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!
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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!
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.
"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.
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
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
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
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
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
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.
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
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.
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.
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?
I guess we British students should stop moaning so much.
No, you've still got shithouse weather.
http://jesus.everdense.com/
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 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.
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.
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