Slashdot Mirror
Ripoff 101: Gouging Students for Textbooks
Brad Lucier writes "The San Jose Mercury News covers a report by the California Student Public Interest Research Group entitled "Ripoff 101" about the high, and increasing, cost of university textbooks. The story notes several practices that force students to buy new books instead of used and quotes yours truly about how universities are insulated from the costs of books. Is electronic textbook publishing the way to go?"
For a $100 textbook, students sometimes pay $5 per page they read during the semester.
Ceci n'est pas une signature.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Yeah, it's that Chinese-owned place across Bishop Street, right next to the coffee house. They have no idea what copyright is. If you're going to give an idea, follow through, share the information. sheesh
That always really annoyed me. I mean, I agreed with a lot of what they did, but the idea of the university acting as the bill collector for a lobbying group, and doing it in such a way that most students ended up giving money to these guys without knowing the first thing about them, always struck me as somewhere between rude and corrupt.
And now they're blowing the whistle on unnecessary costs for university students! Pot, kettle, black.
It's a monopoly racket, it always has been and it's going to take something dramatic to break it up.
- Book publishers and authors don't want there to be used textbook competition, they only get paid when a new copy is sold. Therefore, they'll gladly do anything in their power to force a new edition, even if it's simply changing a few image sizes so the page numbers change in a ripple effect with no meaningful content change.
- Professors don't care. In fact in some cases they are paid to select the more expensive of two options by bookstores who offer them a kickback based on a percentage of the sales. (Just face it, what's standing in the way of a professor including an Amazon.com affiliate URL on the course's website, knowing that at least a few students will by the required book that way?) And, often the professor is the author of the book, so every student in their course equals a textbook royalty coming their way.
- Universities often either own the bookstore, or at least own the building that the bookstore operation is renting. Therefore, anything that's good for the bookstore is good for the university.
Unless students vote with their feet by boycotting classes that require overpriced textbooks, and threatening to switch schools or majors if a required course requires the overpriced textbook, there's never going to be any change. So long as new books are required every year, and the publishers can keep it that way, the market for used textbooks will dry up.
They get fined every year for copyright violation, generally 10-15 grand. There was a huge sting last semester. They don't care, they can make it back in a few months.
There's another place off parc and sherbrooke that's well known by mcgill students. Ah, piracy...
"We will give you 3 dollars wholesale for that book, we have enough."
I would rather burn this 72.50 book for warmth in the middle of the summer stuck in the fucking sahara desert than give it to your for 3 bucks.
---I later sold it for 40 bucks to a girl buying the same book in line. Everyone wins, sort of.
Neck_of_the_Woods
#/usr/local/surf/glassy/overhead
Following advice from this website, at the beginning of this semester I bought books online, and they were quite a bit cheaper. Even with the overseas shipping and conversion rates I ended paying at least a third less for my books. Whats ever better is if you can buy last semesters books from someone. I find lurking outside of the bookstore at the end of the semester quite effective for picking up used text books from students who know the bookstore is going to screw them on their buy-backs. :-)
There are C textbooks out there that are $100 and not nearly as useful as "Teach yourself C in 24 hours." Admittedly, that's not a great example since those books are so common, but here's a better example. I'm taking a software testing class that called for two textboooks: one was an "actual textbook" that runs about $120, but it's half the length and half the content of the $40 "Managing the testing process." It's crap.
Crappety crap crap, as a matter of fact.
When I was at college, nary a course would go by without the lecturer recommending his (I did physics... no 'her') book as the 'seminal text on the subject'. Seminal. Yep.
:-)
The (more serious) bad point is that some lecturers are cosy with publishers, and even make a commission about recommending certain books. This isn't right, IMHO. The faster other universities go the way of MIT with openCourseware (yes, I know it's a year delayed, but they produce it in the right year) with a reviewable (and editable, though that's not at MIT yet, AFAIK), the better.
So, electronic publishing - big thumbs up. Wiki version, with verified (PGP ?) annotation/citation, even better
Simon
Physicists get Hadrons!
The University of Phoenix's online classes only require 1 physical book for the entire duration of your study with them. The rest are made available online in PDF, txt or HTML format.
