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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.
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
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.
We must enact strict legilation to protect American citizens from this threat.
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
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"
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.