selling without a vendors license, failure to pay state salex tax, not paying commission to the college, etc), because of the tremendous negative impact it would have on the goodwill I need with the student body and the college community to stay in business. This student is, as slashdotters here point out, reacting to a nasty pricing scheme. Going after this student would not solve the problem.
The incredible disparity between prices here in the states and elsewhere is a major part of the problem (others include the fact that the rising cost of college tuition and textbooks outpaces the inflation ratios of other commodities).
I have spoken to students in my bookstore in a frank and friendly way about this matter when they return their books less than a week into class. "I'm curious - what's the reason for the return?" I will ask. And when they tell me they got a book for $60.00 overseas, and it costs me MORE to purchase the same book at wholesale from the publisher, I know I am facing the inevitability of disparate pricing and market forces.
I situations like this the only real item I have on my side is customer service and the convenience of getting and returning books all in one place (I own an on-campus bookstore.) For those students in-the-know and/or hard up for cash, this does not often make enough of a difference to keep a sale in the bookstore.
My annual salary is the high 30s at a college where the student population is around 600 full-time equivilant students. I consider this salary to be in-line with that of other small business owner/operators. I dont drive a fancy car or own an expensive/fancy home.
The price of the books I sell is dictated by a contract with the college and the wholesale price of books as the publishers see fit to charge me. The bookstore I own has five empoyees. I am the only full time employee. The part time co-manager and myself get benfits. My wife and the other two part-timers do not because I cannot afford them (my wife works full-time elsewhere).
The Bookstore I own and operate is a member of the National Association of College Bookstores (NACS for short). They have been trying to address this problem with the publishers for the past year with little success.
Doubtless many slashdotters out there will identify me as part of the problem, not part of the solution. But I can say to you as a small business owner that small businesses in particular are either honest and straightforeward (or have a near-absolute corner on the market as I obviously do not) or are soon out of business.
As a result of this kind of competition I have worked to increase my convenience to the students and accpeted that as far as textbooks are concerned, I will simply make less profit. Like many in the recording industry, I thought I would be in my profession for the rest of my life. I realized over the past three years, with the growing impact of internet sales, that this may not neccessarily happen.
If it does not, the last people *I* would ever blame are the students.
.
uR iGn0ranc3, Their Power
That's why I buy and sell my books on half.com and amazon. Not to mention, I never bought a book the last couple of years of college unless I was certain I needed it. You'd be amazed at how many books you really don't need to buy.
They teach you this in econ101, it's called price discrimination. If you can judge exactly what each person is willing to pay and then set that as the price, you will maximize your profit. You can easily show this using some "area under the graph" explanation. The classic example is the movie theater ticket prices. The operators know that there are some people out there that would like to see the movie, but not for the full admission price. So they offer senior citizens a $2 discount, for example. They have realized that senior citizens, as a group are willing to pay less for things, and because it's easy to categorize people by age, it's easy to set prices that take advantage of this. The ultimate goal of discriminatory pricing is to be able to set each price for each ticket individually, based on some omniscient knowledge of what that person is willing to pay.
Anyway, this applies to the textbook industry as well. The publishers have realized that they have two sets of customers that are easily segregated, and so they can set different prices for these different groups of people. They've discovered that Americans are willing to pay a lot more for books, perhaps because as a group the American college students tend to have a lot of money to throw around. (Note that I'm not saying that college kids are all rich, just that if you're going to college you likely have enough money to support the many thousands in tuition, or you have loans and financial aid... either way you are spending a lot of money on education.)
Anyway, they've determined that as a group Americans are willing to pay more than people in those other countries, and therefore it makes perfect sense to charge more. Part of this I'm sure is due to different standards of living, and all the other stuff they use to justify it. But in the end it just boils down to the simple fact that if you can divide your customers into groups based on what they're willing to pay and then set prices accordingly, you will maximize your profits.
You think just the prices are bad. One of my college professors was (probably still is) a textbook author. The publisher requested that she modify her textbook every three to five years (they started pestering at three and insisted at five.) She also found out(after her personal copy started to deteriorate) that the books are designed to fall apart after one to two semesters to limit the resale of the textbooks.
BTW the bookstores don't make quite as much as you think on textbooks. Having seen some of the recent price lists most are marked up less than 30% (Standard MSRP.) In areas where there are competitors they usually cut it to 15%. When you figure that there only big sale time is around the begining of each semester you can see that the real theives are the publishers.
I actually had this happen to me. I picked up my calculus book from a third-party seller on amazon.com. And It was brandnew and a lot cheaper than anything else up there. I think it was about 62% of the original price including shipping. I recieved it about a week later and started to chuckle. Apparently, publishers realize that people are importing books and selling them in the US. I got strange looks for awhile because my book cover is like everyone elses except for the fact that it has the normal cover minaturized and surrounded by a white border. The white border in big red letters says "NOT FOR SALE IN THE UNITED STATES". Kind of interesting. The book I recieved was the international student edition. It was perfectly identical to that of my peers except for the cover and I believe part of the title page.