Tuition also includes access to a decent online library of periodicals, journals, newspapers, books and other research material.
It eliminates both the cost of books (tuition is no higher than traditional schools w/physical books) as well as the need to lug them around.
Learning HOW to think is more important than learning WHAT to think.
I wanted to yell at him, "THEN WHY DO YOU MAKE US BUY THE NEW ONES?!"
But I realized that many of my professors used the books they wrote themselves - conflict of interest, anyone?
***
No, it isn't.
Black and white textbooks with minimal illustration (only where actually useful) and paperback addendums to keep older additions useful are the answer.
I looked through my father's old chemical engineering and mathematics textbooks, and they are smaller, more concise, and better references than any single textbook I've received in my college years. I keep them on my shelf, and sell my own books back at the end of the year.
Electronic books won't sit around for my kids to find someday. In fact, I doubt very much they'll sit around past one or two ebook product cycles. Also, I doubt book publishers want to seriously deal with the threat of a textbook napster. I don't know a single college student (my self included) who wouldn't feel fully justified in taking back from those greedy bastards.
In the meantime: get an old edition, then use the library reserve or borrow a friend's copy to do the problem sets.
In Capitalist America, bank robs you!
This is just another side effect of a copyright society. Although copyrights alledgely promote the creation of works, does not mean they promote the dissimation of usefull works. Alot of people think that cheap tabloids that are pennies on the page, and expensive text books that are pages on the dollar is just another aspect of a free market society, along with the hype over substance that goes with - but it is not. Copyrights are not free market because they are not about freedom, they are about controll. One of these days people will learn that just because an institution calls somthing a right, does not mean that it is. The sooner we learn that with copyrights the better - especially in the information age where the only way to differentiate free speech content from copyright content is to appoint people to censor it.
I never gave in to selling my books back to the bookstore. They offered me $16 for the book I bought fot $120!! You gotta be kidding me.
I put the book for sale in the student paper, charged $50 for it. That's less than what the bookstore was selling it for used ($75). It's win/win for both me and the student I'm selling my book to. Fuck my student bookstore. They really do gouge as deep as possible.
Sometimes they would offer *nothing* for my expensive book.. because "a new edition is coming out and the professor will be using that book." And guess who wrote the book!
Seriously, it's a good racket they have going. Hmmm... maybe I should get into it.
'When the going gets weird, the weird turn pro.' -HST
It seems to be working well for one of the books I've encountered. I'm doing a graduate math course, the details of which are irrelevant, but suffice to say the subject matter is reasonably obscure, and won't exactly have books flying off the shelves. The textbook assigned for the course is available online - I thought this sounded great when I was told this: often I end up borrowing books from the library where possible, or just skipping using the textbook altogether. Occasionally I am forced to buy texts, and this is often annoying to me.
What I have come to discover, however, is that this text provides a beautiful explanations of very difficult material. It's the sort of book I would be gald to have around in my personal library. I was able to find this out by using the downloadable version of the text. Now, of course, I am planning to buy the text, and will gladly reccomend it to anyone else who happens upon the subject area. Sure, I could just print the downloaded PDF, but I may as well have a nice bound copy - and at this point I feel like supporting a good author. There is just something nicer about having the actual book, as opposed to a bunch of printed PDF pages.
I suspect other books could benefit equally from such a system. Of course, if your book sucks, and the material is poorly presented... well, maybe that won't work so well... but maybe you shouldn't be looking to foist your crap onto unsuspecting students who are forced to buy the text?
Jedidiah.
Craft Beer Programming T-shirts
I bought an economics textbook for $85.
I sold it back for $15.
I got some mixed signals from that class
Yes, but think of all the fundamental changes in Calculus that take place each year that you are funding. The book has to be expensive if they want to keep up with ever changing subjects like calc.
The most infuriating experience I had with textbooks was a book for a class that required the student to enter a registration code from the book into a web page. This was used for some web based quizzes and exercises. Problem was, once you used the code it was invalid so students were required to buy a new book for that class. Plus there were bugs, a good 5% of the codes from NEW books were not being accepted by the website so those students had to contact the publisher or webmaster or somebody.
Online or electronic textbooks seem like they could help with the pricing issues described in the report. However, experience teaches me that there are plenty of ways it could make things worse! Plus most people sell back their books at the end of the quarter or semester. Don't count on that option for eBooks.
As an American student, book prices are absolutely ridiculous. A quick example: Physics: Principles with Applications, 5th Ed from Amazon.com costs $131 while the same book from Amazon.co.uk costs 30.09 pounds or about $55.
The Chinese grad students in my program buy completely legal copies at crazy low prices in China. These versions are much more flimsy and made with cheap paper, but when they can get a Stevens TCP/IP Vol 1 for 5-10 bucks you have to laugh. Much like drug prices in the US....
I'm probably beaten to the punch already, but it was always amusing (in a hopeless sort of way) how our Calculus 101 textbook would change every two years. I'm sorry, but I'm pretty sure that the introductory field of Calculus hasn't changed at all over the last 100 years.
All the bastards do is introduce a few new questions at the end of the chapter and call it a new edition.
"The market alone cannot provide sufficient constraints on corporation's penchant to cause harm." -- Joel Bakan
how much in total? $250
So, you failed your first little microeconomics test then.
"Ripoff 101" could also describe Public Interest Research Groups.
A similar story was posted at another site today, and here's what I posted there, slightly edited for different context:
I have worked at the college bookstore here, and will relate how we do it. First off, our standard markup on new textbooks is 25%. Not great for the students, but also paltry compared to markup on the other stuff we sell (clothing and gifts is like 75% markup at least). However, if a book comes with the price printed on it, we price it at the printed price, even if it's at less than 25% markup. Some stores don't do this, resulting in an obvious rip-off. Of course this depends on the person who receives/tags the book checking each one for a price so it can be set appropriately. I always was very conscientious about this, but at big stores with hundreds and hundreds of books coming in a day, it would be easy to skip this step.
As for the buyback, this is probably what most people don't fully understand. As far as I know, most colleges do it similar to this. We contract book buyers from a used-book company (in our case, Nebraska Book Company, but there are others, depending on location). They come in and are the ones buying the books, not bookstore employees. The bookstore receives textbook orders from professors and puts together a list of books that the store will buy back directly from students. These books will be bought back at 50% of the new price of the book and put on the shelves. If you had bought a used book (we price used books at 75% of the new price) and sold it back for 50%, that's not great, but it's also not terrible. However, if you bring in a book that is NOT on the bookstore's list to buy, then it is the used book company that is buying it, at whatever it's worth on the wholesale market. At that point you are the lowest peg on the book totem pole and should NOT sell your books! They'll buy it for a few bucks, and then ship all of their purchases to their warehouse. They then mark it up and sell the books back to bookstores, who then mark it up again and sell to students. I'm not sure about the percentages in this, but it's not like the bookstore buys books for $5 and sells them right back for $100, at least not at my store. What is more likely is this: say you buy a book for $100 new. You go to sell it back, but the store hasn't received an order for that book yet, so the book company buys it, for maybe about $30. Then the store receives an order for the book and buys some from the used book company for about $50-55 and sells it for $75. The numbers aren't great, and again I'm not sure if they're right, but it's probably something like that.
Finally, even though I work at the store and can get a 10% discount, I've only bought a couple books there the last couple semesters. I've bought them online and saved 36% off what I would have paid, even counting the 10%, so I saved about 42% off what "normal" people would have paid.
I attended Auburn University, which has one campus-run bookstore and two off-campus bookstores. One afternoon in an Econ class, we were challenged for extra credit to find out how much profit was made on our textbook over its lifetime, so a few of us set out to see.
Factors we took into consideration were (among others): purchase price with volume pricing (we had an insider), how many times a book could be resold until it became unusable or was obsolete (around six-eight consecutive quarters, thanks to the publishers), and how much money was offered to students when books were sold back based on its condition.
The numbers floored our instructor. A book which cost the bookstore US$90 initially made around 480% profit over its lifetime. What that told me is that the publishers may be making a pot of money off students, but the "local booksellers" are also profiting pretty shamelessly.
- Jack
It's not the college that does the used book thing. The publishers are the ones that force you to buy new bundles by actually not selling the components in the bundles separately. One thing that could be done is require all publishers to sell everything that comes in a bundle separately, and at a fair price (not the same price as the bundle would have been). Then the professors and bookstores can actually choose if the bundle is really what they want, or just the main textbook.
All you need is a scanner and now you have Association of American Publishers going after P2P networks. Now if I can only bittorrent me a box of cup-o-noodles then that will be sweet. :-)
Don't buy the book.
Seriously. At the start of the semester, ignore the books entirely. Buy the book the day you first need it. I started doing that a couple years into college; for the rest of my time, I think I averaged one or two books a semester. Most classes didn't require the book at all. (Often you could pick between reading the book and going to class; doing both was redundant.)
For classes that did require the book, I was often able to get away with borrowing it from a friend a once or twice.
How well this approach works probably depends on the discipline you're studying; I'm certain not everyone could do this. Give it a try, however--you might be surprised.
(Ripoff #2: School meal plans. One day, I calculated the per meal cost of my eat-as-often-as-you-want plan, and realized that I could eat out at a restaurant for every meal and spend less money. After that, I stopped paying for the meal plan and started paying on a per-meal basis at the cafeteria.)
Having had the dubious pleasure of working in a college bookstore for a year, I've learned quite a bit about how things work in the text book world.
First, it?s the publishers making the money, not the bookstore. The constantly renewed editions, bundled materials, and so on--that's all on the publishers end. Often, the reps from the publishers work closely with the profs to ensure students pay as much as possible. The bookstore orders exactly what it's told to. If we could get it used, we did--the store's margin on used books was larger, especially as my store was a Follett store, and had access to Follett's used book warehouse.
Second, when you get less than ten percent of what you paid, it's not because the store is trying to gouge you. When we bought a book back that we knew we could sell the next semester, the student typically got back fifty percent of what they paid. If we did not need it the next semester, then we could only buy it for the wholesale network, and then you're subject to the laws of supply and demand, as well as the fact that books, due to their weight, are expensive to ship in bulk. In order to buy back as many as possible at the best price possible, we always tried to get the book lists from the Profs before buyback started. Unfortunately, many Profs can't be bothered to turn in the list until right before classes start, forcing us buy books from wherever we could at whatever the asking price was.
Third, college bookstores don't make all that much money from books. Most of the money, especially at the big-name campuses, comes from the merchandise. The book section is labor intensive, and you wind up losing a lot of money when books have to be returned to the publisher (store pays return shipping), from theft, and from Profs who do stupid things like asking us to order non-returnable custom printed packets of articles that cost the store $200 a piece, and then turn around and give the students free photocopies of the packets after they complain. For a class of 30?well, you can do the math and figure out how much the store took a bath on.
Yeah, students are getting screwed, but don't yell at the hapless guy behind the help counter or who?s working the buyback station. By all means, make do with the older editions or Indian copies. Also, here's a tip: If the Professor wrote the book, and it's not the principal text for the class, don't buy it unless it becomes clear you need it. Profs often require you to buy their book when they have no intention of using it. (We were once yelled at by a professor when he found we were selling used copies of his book. See, he doesn?t get royalties from used copies.)
This would probably be a good point to provide a link to Richard Stallman's short story The Right to Read. Originally written in 1997, it's scarey how close it's getting to reality. If you haven't read it, please do so.
It's not just the textbooks. The whole College/University system is a self perpetuating racket. In reality, a college degree means nothing in most cases, but those who have one feel the need to validate their efforts, so they require one for any job they hire for.
So, You have to get a degree, which in most cases teaches you nothing you couldn't learn better through experience. This costs you at least 2 years of take-home pay, plus interest, and while you are there you get used at indentured servant rates by the university (called "work-study") to do what would otherwise cost them $40K/yr. You are generally taught by the people least qualified in the field, often by people who you can't understand the first word they say (Foreign Grad Students). The best engineers are working as engineers, the best businesspeople running companies, it is, by and large, the mediocrities who are teaching, with a few notable exceptions at the most prestigious of universities.
The whole system is a racket designed to benefit the administrators and faculty who, in most cases, are 1960's and '70s reject recycled hippies who have used the university as a place to hide all their lives.
The system is broken. We should replace "College" with a decent high-school system (a lot of what gets taught in College is remedial education on basic math, reading and writing, and hard science) and apprenticeships for most things. Universities are for advanced research, not a 4 year party. Think about it: if you spent what you spent on college on certifications and books, you'd have plenty left over for a few years world-trekking!
So, I guess you all know what I think of tax $$ being used to continue to subsidize College. I think it's a waste of money, and it would be better spent on vocational training, and fixing the K-12 system.
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.
I know that the impression of "Gouging" in the eyes of the student (whether true or not) sours students away from my store - usually permanently. News of honest and fair customer service travels fast; news of gouging and dishonest/unfair business practice travels even faster.
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 sentimnt of "gouging." When selling back used textbooks, I usually find it best in the long run to give students the information they need to make an informed decision. When your college bookstore offered you $16.00 for a $120.00 textbook it was probably because of one of two circumstances:
1) the book was not on course for the following term (no demand for the book at your school)
or
2) the bookstore already had as many copies of your book as it needed for the following term, so they weren't going to buy a book at an on-course value when the likihood of selling your book to another student is low. If they don't sell your book to a student next term, they can't return it to you later - so they won't assume the risk.
When a book is not "on-course" most college stores (including mine) typically sell these "wholesale" books to a wholesaler (in my case MBS, Missouri Book Services). The wholesaler pays us what we pay you, plus a 20% commission on the sale. So in your case, we would have made $3.20 on the sale of your book. Your book then sits in a very large warehouse until another college bookstore calls them up and says "We need book X" (your book) and they sell it at a profit to that store, which sells it as a used book.
I can tell you that at my bookstore if your book was "on-course" you would have gotten 1/2 the new value (in this case $60.00) and we would have re-sold it for $90.00 used (25% off the new price), regardless of whether you had bought the book new or used. The ideal scenario for me is to buy back books at their "on-course" value because we make money and the student is happy with the good compensation. Unfortunately this is not common because books are usually not "on-course" (though they tend to be more often at larger schools because of frequently repeating/rotating classes).
It is true that no bookstore will knowingly buy back a book that has gone into a new edition (or will soon be doing so). No bookstore that wants to stay in business for long will buy a book they can't sell again, and you're right to be put-off by the fact that new editions come out so frequently. Publishers do this to thwart the used-book market, which you wanted to take part in (and yes, I know frequent new editions do annoy just about everyone except the publishers).
You certainly did the right thing to sell it on your own for $50.00 This is, in fact what we will recommend to students who have an on-course book that we already have enough of.
Although this kind of direct re-selling thing hurts my business I would be *very* reluctant to complain about it 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. Students like you are, in my opinion, reacting to textbook (and higher-ed tuition) pricing that is increasing at a pace that exceeds that of other commodities in society. College Tution costs so much nowadays that after students like yourself are done paying tuition (or, more likely, taking out yet-another-college-loan), they have less and less patience each year for the cost of textbooks and bookstore explinations for them, whether the explination is legitimate or not.
uR iGn0ranc3, Their Power
Here are some links I dredged up last time this subject rolled through.
Wiki Textbooks
Light and Matter: Open physics textbooks.
An open math textbook
Project Gutenberg, for all the English majors out there.
There are also a lot of books out there which are freely downloadable, but not modifiable. Has anyone here used a free (in either sense) textbook as their primary learning tool in a college class? If so, what was your experience?
You want the truthiness? You can't handle the truthiness!
Although it sounds like a racket, I have been told that professors don't get royalties for books sold at their own universities. This is to prevent the abuse that you just mentioned, which although cynical, is not true.
Professors don't care. In fact in some cases they are paid to select the more expensive of two options by bookstores who offer them a kickback based on a percentage of the sales.
Perhaps it is because I have a positive view of academia but I have had a good number of professors who said (paraphrasing): I was thinking about book X but it was too expensive at $100 so I went with book Y at a more reasonable $50. Don't get me wrong, they could go out of their way to make it really cheap for us students by doing something like you suggested. So you can look at this two ways.
Lastly, professors in the sciences only want to write two kinds of books (I know I'm generalizing):
Lately we've been using PDF texts at my university. Real text books have become a total rip off.
:(
In order to make a buck, publishers and bookstores have been dealing with tons of "revised" versions of text books. One year a class will use a new text book, however at the end of the year you'll find that you can't sell your book back to the bookstore.
Why? Well the publisher decided to release an updated version, with a fixed typo, and a new cover. The book will be, more or less, -exactly- the same. Nevertheless, the campus bookstore will pick up the new book because forcing people to buy a new version pulls in more money then buying and selling used text books >:(
Moreover, a lot of publishers have also been ripping-off students with CD-ROMs. Lots of new books get marked up because they come with a CD-ROM. Yet, It's not uncommon for the CD-ROM to simply be a cheep-ass compilation of PDF, HTML, or MS word documents that were represented as text in the actual book. "Save for Web...", burn to CD >:|
AND, it can get WORSE! Sometimes publishers combine both of the above rip-off tactics. They'll rerelease a new version of a book, and the new version will be EXACTLY the same as the old one. Yet, this time someone will hit "Save to Web.." in InDesign or Quark, save a digital duplicate of the book to a CD-ROM, repackage the book, and raise the price to reflect the new "digital" content! Soulless Mother F***ers!!!
Now, combine that bullshit, with the fact that professors have to PAY to use the faculty copy machine, and you'll understand why we use PDF documents now.
It's sad
"Things are more moderner than before- bigger, and yet smaller- it's computers-- San Dimas High School football RULES!"
I'm sorry, but I have only an imperfect understanding of this. Maybe it will ring a bell with someone out there who can explain it better.
In the US, sometime during the Reagan administration I believe, the tax code was changed, and this directly affected publishing companies in how they could depreciate inventory. If I remember correctly, publishers used to be able to print a large edition, warehouse the books for years, and write a part of that inventory off on their taxes.
From my understanding, the tax code changed so that it became far more expensive for publishing companies to warehouse books -- they couldn't enjoy the write offs they once could.
The result is, publishing houses print smaller editions, and come out with newer editions more frequently. These smaller printings are more expensive. This raises the price of books, and pressures schools to use the newest editions -- driving down the value of used books.
Who wins and who loses?
quiquid id est, timeo puellas et oscula dantes.
A huge list of math texts.
David MacKay has posted his book Information Theory, Inference, and Learning Algorithms on his website. (This is despite it being a recently published work available through major bookstores.)
The classic, Numerical Recipes in C, is available online for free.
Some more math texts.
Another grab bag of online texts (mostly math).
Yet even more math and CS stuff.
I suppose the text book publishers would try quite hard to prevent these from being used. "Oh, your school district is going to use the public-domain trigonometry textbook? Well, I'm afraid we can't give you the usual 12% discount on your purchase of organic chemistry textbooks."
Richard Feynman wrote in his autobiography "Surely you're joking, Mr. Feynman" a story about his participation in textbook selection in California high schools, in which the publisher got the committee to approve a book before the content was even available to review.
"Surely..." also gives one example of the serious problems with content he found in most textbooks.
I worked for 7 years for a major publisher. The report says: "paper, printing and editorial costs account for an average of 32.3 cents of every dollar of the textbook cost".
Okay, so it's the printing, right? WRONG.
"Paper, Printing, & Binding" (PP&B) is anywhere from 4-8 bucks for your typical "real" textbook. Calculus, Chemistry, Finance.
Editorial is usually $20k per book, and most of that comes out of the author's royalties - the better the book, the less editorial needed.
I remember the numbers for one book in particular. PP&B was ~$4.50. Retail was something around 65 bucks. We sold it for 40. That covered the PP&B (which is JUST the cost of the physical item. The marginal cost), plus my salary, company profit, etc. The three big reasons books cost?
(1) Bookstores. That $40 book cost you $60 because of the bookstore. All they did is have it. Nice gig.
(2) Professors/Ancillaries. You would not BELIEVE the stuff we make for the professors. Transparency sets ($300 for one set). Software. Testbanks. Grading testbanks. Teacher's manuals. If you had all the stuff we provide for professors, anyone could teach the course. And all of that has to be paid for by you, the students.
(3) Indirect market. Just like your doctor, your professor doesn't know (or care) how much the book costs. It's what he likes. (One professor adopted a book solely because the cover was "his school's" color)
So, make the prof happy, no matter what it takes or costs. And this is why books cost so much.
"Sometimes a woman is a kind of religion, she can save your soul & set you free from all your sins" - Bad Examples
I worked 2 years in publishing and sales representation to the academic market.
:) Seriously, be polite but firm, and be prepared to reiterate- some have been so high up in their ivory towers that oxygen is sometimes rare. The publishers can put out a new edition every 3-4 years only with the complicity of the professor.
*Advice on bringing down the prices of books appear below the rant*
[rant]
So there's a few things I'd like to set straight, especially for the whiny bunch (you can't bring prices down if you don't know who's responsible):
-trade stores buy books at 60% of the cover price
-university bookstores buy at 80% of the cover (a 25% markup)
-print runs on all but the most popular books (think 1st year intro) are ridiculously small
-professors are lucky if they make 10% of the cover price. Even if that amounts to $5,000, a tenured professor would expect to make more money than that for a few hundred hours of work. (It's not the money: it's publish or perish).
So, the university bookstore is obviously not making massive amounts of money, nor is the author(s). So, the publisher makes a killing, right? Well, sometimes. The guys cranking out a new edition of that $120 first year text every 4 years is making entirely too much money, as are those that bundle materials or otherwise force you to buy a new copy.
Smaller publishers that can't get professors to publish that big first year textbook with them generally aren't doing so well. Publishing any book cost several thousand dollars. Printing is not the biggest expense, and goes down fast as print run size increases (per unit, obviously). Editing and layout eats up most of the budget, then you have to add sales and distribution.
Yeah, there's a few people that think we could let professors write things on a wiki, and not bother with editing. Sometimes, you're right: there are some professors that can actually write. Let me be blunt: we reject 90%+ of manuscripts, and the other half can be unreadable without major editorial adjustments. Editors have to be highly educated, and it is not uncommon for them to be PhDs- and that doesn't come cheap.
An index also cost money and you can't just use a software package to tell you what words are on what page, as that's pretty useless.
Having spent a good part of my time in the sales side of things... do you realize how many books we have to outright GIVE to professors so they will consider the book for their class? They're only a few dollars a pop to print, but having to meet professors, find out what they are teaching the following year, mail them books once printed... all that costs a lot of money. In upper-level classes with small enrollments, you can be giving out 2% of the books, and some free copies for TAs (up to 1 per 25 students).
And don't get me going on the price of an ad in an academic journal, or sending sales reps to their conventions.
Moral of the story: it cost an awful lot of money to put out a book. There are profiteers - the first year textbook sellers that put out a new edition every 3-4 years, and the folks that would give you $4 for that $120 book.
This is not the music industry. Publishers -especially the smaller ones- are nerds that want to put out good books.
[/rant]
To get back to the prices though... as I said, there are profiteers: resellers and big publishers.
The resellers ought to be put out of business. Use eBay, whatever it takes, but don't sell them books.
There is another player in this market that has enormous power to set things straight, but is often overlooked: the professor.
If your professor wrote one of those fat 1st year texts which comes bundled- lobby them. Tell them you find such practices appalling, and that you would much rather spend money on beer.
If your professor asks you to buy those expensive books, ask them to complain to the publishing house. A couple professors that tell the sales reps they won't use the text again unle
Information: "I want to be anthropomorphized"
There are usually two types of "textbooks" that professors encourage you to buy. Or, rather, two scenarios.
The first is a book from which the professor will be teaching. He assigns readings from it, references pages in class, sometimes assigns questions at the end of the chapter as homework, etc. Sometimes it's one big book that covers the entire course (and often runs at $60+), but you can't do without it. Here all the rage is appropriate - with the diminishing printing costs why do prices of these books keep climbing? Also, you really *can't* do without buying this book and the professor has all the leverage he needs to make you go and buy it. No real way out - get it cheaper, get it online, order overseas, buy used, steal someone else's, etc.
2. The professor lists half a dozen books to buy for the course, often clicking "required reading material" without thinking. You spend $300 only to find out that it will never be mentioned in class or useful for anything except autodidactic reasons. You're pissed off and try to unload the books to the next class which, to your bitter rage, was given an entirely different list of books that they'll never read. This is a case where you use judgement. Often the professors will say that these books are for you to read on your own to broaden your knowledge of the topic. Simply don't buy the book or at least hold off until the professor assigns you the four pages to read from it. Then go to the bookstore, read the pages, write out the questions, and put it quietly (or not) back on the bookshelf.
A quick personal story: we were assigned a book for a cryptography class which I thought fell in the 1st category (since it was the only book assigned.) It was a small book costing $80. The book was, unfortunately, too advanced and mostly tangent to the topics we were discussing in class. After the class voiced its concern for the horrific waste of money on a book that's not helpful to do the homework or understand what's going on in class the professor explained that, "Neither the book nor the homework will have much to do with the class discussion. Those are for you to go home and do on your own. Please don't come to class with questions about the homework, as that is something that wastes my time as it doesn't pertain to what I'll be teaching anyway."
-s
I teach at the college level and the high price of text books is a problem. You would be surprised at the number of students who try to get by without buying a book (either because they can not afford it or they think they can get by without them). By the way, if you can not afford a text book it is worth a try to see if the instructor has an extra copy. I often loan books to students. My colleagues and I receive our copies for free so we have to stay aware of how much the book actually cost the student. For example I was about ready to use one text for a class when I discovered that a similar text, actually a bit better, was available for 35% less. I switched books. Also, I think it is the responsibility for the instructor to do their own homework and make sure that the book is relevant and that it will actually be used.
for a $100 textbook for a mandatory "Windows" class. He uses Suse and found no need to take this class. They tried to make him buy the book anyway and told him he could skip the class if he bought the book and took a $35 test and passed it.
He smoked the test, he said it was for drooling retards and that only vegetables on life support could fail the class.
What a waste of time, money and resources.
I was *NOT* happy over this..
There are a few solutions to this problem.
First off, a big problem is that publishers who know their books are being used as course-books, publish a new version with nominal changes, very quickly. That ensures that you can't get your money back by selling your book as used, and students can't save money buying used books. The only reason schools and professors go along with this, is that the nominal changes don't affect their cirriculum, except they may have to change page numbers.
I would prefer that the old books are used. Schools should have a contract with any publishers, saying that they will continue to sell the same book, at a pre-set price, for X number of years.
Second: I would encourage anyone with a scanner to scan-in their books. A sheet-feed scanner (or a scanner with an ADF) can just be loaded with the pages of a book, and automatically digitize them. Then, distributing them as text files, PDFs, or any other format would be easy. People just don't seem willing to do digitization on their own... That's why we see many more CDs and DVDs on Peer-to-Peer networks than TV shows, et al.
In addition to this, it may very-well be considered fair-use for professors to distribute electronic copies of out-of-print books. Both educational purposes are involved, and the book is out of print, so it's hard to say there is major financial damage being done. I'm sure there would be a lawsuit when first done, but I bet the schools would win. Either classes would start comming with free books on CD-ROMs, or book publishers would have to keep their books in-print to prevent that from being fair-use.
Third: Instructors should be more careful about what they require students to buy. I know I had an english class where I bought 3 expensive text-books, where only one of them was used. One we only read a 3-page story from, and the thrid was NEVER EVEN OPENED. I complained to the teacher, and to administrators, but they all said there was no blame to place... It's just not considered bad to bleed your students. I wouldn't be surprised if publishers are actually bribing professors in the near future to require lots of worthless books.
Last: There are a few professors that care about book-costs. I know one Unix instructor who uses the FreeBSD Handbook as the only course material, and doesn't require buying any books. I know another teacher who went to great lengths to allow students to use any of the past 3 revisions of the course book. He listed the different pages for different revisions, and even went as far to print-up a sheet which listed all the differences in content between the versions. Unfortunately, the latter professor went through a great deal of work to do this, so few would be willing to do so. The former professor has the better system, but others are not very considerate, and just don't care how much money is being wasted by students.
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant