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.

Comments

I'll second this-I imported my mMath book

[BigDish]

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.

Cheap overseas textbooks are harmful to them

[u19925]

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.

Re:Not capitalism

[Otter]

I also liked "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." in the article.

Wrong, perhaps but isn't "frightening" a little over the top?

Textbooks=$$$

[christurkel]

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.

Academic publishers are pond slime

[Dr. Spork]

If you think overpriced textbooks are terrible from the student's perspective, things look even more dirty from the other side.

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.

My experience

[Quixote]

A long long time ago, when the algorithms bible CLR was in its first edition (yes, that long ago), I went over to our campus bookstore to buy it. It was listed at about $84 in the textbooks section. As I meandered around, I came to the general sci/math books section. And what do I see? The same CLR (exact same edition), listed at $76. Not a huge difference, but a difference nevertheless. I was dumbfounded: what kind of a person would mark up textbook prices for students??

Re:Not capitalism

[DaveAtFraud]

Plus, the college textbook market is a racket.

You probably have no idea how right you are. I used to work for a subsidiary of Times-Mirror Corporation. At a meeting of technical leads in the mid/late '90s the discussion from the subsidiary that published college text books was how to leverage technologies such as SGML/XML to create the ability for profs to customize the content of the text book they used in class each year. The motivation for this was not to allow the prof to select the best content for the course (this was just the marketing angle) but to destroy the market for used text books.

I can just hear a prof saying something like, "Oh, by the way, don't buy a used copy of the text for this class. The content has changed significantly from last year."

Time-Mirror got bought by Tribune Corporation a couple of years ago. Tribune sold off the subsidiaries that didn't fit with their core identity of news media so I have no idea where that particular subsidiary ended up. My guess is it doesn't matter. On the other hand, I know of at least one prof who required his own text book and then refunded to the class what he made on them buying it. Some people are fair but don't count on it.