There is quite an outrage here about the difference in cost for textbooks bought in the USA versus those in foreign countries. But at least arbitrage will eventually stop this (assuming Congress or tariffs don't interfere). But an analogous situation prevents this sort of market correction for DVD's: the Region Code system. It is time for equal public attention and outrage against this system, and the DMCA which makes it possible.
I may be wrong about this, but it was always my understanding that people in military service overseas were able to purchase items and bring them back to the U.S. at much lower customs fees than what are normally charged.
I had a friend in the Navy, stationed in Japan, who kept telling all of us to be sure to have him purchase any electronics/stereo gear we wanted while we had the chance, because it would be a far better deal than we'd get otherwise.
I also understand, though, there are limits to this. You can't just start massively purchasing products overseas for resale in the states - or else you start paying the normal import duties and fees, instead of the discounted military rates.
I was in the book store in Beijing a while ago. I walked down the computer science and found a couple of my old time favorite books like the dragon book for compiler design and others. The price is like RMB$25~40. I paid more than that in the US for my copies. Remember, these books are not pirated. They are authorized to published.
On the same account, Disney is selling Mickey DVD in Chian for US$2 vs $1 for pirate copies.
My Major is Accounting. The US follows GAAP while the UK and the rest of the world follows different accounting standards. I'm also taking tax classes. I really don't think anyone in the UK gives a damn about the IRS. So while it may work for the sciences. Business majors mileage may vary.
You're right. I'm a second year student. I'm just taking required courses at this point. I sure hope some of the later classes challenge me, but the courses I'm in right now are just like "this is a switch, a switch does this" etc. I HATE core requirements.
I think publishers are charging too much for textbooks also. I work at an advertising company where we get many of our catalogs printed in Hong Kong now. They cost considerably less to print. I don't know if the same textbooks that are sold in the US and overseas are being printed all in the US. Although it makes sense why the textbooks sold overseas are considerably less if they are indeed printed overseas too. That's why most electronics are manufactured in Asia also.
The U. of O. Bookstore is like this, but they take 10% of the final cost off at the register. What a sweet deal!
Which university does that refer to, and does the discount only apply to students?
the authors make the same amount of money anyway, whether the book's sold for $180 in Canada, or a quarter of the price in Hong Kong. i'm sure it's the publishers fixing the prices. but when you look at the books' inside covers you see specifically that it's illegal to sell/ship the books overseas.
I've been trying to find a site that would sell texts and ship them over here but havent found any. (Does anyone have links?)
At Concordia University, pretty much 85% of the students get photocopied textbooks. You can pretty much spend less than $25 and get the entire book with bounding costs included.
You could do it by hand which would take 2 hours on average, or buy a pre-photocopied version at the shop right across the bookstore.
usually the books bought overseas cost about the same, but soft covered. i certainly dont mind it being that. it sure beats the photocopied version in my opinion.
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Once again this shows that the internet helps to make the world look like one single marketplace. The old tactics of marketplace division (sell the product at the highest possible price in every possible market) are beginning to break down.
This is the sort of lesson the MPAA is learning with region coding of DVDs etc....
Universities/colleges enforce professors to use the latest edition of books every 2 years. No buys the 5th edition if 6th edition is available because a) problem numbers are different b) chapters are shuffled around /w missing chapters
Although some profs are nice and give problem sets using old and new edition of text books.
So text-books have an EOL of 2 years.
I was not stationed overseas at the time so I had to pay the duty fees. I did not but more then a few things a year subject to the duty fees so I don't know what limits there were. I do remember a check box or a verbal confirmation when ordering that you were buying the equipment for your own personal use or as a bona fide gift for someone else.
Bad boys rape our young girls but Violet gives willingly.
Then as a professor, you wouldn't believe how many students photocopy textbooks. Especially for all the shitty courses we have to take, and have no interest in the subject.
Of course, I'd happily pay for good, solid CS text books.
Kashif
Reading some of these comments.. duh.. Amazon is list or a buck or two under.. and the story as well.. oy.
Take for example Quantum Mechanics by Liboff. Not a very large distribution, but fairly well used. Its $73.30 with shipping from A1 books. From that UK amazon site, its $71.75 at current exchange rates, excluding customs charges. From Amazon US its *shockingly* list price $94 + shipping. Moral? Shop around in the US and you can find your textbooks for quite a bit cheaper than your campus bookstore or Amazon, and on a par with the offshore offerings.
when going to the amazon uk site remember that funny thing in front of the price is the pound symobol and pound > $ :-p
There is room for lots of fun there hehe
The war with islam is a war on the beast
The war on terror is a war for peace
I haven't purchased any textbooks overseas, but I have purchased quite a few normal books and CDs from Europe and have never received any customs bill.
Students Find $100 Textbooks Cost $50, Purchased Overseas
By TAMAR LEWIN
Published: October 21, 2003
ichard Sarkis and David Kinsley were juniors at Williams College, surfing the net for a cheap source for their economics textbook, when they discovered a little known economic fact: the very same college textbooks used in the United States sell for half price -- or less -- in England.
Just like prescription drugs, textbooks cost far less overseas than they do in the United States. The publishing industry defends its pricing policies, saying that foreign sales would be impossible if book prices were not pegged to local market conditions.
But many Americans do not see it that way. The National Association of College Stores has written to all the leading publishers asking them to end a practice they see as an unfair to American students.
"We think it's frightening, and it's wrong, that the same American textbooks our stores buy here for $100 can be shipped in from some other country for $50," said Laura Nakoneczny, a spokeswoman for the association. "It represents price-gouging of the American public generally and college students in particular."
But thanks to the Internet, more and more individual students and college bookstores are starting to order textbooks from abroad -- and a few entrepreneurs, including Mr. Sarkis and his friends, have begun what are essentially arbitrage businesses to exploit the price differentials.
"We couldn't understand why what costs $120 here should cost $50-something there," said Mr. Sarkis, who, with Mr. Kinsley and another classmate, has spent three years building a Web-based company, BookCentral.com, selling textbooks from abroad to students in the United States. "It seemed so sleazy of the publishers. We were sure that college students would be shocked and outraged if they knew about the foreign prices. But it's been this big secret."
That is changing, though. To the despair of the textbook publishers who are still trying to block such sales, the reimporting of American texts from overseas has become far easier in recent years, thanks both to Internet sites that offer instant access to foreign book prices, and to a 1998 Supreme Court ruling that federal copyright law does not protect American manufacturers from having the products they arranged to sell overseas at a discount shipped back for sale in the United States.
Before the Supreme Court decision, Americans could not take advantage of the discounts abroad without violating the copyright law.
Now, however, "gray market" sales are taking off on campuses.
At one prestigious university, a sophomore imported 30 biology books from England this fall and sold them outside his classroom for less than the campus-bookstore price, netting a $1,200 profit. Next semester, if all goes well, he plans to expand the operation.
"The only difference is that they say `international edition' in little print on the cover," said the student, who added that he was not certain whether his project raised any legal issues, and therefore asked that neither he nor his college be identified.
At other colleges, Asian students have banded together to take advantage of textbook prices in Taiwan, Singapore and Malaysia, which are even lower than those in Europe.
Many students, individually, have begun to compare the textbook prices posted on American sites like Amazon.com, with the lower prices for the same books on foreign sites like Amazon.co.uk.
The differences are often significant: "Lehninger Principles of Biochemistry, Third Edition," for example, lists for $146.15 on the American Amazon site, but can be had for $63.48, plus $8.05 shipping, from the British one. And "Linear System Theory and Design, Third Edition" is $110 in the United States, but $41.76, or $49.81 with shipping, in Britain.
Many college bookstores, meanwhile, have taken matters into their own hands, arranging their own overseas purchases.
"I buy from Amazon.c
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The article mentioned uk's amazon web site, but it also mentioned people getting books from sites in the Far East, Israel, etc. Anyone got links for some cheap, yet trustworthy, offshore booksellers?
Yup. Blame the publishers, for publishing new editions with trivial changes & pushing the instructors to abandon old books. The campus bookstore is stuck. I worked in one for years, and also for a used textbook company for awhile.
The campus bookstore has to carry every silly book any fool instructor chooses, some of which are incredibly difficult to get and impossible to do anything but lose money on. I've dealt with small publishers who offered no discount, required payment in advance, and didn't actually ship anything, because they had no inventory. If they did ever get around to shipping anything, they would never accept a return.
Other book vendors can cherry pick, and only carry the books with a good margin. This is similar to the problem with competitors to the postal service. Nobody else has to provide universal service.
Also, blame the instructors who pick a new book every time they are given one, instead of using an older but still widely available edition.
I also remember instructors who would have the campus copy shop produce custom texts for them, and price their books outrageously just because they had a captive audience. Of course the bookstore took the heat for these too.
Used book buybacks are usually done by outside companies, so it's not the bookstores who are profiting from this either. Best of all, while they won't ever pay more than a minimum price for a used book, they sure will sell nice used books as new. These same companies run competing bookstores and undercut the college bookstore on the high-margin books.
Oh, and some books are just gonna be expensive because they'll never sell more than a hundred copies a year. Some of these are still great books.
The India price difference doesn't surprise me, but the UK price difference is interesting. I'd love to know why that is.
Anybody who thinks there's big money in bookstores should spend a decade in the business. The rumors in the business about one of the big chains is that they don't have to make a profit because their main business is laundering money.
Assembly is the reverse of disassembly.
I'm not sure why they're cheaper, but I compared the prices of the books I bought this semester to the prices on BookCentral.com (the website listed in the NYTimes article) with my school's bookstore ( http://www.book.uci.edu/ ) and my books were 40-50% cheaper from the bookstore. These are new, US edition books.
Go figure.
Sig!
BookArea.com - I buy my books for WAY less than my peers, and sell for more on half.com as well!
Sure, it sometimes takes a week to get my books, but it's not like i woulda started studying during the first week of classes anyway! :)
Berto
Total I paid for my 7 books: approx. $600 or a little more Total from just amazon.co.uk after converting from pounds sterling at the current rate of 1.67 to 1:
$312, all of the exact ISBNS
from gobuybooks in India (converting from Rupee to Dollar): $28 - that is not a misprint TWENTY EIGHT FUCKING DOLLARS.
of course i have no idea how ordering from India would work out, but I have ordered from the Brits amazon and it worked out fine!
so in conclusion, i am going to do a test run from India, and if the books show up I am going to advertise this like crazy, I am talking commercials on local TV for my new Import biz!
I have over 25,000 local college students available to me in a 10 square mile radius.
1. advertise books 2. sell books 3. india sends books 4. profit
Elliott Smith Tribute CD available now on Double D Records! Visit www.doubledrecords.com to order.
The purpose of tenure is to ensure freedom of speech. The proper functioning of the scholarly world depends crucially on this freedom, because our way of trying to find out the truth is by arguing for competing ideas. If I'm afraid that I might lose my job for stating an unpopular view, I'm less likely to voice that view; and this in turn interferes with the progress of knowledge. That's why we have tenure: so that we can say what we think without having to fear popular opinion.
No human decision-making process is perfect, and you do occasionally get deadwood tenured faculty. On the whole, however, I think the system functions pretty well. People who are slackers by their nature usually don't generally make it thru the years of grad school and the years of the tenure process. If you want to be a slacker, there are much easier ways to do it. People who make it thru all of that tend to be hard workers by their nature.
As for the idea that professorships should be like jobs in other sectors, I'd argue that it's the other sectors that have it wrong. It used to be common for someone to work for one company for his or her entire career. Now, employees are generally viewed as disposable parts to be dumped when doing so makes more money for the shareholders. Even leaving aside the free-speech issue, are you saying that it would be a good thing for more sectors to take this view?
This tells me that like recording artists, the text book authors aren't getting a big cut of those seemingly outragous prices charged by school book stores. One of the best things the Internet has ever or will ever do is cut out the greedy middlemen.
This is a very good idea. I bought a $130 physics text book from amazon.co.uk that cost $55 after shipping and euro conversion. Amazon.com had it for $130. The best way to compare this is to check out www.addall.com and they can search multiple websites for an isbn number and give you the results of prices. Also the book is *identical* to the US version. Same ISBN and everything.
Just like many companies are going overseas to places like India to get cheaper wageslaves, your average college student can go to these same places to find cheaper textbooks. Globalization cuts both ways. In theory, both prices of textbooks and salaries would average out over time. Now, the publisher gets to play the role of the displaced IT worker, using political pressure/shame to try to eliminate this sort of competition.
Don't American students buy used books? Why do they have to pay the list price?
37.99 BPS (british pounds sterling?)
Nitpick: it's GBP, Great Britain Pounds. The codes are defined in ISO 4217. (They usually start with the same code as the ISO 3166 country code, which is GB for the UK.)
GROGGS: alive and well and living in
At the University of Delaware, they do $300,000 in CASH sales at fall rush. thats CASH.
so let's see...
so far we can get cheaper alcohol, cigarettes, textbooks, software (although it might not actually be *legal*), prescription drugs, and probably countless other things, just by logging on to an international website.
kinda kills that whole "buy american" slogan, huh?
well, i guess you can still buy american goods, just not from actual americans.
The purpose of tenure is to ensure freedom of speech.
Since you are at Penn, two words for you: Eden Jacobowitz.
He was suspended from Penn for calling two girls "Water Buffalo." So much for freedom of speech at Penn.
Thanks to our country of birth, my wife and I have 5 degrees between us, total of 14 years of university, at a total visible cost of $0. Free-at-source education is one of the great achievements of civilization that the US chooses not to adopt.
K&R C book in Amazon $40 USD.
I bought that same book, (Spanish translation but same publisher) in Mexico City, new (and legal) for ~8 USD
Believe me they still make money... Dumping isn't necessary because there is no competition there.
Is the restriction legally enforceable? I've seen copyright notices in books published in the UK that attempt to assert rights that don't exist in the USA.
Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
I'm taking a course this semester that uses Parallax's BASIC Stamp. The professor decided to put some reading materials and a CD in the bookstore for us. The reading was just printouts from the CD. The CD was just a collection of PDF documents and some programs from Parallax, all stuff we can download for free, but he took the time to put it on CD and give it to the bookstore.
There was about 50 sheets of paper photocopied front to back, and the professor actually burned the copies of the CD himself. Cost at the bookstore - $50. I paid a friend $10 for a copy of the CD and printed out the documents in a computer lab (putting my 'technology fee' to use). He coulda had the copy shop across from the bookstore print the pages for about $5, and made each of us give him a $1 for the CD. At least that way he would have made a few cents - he says he doesn't get anything from the bookstore.
Parallax says that a "reasonable" reproduction fee can be charged for the documents, otherwise they are to be freely distributed. I've been awfully tempted to send them an email about this stinkin bookstore.
A professor who uses a textbook is being lazy; he's passed the responsibility for his course to another.
A return to the older system would be refreshing, would free up shelf space, save the trees and lighten backpacks. Students would save $ and learn more.
> Third and fourth year, I could see changing... maybe.
No.
If you do abstract algebra or some of the very tough upper-level math classes, you may learn some 40-year-old math. Other than that, nothing you learned is younger than 100 years. Calculus, in particular, is not a young discipline.
The purpose of tenure is to ensure freedom of speech.
An oft-repeated piece of propaganda that remains a lie however often it's repeated.
The purpose of tenure is to perpetuate the "election" of one segment of the therapeutic/educational/prison system by reinforcing its restricted membership.
Applied to average working people, this is called "indenture." The underclass are, in every meaningful sense, immobile, bound to institutions and masters. Without their continual subsistence pay, they can't afford to live, let alone to invest in the invention of their own occupations. They cannot afford the leisure required to seek better employment. They risk their very lives by not perpetuating their bondage. So, rename the bondage "job security," and put a smile on the slaves. I'm not surprised you so enjoy the idea. Because...
Applied to the modern "master class," of which educators are a (low-ranking) part, this type of contract serves to mark those tenured as the living temporal embodiment of the Holy Immortal Institution--with a small, metonymic career-immortality that shields them from minor revolutions within the system, and prevents the system as a whole from meaningfully changing.
You should "fear popular opinion." The "progress of knowledge" doesn't need you. Your egotism and class hatred is nauseating. The whip-handle in your waistband is showing, and slave revolts are not unknown to history.
{/"Troll"}
Your mouth is like Columbus Day.
BPB reprints several publishers from the USA for software books. Prentice Hall (India) publishes quite a few classics like the K and R.
Someone wrote that the K and R is available for $2. Not true. It is available for $5. But there are still cheaper ways to get books. India has a flourishing market of second hand books. these are hand-me-downs. A book typically listed for Rs.200 can be had for Rs. 50 in the seconds market (Rs.50 is approximately about a dollar).
If you still want it to be cheaper, you can even hire a book for the semester at 10% of the listed price. You have to return the book in reasonable condition though. Finally, most of the schools (including the one I went to) have a tradition of the seniors passing on their text-books to their juniors. It is not with regret that I noted that my cousin (who is now in the same school) is using the same copy of Kimberley that i studied.
The purpose of all philosophers was to impress women
Griffiths' Electrodynamics book is excellent. It covers vector calculus in a very integrated fashion. Griffiths' QM book is average. You won't get any decent understanding, but what single QM book offers that anyways? What specific beef do you have against Griffiths?
At my school, there is a small student organization that will buy back your schoolbooks for almost twice what the college bookstore will, and sells them for only a $0.50 profit. I ended up getting all of my books for about $200, where as some of my friends bought the same books for about $900.
"Upon attaching the waterblock to my penis, I began to notice that I know nothing about computers." -- JRockway
Here's the website to a bookseller in Singapore.
They concentrate their offerings to IT/Computer Science related books.
The prices listed on the website are in Singapore dollars, US$1 == S$1.75.
Try searching for your favourite(read expensive) IT/CS book and have a feel of the price disparity.
http://www.compbook.com.sg
[JASON@CHAW]
I think the bad news is that the publishers aren't going to sit by and watch this happen. I think the first thing they will do is try to get a law passed or changed to make this illegal. If that doesn't work they'll probably just make a US version and an overseas version of their books, just like the revisions that come out to keep people from using old books, and put pressure on bookstores, universities, and professors to ensure that those books are used in the US. They might even just delay oversea versions so that the US and oversea versions fall out of sync. I wonder what decision professors would make, and just how great the pressure will be from the university for professors to use books sold at the university bookstore.
I checked for pricing of the textbook needed for my current course on Amazon (very arcane title having to do with physical synthesis [chip layout]) and found it was selling for $130+. I then checked half.com and found a seller selling copies for $63. After I got the book, I noticed that it was printed in Taiwan (had an extra special little note under the copyright). It shipped directly from Taiwan (and only took about 3 days). Now I suspect that this book costs something like $20 in Taiwan. I've heard that they just copy American textbooks over there without paying attention to the copyright notice. So if you've got a direct connection with one of these Taiwanese 'publishers' you can probably get a much better deal than you could in England.
Software piracy is *much* more rampant here (India), but software is a lot costlier here than in the US. The argument they give is that they have to make up for the losses due to piracy.
Can you post some URLs?
I checked out this one:
http://www.firstandsecond.com/
of course the prices are in rupees - does this get automatically converted by the credit card co? (and what's the exchange rate for rupees?)
That's nothing compared to India. There, many publishers of standard textbooks publish the same book at a steeply discounted price. This is to match local standards of living (the same reason for the much-discussed salary gap).
c ma y2k.htmlb ib/cs.html h tm
I saw such classic CS books as K&R and UNPv1, published as "Eastern Economy Edition". The Indian person who owned the books said that they were bought for the equivalent of around $5 each! They are softcover, printed on really cheap paper (thin and not pure white), and generally produced as cheaply as possible in order to meet the low price. The page size is also reduced.
http://www.niyam.com/writing/iconoclasts/niyama
http://people.csa.iisc.ernet.in/~siddu/
http://www-scf.usc.edu/~india/newstudentletter.
I was jealous, and wished I had been able to get books at that price during school. The content is exactly the same! Too bad there isn't an Amazon.co.in....
Dr. Demento On The 'Net!
England != UK.
FFS, its bad enough to see it in the story but try and learn.
Might as well call the entire states Texas!
Yes, and 1$~50Rs.
It's remarkable how things are so much more expensive in one region than another; at least it's a slight delight that in england, for once, something is cheaper. Well, don't be upset americans, for almost everything else it's way cheaper in the US than elsewhere.
Department of Computing Science has a similar arrangement. They do not make actual books, just a bunch of photocopied A4:s, and the SSA is not involved, instead the dept. sells these for a non-profit price.
This is price-fixing, it is anti-competitive and anti-business, but most of the students seem to like it. Maybe these policies (business is not always the first priority) have inspired Linus Torvalds to release Linux under GPL. He graduated from our university.
You would think that with such massive profit margins available, there would already be an underground organization devoted to undercutting the publisher's prices through textbook imports.
Just imagine it: you could be part of the "Textbook Mafia."
or check out www.fabmart.com
"When the only tool you own is a hammer, every problem begins to resemble a nail." - Abraham Maslow (1908-1970)
I tried to buy a textbook for a class I am taking, the online campus bookstore sells it for $35USD, but I wanted to get a used one. So I tryed searching the ISBN on Amazon.com and found a used copy of that book for $199USD. Is Amazon.com price gouging us, or are the people selling the used books asking too much?
Remember, Slashdot does not have a -1 disagree moderation, and no, troll, flamebait, and overrated are not substitutes.
I've been amazed to learn how much students have to spend on books over there... I had come to the conclusion there's some severe institutionalised ripping-off going on.
The simple fact is you shouldn't need to buy $1500 worth of books when you get to university. I'm most of the way through a Computer Science degree in the UK, and thus far we've been required to read one book and strongly advised to gain access to a few others.
Where does the material come from? Lecturers either print their own handouts, or you take notes yourself.
Seems to me to make a lot more sense.
(Before uni, we did work from books -- the college had enough copies for everyone, we each borrowed a copy for the duration of the course).
If you don't like what I write don't be a CS and mod it down. Refute it.
Yea I can't spell. So what is your point?
Since Iran does not enforce USA copyright, iranian publishers can reproduce USA books legaly without having to pay any fee. So they reprint USA textbooks at better quality than USA originals (harder covers, better paper, ...) and sell them for less than $5.
:( but it should be possible since DHL operates there ( FedEx and UPS don't )
I'm not aware of any company reimporting books from Iran though
Dear Comrade,
I am a cheapskate. I admit it.
I am really pleased when I know that Adam Smith's book "The Wealth Of Nation" is online
So, is the "Das Kapital" online as well ?
If so, where is it ?
Thank you !
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
Freely available university research papers will mean equal treatment for all.
Where will the money come from? Tax, most likely, but as we aren't paying as much for medicine it won't actually cost us more.
This is off-topic isn't it?
Why not have text books be electronic, and have a few profressors be in control of them?
Again, once the inital copies are written, it wouldn't take too much over to update them over the years.
e.g. colour -> color, aluminium -> aluminum, initialise -> initialize
Then all we'd need to do is get them to correct their date format and....
hello all,
You can try First & Second. They claim to be India's biggest online book store and have a nice 72 hour shipping to the US.
Another one is Fabmart
I have always used Economy Asian Editions printed in India because the original American / European editions cost at least 10 times more. Happy shopping
resurrect my
often times, just scoping out amazon a week before classes begin is a good deal. amazon tends to deliver pretty quickly for me.
my university's bookstore puts little paper labels on the shelves noting the class number, who's teaching it, which book is needed and how much it costs, even before the books are in.
you go to the bookstore, get all the titles/editions/etc and go order on amazon. it seems a little dishounorable at first, but given that the bookstore extorts you on book prices when they know you're already broke from paying tuition, it's not so bad...
Oddly, for other kinds of books the US is usually much cheaper. I live in the Netherlands and when I buy English language novels or computer text books I usually buy them from Amazon, since they usually cost about half to three quarters (even including shipping) of what I would have to pay to buy them locally...
Wow, finally something that can be bought cheaper in the UK than in the USA. Maybe next time he'll swap the books for a crate of Levi's and do us all here a favour....
Of course they must be cheaper in Britain, they do not follow the british spelling standards.
We're not (quite) a third world country yet....
An unusual anomoly given that the same book in a CD format would attract 17.5% VAT (sales tax). Books used to be regulated by something called a Net Book Agreement which fixed the prices that books could be sold at. The Net book agreement was removed and straight away competition started. My guess is that if a book in the US is higher than the UK then its because of some price fixing agreement of some kind.
During my computer science degree, a Chinese friend of mine had a copy of "Modern Operating Systems" by Tanenbaum. In the US, it costs about $100 brand new. In China, it costs $2. And guess what: the cover is in Chinese, but everything else is in Chinese. I guess you can get the same deal in India as well.
Nobox: Only simple products.
Are there any differences between them?
What is the edition then called where it has the answers and stuff, that's the one I'd want to buy, maybe instructor's edition.
DVDs, Music, Video games, software, computers, cars and almost every single mass produced consumer product is still cheaper in the US. I understand that this is especially bad price fixing but it is one of the few cases of it in America, consider also that an American tuition is also more pricy than a tuition in a UK university, so Americans are already paying more just by attending college in America. (Ramen noodle companies rejoice!) Price fixing is happening all over europe by the same types of big companies, here in Ireland a new music CD is $25. And yeah, we in the UK / Ireland still have lousy weather, I'm looking out my window at loads of hail coming down. Yay.
Yup...
Off course printing costs a lot more than offset-Litho, but there is no stock for the publisher or shop to worry about.
Yes we still need a referee mechanism (even forgetting the tenure issue, there is still an issue of quality assurance) and an editor/proof-reader to be sure that everything is correctly put together - but it rather changes the publishing business.
Please remember that Donald E. Knuth wrote TeX and METAFONT because of the issues he had with the printing and publiching business. He triggerred a small revolution.
See my journal, I write things there
1$ = ~45.4 rupees
Look here: click
;-)
"Modern Operating Systems" costs 250 Indian Rupees which translates to 5.5 USD! And they even call it "Special Indian Price". There is also another version which does not have the "Special Indian Price" thing which costs 5427 (!!) Indian Rupees (122 Dollars): click
I'm curiuos if they will ship the Speical Indian Price book outside India
Well, this explains things a litte.
A book I happen to have sitting on my desk right now, "Java How To Program" - Deitel & Deitel, has in big fonts on the back cover -
"Not for Sale in USA and Canada"
Above this, in a box, it has -
"This is a special international edition of an established title widely used by colleges and universities throught the world. Pearson Education International published this sepcial edition for the benefit of students outside the United Sates and Canada."
"If you purchased this book within the United States or Canada you should be aware that it has been wrongfully immported without the approval of the Publisher or the Author."
I thought this was a little strange, as if I ever buy books from the US, I get them from bookpool, and the prices are always less than I can get locally in Europe, even with the shipping and import duty included.
Now I understand why is has this - it's either telling me that I'm privledged to be able to buy a copy of the book, or that the people in the US and Canada are really getting screwed on the price.
"The best part? I became an ordained minister while not wearing pants." -- CleverNickName
This would be a case of capitalism trumping protectionism. By having real free trade, price fixing by region becomes impossible. (Unless you do some sort of technology BS like DVD regioning.) But for most things, like books, if you try to price fix by region and there are no barriers to international trade, then the books in the cheaper region will be resold in the expensive ones, undermining the producers attempt at price fixing. This is how real capitalism works once you have eliminated the policies of the pseudo-capitalists in the Republicans and socialists in the Democrats.
Of course, normally people here like to screem about all the lost jobs. This at least should help demonstrate the value of unfettered fair trade, the value of rejecting America's current uncapitalist economy and moving towards a fully capitalist free trade economy.
If you don't think this is capitalism, go read books by capitalists like Frederic Bastiat, Ayn Rand, Jim Lewis, etc. to see for yourself.
"The State is that great fiction by which everyone lives at the expense of everyone else." -Frederic Bastiat.
Do what most professors at my old sydney uni did, write their own text book. I only had text books in 1st yr. After that they wrote their own notes and had a reading list for books in the library (multiple copies - plus a closed reserve - always available).
I guess it comes down to how lazy the professor is or not.
Never bought a text for next 2 years.
-- Cheer, Cheer, The Red and the White.
The real irony is I used to get my books from Amazon.com (not co.uk) until a year ago because they where cheaper.
technology jobs. College grads can afford (at least somewhat) to paid less. Due, in part, of having to pay only 1/24th the price US students due for textbooks. I'm sure this dichotomy extends well beyond this simple example, but it does appear to be a valid example.
This was some years ago, but I remember being jealous of foreign students that had been able to obtain either
For books that were $100 this was a big deal.
Some students photocopied whole books, but the big pile of smudgable papers, hours spent getting flashed by strobes, wasn't worth the saved expense and convenience of a genuine book, IMHO.
BTW, I thoroughly recommend that people check out Dover books for inexpensive paperback reprintings of really classic works.
"Provided by the management for your protection."
A senior citizen can either choose to go to a movie that is 7$ or choose not to. A college student HAS to purchase the textbook for a class. I can remember spending an amount equal to half of my tutition to purchase books for the classes several semesters. But no matter what, I was gonna get me some learning so I probably would have paid what ever it took, the only rational reason for the price difference then must be that brittish students would rather drop out of college than pay more money. It has gotten even worse recently with professors changing editions of the book every other semester (are there really that many new discoveries about midevil history every 6 months that you need a new book for???) so you can't sell the books back and others are forced to purchase new books.
Here are current (as of Oct 22, 2003) prices for new copies:
As for royalties, I get the standard 10% in the US of the puslisher's price, not the retail price, which works out to about $3 per book. For Canada and Europe, I get 5%, or about $1.50. Note that this holds regardless of the actual retail price.
When I came here to work, the prices of book shochked me!
/. I am still wondering why is it so and why are American taking it from publishers?
/down the prices. And hence cheap paper backs.
...
I always wondered why are books so over priced here. And now that this news is being discussed on
Publishers started with selling books for thousands of rupees but soon realised that if they wnated to sell they need to
Why are people here so gullible to take it form them? I mean are student willing to pay and increase their debt to pay for cool coffee shops, ads, fancy covers, etc etc prices when they buy a book?
Just curious
Hope they don't slip up and import any american history books. Then people might know what really happened!
Lies My Teacher Told Me
I bought some books from amazon's used textbook site. What i got was a lower quality textbook printed in India. Printed on the inside cover "not for export". The book was paperback, black and white, and poorly bound. I told this to one of my indian friends and he said textbooks in India cost next to nothing and he writes his parents for the textbooks he needs and they send them to him from india. Cheaper that way.
Now publishers outside the US will have a great excuse to jack up their prices. Students all over the world thank you!!!
That's "Mr. Soulless Automaton" to you, Bub.
Identical cars in Canadan and the US are prices several thousand $$ less in Canada. In fact, the making of the cars is transparent and the parts and completed cars cross borders, but the cars themselves are much cheaper in Canada.
I'd be happy to sell my 1 day old car to anyone in the US for a $500 fee...
He wrote "Yet Another Modest Proposal" about making coinage out of nuclear waste...
Excerpt:
"The profession of tax collector would carry its own, well deserved penalty. So would certain other professions. An Arab oil sheik might still grow obscenely rich, but at least we could count on his spending it as fast as it come in, lest it go up in a fireball. A crooked politician would have to take bribes by credit card, making it easier to convict him. A bank robber would be conspicuous, staggering up to the teller's window in his heavy lead-shielding clothing. The successful pickpocket would also stand out in a crowd. A thick lead-lined glove would be a dead giveaway; but without it, he could be identified by his sickly, faintly glowing hands. Society might even have to revive an ancient practice, amputating the felon's hand as a therapeutic measure, before it kills him."
The reason their books are so cheap, besides the awful book paper, is most of these publishers blithly ignore copyright conventions and royalties. Do these people think they are American music consumers or something? :-)
Was that at the end of the article (about textbooks selling at a discount from the manufacturer's sticker price) were sponsored links for places that sell textbooks at a discount and places that buy and sell used textbooks!
Paul Robinson <Postmaster@paul.washington.dc.us>
The lessons of history teach us - if they teach us anything - that nobody learns the lessons that history teaches us.
I'm waiting for the textbook industry to parrot the pharma industry with "we can't guarantee the purity or effectiveness of textbooks bought overseas." Especially from Canada ;)
stirring the pot since nineteen mumblty mumble...
Drug dealers will be replaced by textbook pushers. Just say no to libraries.
Gonna be funny when you Americans spell 'colour' with a 'u' ! Or maybe UK books need a patch-kit to remove all the 'u's in various words ! Maybe thats why US books cost more - it takes time and money to correct the English language to US English.
My college book store had a "Low Price Guarantee." Policy was, you buy the book there, and if you find it somewhere else cheaper (not counting Marketplace/Half.com/etc), you put in a form and they'll reimburse double the difference. I found my $100 math book for $70 after shipping at Pickabook.co.uk. New. I filed for my LPG, and forced them to give me back my $60. So I actually made $5 profit on that book when I sold it back to them for $45.
They were so pissed that now, the LPG only gives back the difference (instead of double), and their policy stipulates "For online comparisons, the book must be offered by a retail establishment located in the United States, not... sites located in the UK."
Although what you say may have been the case in the past, not all tuition fees in the UK are paid for by the state - they are means tested and charged depending on household income. Grants are provided only in very rare circumtances. I believe what you are referring to are 'Student Loans' which are currently charged at an interest rate of 2% above inflation; this will apparently be increased next year. Also, students may not claim any form of income support for their living costs whilst at university, and are again required to trust to parental income or simply borrow money for later repayment.
It's not as cushy for UK students as you make out. I'm currently earing 0, spending 600 a year on travel expenses, and quite a bit more on resources like books. And I'm required to pay council tax for the 2 months between college and university where I was unemployed. Makes me bitter when I think of all the freeloaders who get paid by the state to do nothing but spend their income on drinking, contributing to social disorder and modding their crappy old cars... *is bitter*
"There are 10 kinds of people in this world; those who understand binary, and those who do not."
Think the title speaks for itself. I go after used textbooks whenever I can. Saves me even more money. I'm surprised there aren't even more students about getting them. Sure, some subjects you can't get used books, but nothing is lost looking.
With books and the UK, on the other hand, it's primarily a market issue - textbooks cost less in Britain because students have less money, so the publishers can't get away with charging as much. (There may be some tax differences, but the taxes are probably higher in the UK with VAT.) And unlike gray-market electronics, where the same thing happens, textbooks don't have warrantees or repairs to worry about.
Textbooks from Greater China are a different issue - at least traditionally, those have been much less expensive because Chinese publishers of European-language western textbooks didn't bother with copyright or royalties. They'd often print them with covers in Chinese, or cookbook covers, or things like that. (I forget how much this was students from Taiwan vs. Hong Kong, but there was a lot of it when I was in school.)
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks