Slashdot Mirror
DRM Lite for Electronic Textbooks
bcrowell writes "The New York Times reports that textbook publishers are backing off somewhat on the level of DRM used in the electronic editions of their textbooks. They no longer become unreadable after a certain amount of time, as in RMS's famous essay The Right to Read. Even so, most students aren't interested, because the books can't be sold back; the solution, however, may be to make it impossible to return printed books either. No mention in the NYT article of the steady progress being made by free books."
I think one of the reasons why publishers see ebooks as more threatening to their industry than the paper books is because ebooks will always be in "Like New" condition, thus it can be traded in the 2nd hand market at very close to the retail price.
And even with a slight price difference, (poor) students will always be more inclined to purchase the used-but-as-good-as-new ebooks.
Please stop entering code 2,2,7,6,6,4
Sorry publishers, the future of education is free.
(at least you have entertainment to fall back on)
There are shills on slashdot. Apparently, I'm one of them.
3rd party exchange sites will pick up the slack left by dropped university programs
The used bookstore at my school seemed to function just fine.
Personally I held onto most of my textbooks, they contain a lot of useful information that I actually refer to.
Many of my profs would make allowances for people using older versions of the textbook when the changes were small. Fortunately most of the new editions were significant improvements and worth it.
At the same time people complained about the ancient thermodynamics book we used.
...I refuse to buy electronic textbooks until they have zero DRM whatsoever. In addition, I don't even buy regular textbooks unless the professor actually uses them for graded assignments. They're just too damn expensive to do otherwise!
More universities need to make things like MIT's OpenCourseWare, or better yet, work together to make one big system.
Also, The Right to Read is a great story -- and is becoming more real every day. Everyone ought to read it, because it doesn't just apply to textbooks, it applies to music, movies, and other media too. Pay special attention to the notes at the end; the summary of the current trends towards DRM is downright scary!
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
The past thousand years or so have seen mankind invent all different kinds of technology that enable us to share and reproduce information to an astounding degree. The effect on civilisation has been staggering.
The past hundred years or so have seen mankind try and turn back time and suppress these wonderful tools. Why are we, as a society, willing to let such marvellous inventions go to waste? What went wrong?
They've already got a pretty good solution to deal with the "problem" of students returning books -- it's called new editions. There are some texts that have a new edition every single year. Sure, the publishers are "getting screwed" out of one semesters worth of money, but that just means they need to release a new edition every semester instead of every year. It's not as if there are significant changes between editions as is, so that shouldn't be a problem.
Ebook publishers should have their heads examined for going to such great lengths to inconvenience potential customers like this.. with books, the "analog hole" is a very easy and viable workaround for just about any form of DRM they can dream up. I know the article says they are backing off a bit.. but even so - it's pure lunacy.
Personally, I won't pay a dime for an ebook in any format other than PDF (or an alternative that I can view/print/copy in Linux). If they insist on using a format that can only be viewed in Windows, I'll hang on to my money and snag a "cracked" version online (even if that means downloading a jpeg image of each page; I have a couple books like that!).
Bottom line: the people who don't want to pay will find a way not to. The people who do pay will start thinking twice before their next purchase, since they're basically paying to be inconvenienced.
I graduated college last August, and I don't remember returning text books to the bookstore as a particularly exciting time - more often than not, I'd only get maybe $10-20 back on a book that cost me $100 at the beginning of the semester - and then a semester later, I'd see that same title on the shelf, being sold used for $80. The only people excited about book buybacks are the bookstores that can exploit them.
So I don't really see how the ability to return books is a big reason why readers prefer physical books over ebooks.
It is harder to lay back and read my laptop than a traditional text book. Until an electronic form comes out that is easy to lay in bed with and read for 30 minutes with shining a light in a face I will never use ebooks.
They're working to release this as courses in Moodle format (which exports to IMS-LD) over the next year. Since these are "battleship"* lower division, high enrollment courses with top quality content, this may dramatically change the market of educational conten.
More:
* Dr. Jason Cole, Keynote, Moodle Moot Savannah 2006
I can personally attest to the fact that many textbooks are now impossible to return.
I go to UCF (Orlando, FL) and I am required to buy a new textbook for nearly every one of my classes now. Even in the past three years it has been harder to find a class that does not demand a new edition.
One class I took this semester required a bundled package, which included a main course text, two useless reference books (the kind you see at the checkout at Borders or B&N, except it was neither clever nor useful). It also contained a small piece of cardboard folded over with a serial number inside.
I bought the bundle for the class, for the sole purpose of finding that serial number. I needed it to access some online quizzes for the class -- required by all students in order to pass a number of weighty group assignments. I never cracked my book open, and probably threw away the reference materials. The total cost was $142 and some change. (Most of the online sections of classes like this have an option where you can buy the serial for about $20 seperately, this one didn't.)
The main text will likely have the chapters re-arranged and be reprinted so there will be a new edition that is required for next year, bundled with the same garbage, just as most of my classes have done.
Oh and the online section was a quiz, done in flash. And we were meant to print out the results, yes printing flash. GG PROF NOOB
-- lol pwned
Basic textbooks for K-12 courses should be electronic and free. Mathematics, reading primers, languages... such things don't need new books every year. Schools are bankrupting themselves trying to keep up with buying uselessly new books.
And I am aware there are open source style e-textbooks becoming available, and more power to them.
People always ask why there should be cheap, low power ebook readers. This is why. The world needs them to teach its children without popping for several thousands of dollars per student to enrich paper mills and book publishers. And there's the small matter of losing our forests to this idiocy. Global warming is caused by an overabundance of CO2; the solution is TREES, as many as we can plant. That, and not killing the microplants living on the surface of the world's oceans, which produce half of the photsynthesis activity, but I digress.
But we're cutting more down every year. More parking lots, more gated communities, more cattle grazing lands, nore and more books and newspapers and magazines and laser printer paper. We need green growing things, STAT. And ebooks. Screw the market, some things are more important than making Bill Gates or whomever is used to making money even richer. Mandate the things by law. We need to start making a lot of things mandatory by law with a view to surviving the upcoming weather changes.
We've no problem with volunteering our troops or people in other countries to die as a sacrifice. Will we even volunteer a small a thing as giving up our paper books to save the world, or is that too much for our hidebound conservative asses?
So long as there are printed books: the public library and the university library.
... not in any academia though).
Publishers are starting to use a cookie-cutter methods to putting academic textbooks together. Include a CD-ROM with little or no information. Add colour pictures which add nothing to the learning experience. And revise the edition every year so that most books are in their 10th or 20th editions. Each year, as these "features" increase, the cost becomes higher. I won't even mention how many typos and errors there are without an Errata available (at least most computer books are good for that
Hence, I just borrow the book, take notes and return.
Oh, and this idea that selling revew copies raises prices? Nice try publishers (cheaper alternatives should lower prices, not raise them). Don't send out unsolicited review copies and then tell me how to use them if you don't like what it does to your profits. Because I will sell them at a big discount online.
Slashdot "libertarians": Small government for me, big government for those I disagree with. -1, I disagree with you
One of the major problems in publishing, whether people like it or not, is the used book market. Stores pay students $4 for a formerly $12 new book, then sell it for $9. This price difference between new/used shelf price is almost exactly what the authors and other royalties get paid. That is why so many new editions come out, so the authors actually make a little money for their years of research and sobaticles put into the book. Everyone loses except the bookstore on used books. In order for prices to come down authors have to insist on new technology for distrobution, and students need to keep their books. An ebook for almost no money that is not recycled, that could be created and distributed by the proffessors and academics doing the research would be the end of tradtional publishing and make things cheaper for students. The academics need to get paid, not because they won't make it without the money but because there is so much work in producing a full textbook. Until a new system of payment is created we are stuck with paying for texts ourselves, and they will be modestly DRM'd. Right now textbooks make no money for the author, even if they cost $150 to the students who need them.
I went through most of college without buying any textbooks. Professors used the same textbooks for a while (there haven't been any major news on basic calculus, physics and algebra, for instane). Our library had many copies of the most used textbooks, and we could loan them for long periods.
:-) And the xerox guys on campus even collected copyright fees...
For some books, we used a wonderful device called "xerox copier"
Anyway, that's my particular experience on a fairly good Brazilian public university. I'm not sure how it works on other schools, here or elsewhere.
There is considerably more difference between the books than just the homework problems. Part of the problem is the gratuitious shuffling of material within the text book. I'm a professor in Computer Engineering. For the past five years I've been using the 6th edition of one text book for my operating systems class. I have planned all of my lectures to more or less follow the text book so that the reading assignments for the students are clear. I make references to the examples in the text, and introduce new examples of my own.
Last spring the publisher issued a 7th edition. I took one look at the book and realized I would have to completely revamp my course.Material was presented in an entirely different order, and in some cases the presentation of the material was substantially different. I requested the bookstore to order the previous version (buy out the old stock). Unfortunatey, the publisher only shipped the new edition. I had explicitly filled out the form for the book store to buy back the previous edition. So I ended up with a class with mixed old and new editions. It turned out the be a mess. I kept the same outline of classes since most of the students had the old edition and I updated the reading lists on my course web site to give the page numbers for each class in both old and new editions. Even so I constantly got complaints from the new students about how they were constantly confused because I kept skipping arround in the text (which, from their perspective, I was). So now I face a dilemma. Since the balance will shift to more new editions (7) over old editions (6th), I have to spend many hours this summer revamping the course to match the new textbook. This will benefit the new book students and the students who buy the older book will be disadvantaged because they will have to jump all over the book. If I require the new book, then I get students like you who claim that the only reason I do this is because I'm in bed with the text book representative. If I allow the old book, then students will complain that I don't follow the textbook and that there is no point in buying it at all because it is too confusing. I'm damned if I do, and damned if I don't.
Absolutely not. I have never recieved any benefit from a publishing company other than the free copy of the book that they send when it first comes out. That free copy then becomes my reference copy if I choose to adopt the book. There is some revenue if the prof is the author of the book, but since my research area is not Operating Systems, it is unlikely that I will ever write an OS book. I would advise you to think before you make such claims, it makes you look like you really don't know what you are talking about.
Atlas stands on the earth and carries the celestial sphere on his shoulders.
No. The solution is not planting as many trees as we can. The solution has never been planting as many trees as we can. I remember Discover magazine did the math using the most efficient plant (I think walnut) and it pretty much equated to it doing squat diddly. Im not saying we have free rein to cut down all the forests though. It's just that your solution won't work.
Ooo man the floppy drive is broken. No wait. The computer is just upside down.
I made it through a masters degree in engineering without buying a single textbook. Maybe twice a semester I had to go to the library to get out a course text to find something I needed that was only in a set text.
The rest of the time general texts, internet resources and lecture materials covered the gap... so what's the big problem elsewhere?
Beep beep.
...free porn is quite commonplace.
"You can either have software quality or you can have pointer arithmetic, but you cannot have both at the same time."
Ooo man the floppy drive is broken. No wait. The computer is just upside down.
And for teaching a course on Compilers, I used the now-classic http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0201100886/sr=8-1 /qid=1145828128/ref=pd_bbs_1/103-6472017-6203054?_ encoding=UTF8dragon book. The advertisement said that the new edition was revised, but not in the print copy; the new chapters were available online as an electronic book for anyone who purchases the book. The additional cost for this e-book was about $40 (not optional).
To my horrid disappointment, when I went online (much later, after I started teaching the class), I found that the digital copy could only be viewed with some Macromedia-Flash like software on the browser, which would only allow you to view it page by page, no search, and no printing or saving the entire file either locally. There were no options to increase the font sizes for viewing the document comfortably either.
I felt sorry for my students and apologized to them, and after the semester gets over, am planning to write to the authors of the text book to look into the matter.
and all they care about is profit. fuck education. that's for the birds and the chinese. i worked for 11 years for a massive educational publisher and all they want to do is lock in users of their books by releasing new revisions every three years. nothing much changes in MOST of the books, they just want the revenue boost. the price is criminal and they want to prevent you from getting the cheaper versions of the books from overseas. dont get me started on their technology programs. have you seen what wiley, addison wesley, prentice hall, and macgraw hill offer in the way of technology? they want to lock you into their homework systems and then make sure you upgrade every three years. its like freakin microsoft. and you have to pretty much always use IE on windows too!! its a scam my friends and the sooner the doj takes on these monopolies the better before the whole world is forced to use our expensive and pretty dang sloppy textbooks.
"No mention in the NYT article of the steady progress being made by free [CC] [MD] books [CC] [MD]."
*copy* *paste* *copy* *paste* *copy* *paste* Alright! Alright! I'm going as fast as I can.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_sequestration# Forests
Read the part about natural sequestration. I was also not saying that planting trees was a bad thing. I was just saying that there has to be more to it than just planting trees. Reduce emissions, use alternative engerty etc. etc. etc.
Ooo man the floppy drive is broken. No wait. The computer is just upside down.
The article suggests students are slow to adopt digital textbooks because they can't resell them at the end of the semester.
But why should students do this at all? As one law school textbook author has suggested, why not include the price of textbooks in tuition? As he notes, "It's easy for prices to drift upward when the person choosing the product doesn't really care how much it costs."
Yes, tuition would have to go up accordingly, but once the textbooks came out of the school's funds instead of the students', professors would have to justify their textbook recommendations, instead of putting down a bunch of "required texts" that they refer to only lightly, if at all. Perhaps if such a scheme was in place, schools would find that it is in their interest to push digital textbooks more aggressively to keep down the costs of maintaining an inventory of textbooks from semester to semester.
We had a text for one of our more obscure courses that wasn't very good but it was fit our needs better than anything else. It went out of print. The publisher made what was basically a photo-copied version available to us as a paperback. The price to the students was $150 and many of the pictures and graphs were illegible. I cancelled that text because I couldn't stomach seeing the students ripped off like that. We're working on an on-line text which the students can use for free. So, the greed of the publisher has resulted in a loss to them of many thousand dollars per year.
Increasingly, I am finding other profs' course materials freely accessable on-line. In many cases the on-line materials are better than the available texts.
Second, when one thinks of a text or referece book, this represents an incredible amount of effort on the part of the writers and editors. Gettting everything right is hard. For examples, the cheaper computer books are full of significant errors and misprints. Even reilly has a tough time getting it perfect, and these are often mid priced books. I am just now reading a Ruby book from them and in the first few pages is a passage that is either awkwardly presented, or an example is missing. Sure, if I am just reading it for fun that is acceptable, but since I tend to be somewhat serious in my computer stuff, I want the real things. So I have little problem paying more for something that is correct. When I was working computers, $80 for a good book was nothing compared to what is saved me on my jobs.
Now as far as school is concerned there are three issues. First, the writers have to be paid. These are often proffesors that have a skill of writing things down in such a way that a student has a good chance of understanding what is going on. They also provide relevent problem sets with solutions. The publisher has to be paid, without whom we would not have a book, as someone probably had to front some money. We also need a store, so publishers can ship limited quantities of books to certain well known locations for students to buy.
Now, here is the rub. College textbooks are not neccesarily that expensive. As has mentioned, at least some of the books can be bought used and sold, whcih means that any one book, at least at the lower levels, is unlikely going to cost more than $50. Second, books can be shared. Find someone in to go halfsies. And third, I had very few proffesors that actually demanded and checked we had the most recent version of the book.
So, what can be done. I think the publisher should sell electronic versions of the books that expire after one year. The books should be 1/3 the cost of the orignal book. Second, the univsersity should be able to buy an affordable site license to the book so that it can be read on any library computer. Finally, the reissuing of books for the purpose of stopping reselling must be halted, though this may not be such a big issue as with reselling no student will be stuck with more than half the cost.
My gut feeling is that most of this has more to do with the expectation of the student rather than the cost of the books. Books represent an opportunity cost to most people, not an investment. I think when someone buys a book, they are thinking of the beer that they cannot afford. OTOH, when someone buy a bag of chips and a coke every day for a week, they do not think of the book they could have bought. School is about education, and sometimes we have to give something up to become educated. On problem I see with the modern compulsary public educational system is that they parent and kids expect everything to be given to them. Clothes, books, supplies, transportation. Now some of this is appropriate, and much is needded. However to be educated one needs to begin to take some responsibility and sacrifice at leat a little. If that measn that a student does not get a new clothes, or a car, or even prefered meal, perhaps at the college level that is ok.
One last thing. Some of the increase in books relate to student needs. For instance when i was in college, the Physics textbook transitions from a simple black and white print with line drawing. This was a cheap book to produce, and for the amount of information was very reasonable priced. However, presumable due the MTV generation, it became a much more expensive book with color drawing, color photos, and the like. There was no more physics in it, no better teaching, just fancier and more expensive graphics. Go figure. Students paid more money and perhaps sacrificed education for glitz.
"She's a scientist and a lesbian. She's not going to let it slide." Orphan Black
Ooo man the floppy drive is broken. No wait. The computer is just upside down.
Even that has not changed much in 30 years. Fortran 77 is still used and the techniques are the same as they were when Newton and then Coates thought them up. The thing that has changed is the maturation of GNU tools and the availability of great numerical packages like the Fastest Fourier Transforms in the West. A text on the subject should contain a chapter of practical free computing, but this has little to do with the principles involved.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
Oh come on, you know as well as I do that textbook publishers seriously jack up prices, especially on those essential math and science books. the $140 or whatever gets you a book, a dvd or cd, a solutions manual, a web site. How many copies do you think a bestelling book sells in the us alone? 10000 - 30000 - more! that's one bestseling science book. its a business that relies on total product turnover on three or four year cycles. its like selling any other product and theyll charge whatever the market can handle.
I am a student who is interested in electronic versions of my textbooks. I have a shoulder injury that prevents me from carrying much more than my laptop to class.
I have fantastic PDF searchable (and legal) copies of my gaming books from Steve Jackson Games, and can't understand why similar versions aren't offered for text books.
This quarter is the first time a 'hybrid' electronic version was even offered. This hybrid was $53, for a few paper pages, along with a code to get me into the online content for the rest. My problems with this, is that I would be more than happy to pay $20-30 for what I need, but to charge me the same amount as last years paper text seems greedy.
Still, despite the cost issues, I would still pay for it because I am physically unable to carry my books around. At my college no one has access to any electronic versions at this point. At least no one ever knows anything about such a version when I ask.
Nothing hides evidence like a stew. -Gus Pratt
I presume you were an undergraduate somewhere and know the ways you are forced to buy new texts. Minor revisions marketed as new editions, rotating question sets, etc.
It's nice of the publishers to announce their intentions up front now, but their excuses won't win them any sympathy. The existence of cheaper distribution methods should drive prices down. If publishers chose to make paper even more inflexible and difficult than it should be, they will simply hasten the demise of their printing business. Others will, hopefully, take their place where it's appropriate.
The problem is worldwide for technical texts. My friends from India showed me their versions of the textbooks they used. Same publisher, same edition, lower price and somewhat lower quality. The publisher knew just how much they could squeeze from the market. The thing that was valuable was the US produced technical content, which was excellent. Where it's really the best, it's craved around the world regardless of language. Indeed, people will learn English just to get it. The publishers own that content and foolishly think that it can't be recreated.
general texts, internet resources and lecture materials covered the gap... so what's the big problem elsewhere?
The big problem comes when publishers seek to own the information instead of a particular expression of that information. They have the cash to make trouble.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
The problem with your idea is that "It's easy for prices to drift upward when the person choosing the product doesn't really care how much it costs." Professors might have to choose some cheaper textbooks, but all the textbooks would most likely come from 'official' channels (i.e. brand new copies for every person), and most new textbooks cost more than used ones. Since colleges would be ordering textbooks en masse, they would not take the time to order many used copies from Amazon.com or EBay, which would be the preferred channel of the poor college student.
Including mandatory costs drives up tuition for price-sensitive students. For example, my university mandates that all incoming (i.e. freshman or transfer) students must purchase a specific laptop model for the year; you HAVE to buy it, if you do not send in the "laptop purchase form", they include the cost in your tution. The laptop I 'purchased' nearly two years ago (I am a Sophomore now) was the HP Compaq Business Notebook nw8000, which cost me a cool $3400!! It is still a good laptop, but I do not think it justifies the cost. A lot of the cost is probably software, although, as I type this on my nw8000 running Ubuntu, I am not helped by most of it (except for Maple, MatLab, Mathematica, and some other Math Program, and a copy of Windows 2000, which I used to upgrade from Windows XP). I would not have been helped by most of that software anyway, since it is primarily engineering software, and I am a Physics major.
While there are some advantages to mandating computer models, such as having your technical support be already familiar with the system, the disadvantages seem to outweigh the advantages, one could find a similar system with decent specs for a lot less than $3400.
---- "XML is like violence. If it doesn't fix the problem, you aren't using enough."
...I think. My Earth/Space Science book is online (well, uh, I found the PDFs on another school's site...) and there are Acrobat security restrictions on printing and copying text, which is annoying.
Ultimately it can be cracked with any PDF "password recovery/removal" tool in a second, but not everyone that wants to quote a passage or diagram, etc. knows how to do that.
Yeah, uhm, students get a choice too. The teachers do choose the books, but, the students still get some say in the end. In fact, in the end, the school tries to satisfy the students. Rather than simply doing something that will tick off a LOT of people, they would be more inclined to go with the books that the students can be generally happy with.
In other words. It will not happen.
Here's a thought. Why don't they just consider making it possible to transfer the license. Problem solved. People would then use them and they could then compete.
Another great essay by Richard Stallman in which he discusses the many dangers of DRM (aka. Treacherous Computing and Handcuffware) is:
Can you trust your computer?
Get computers and accessories from Linux-friendly manufacturers
When you get the e-book, then you have unlock it with a key and send it electronically. If for some reason you need to re-unlock it and you still own it you should have to confirm who you are somehow. Secret answer to a question or a secret hand shake whatever. Then when you re-sell the book to a new student, they call up and get a new key and their secret handshake, etc.
That which does not kill me only postpones the inevitable.
Can you actually name a situation where that happened?? I have never heard of anyone claiming to own facts before. If so I would try and own all the information for engineering students in the world and become their greatest enemey. Note: Last statement was sarcasm.
Ooo man the floppy drive is broken. No wait. The computer is just upside down.
Hate to break it to you, but it's pretty much impossible to sell back printed books already. Between the departments and the publishers, they do a good job of making the books very difficult to sell back (either by obsoleting them rapidly, or by making the books degrade rapidly through even casual use, destroying their value). Even selling my books online only gets rid of around 25% of the books I've bought, and always at a huge loss.
For example, I bought an art history text book for $120(!). This was a brand new book, and its first semester in use at my school. Partway through that semester, the department decided they did not want to use the book anymore. Not only did we not use the book for anything in class or for homework, but nobody wanted to buy it - the university bookstore would of course not take it, and nobody else seemed to want it. I finally sold the book 3 years later, at like-new condition, on Half.com for a whopping $10!
It's only getting worse, as well. Publishers often make the textbooks incredibly flimsy, especially for classes with huge enrollment stats (read: 101 level electives in science and the like). My geology textbook, although uncharacteristically well-written and enjoyable to read, is very poorly constructed. The glossy pages get creased, folded, and torn with just the slightest page-flip, and the binding is already falling apart after light home use (I don't take it to campus). Very scary how much damage has been done to my book, considering how I go out of my way to treat all my books with care.
It's pretty obvious that many of these books are purposely designed to last barely the 16 weeks of one semester, to ensure that they are less appealing for second-hand sales.
All in all, a very disgusting racket. The university and the publishers work together to screw students at every turn. No surprises here, but things are definitely not getting any better...
"Wow, you're like some kind of superhero able to ward off happiness and success at every turn."
-- Ryan Stiles
as a british student i've never really understood it.
can't your lecturers be bothered to provide sufficiant supporting rescources with thier courses?!
i'm coming to the end of my second year doing electronic systems engineering in the uk and so far my textbook count stands at
bought: 0
borrowed from my tutor: 1
borrowed from the library: about 4 or 5 not sure exactly
note: i'm known as plugwash most places but i screwd up registering that here somehow in the past and now can't register
Suck suck suck.
:-D
Take code examples. Reading through explanation of the code in a real book, I can keep a finger at the location where the code is and occasionally glance back at it.
Scroll wheels, while a wonderful invention, do not offer near the usability.
Oh and lets not mention that, unless I have a dual monitor setup (like I can afford that, not to mention find space for it, since square footage is always at a premium), working on code while looking at examples in a book is nearly impossible.
Oddly enough, Unix man pages have none of these problems.
Oh, and ebooks suck for everything else academic in the world as well[1].
Math? I hardly need a monitor clogging up my workspace. When I do math, I push my screen back and pull out the pencil/paper.
Science? See notes about math. For higher level science classes that require working on a computer, see the notes about programming and e-books.
You want the ultimate evidence that e-books suck? I can pirate almost ANY required textbook for my courses in e-book format for free, but I still BUY the textbook. Ebooks suck that much.
Oh and lets not even mention accessibility. I have to be ON my computer? Or connected to the net and logged into a given website? Screw it. Give me a good ol' fashion bundle of dead paper.
Ah, being a CS senior, it is not like I use books anymore anyways. Google and Wikipedia have most of what I need, and most Unix things I can grab from man pages.
Given how textbook publishers (and school textbook stores) like screwing over the students, all of this DRM crud is not surprising though. Just this quarter, I found out that my university's book store is charging $80 for a book that Barnes and Noble has for $30.
[1]Giant unsubstantiated statement.
Need help treating your acne? Come here!
Neither teachers nor students choose books. State boards choose books. Lies My Teacher Told Me is an excellent book for people interested in the world of textbook politics. (The book focuses on American History textbooks, but many of its points apply to others: biology, etc.)
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
I guess I should clarify: I'm discussing selection of k-12 textbooks, even though TFA is primarily about college textbooks.
You wan't to lower prices of textbooks, don't let professors teach the books they have written or edited. Or, if they want to use them they have to make them available to their students in electronic form for what their royalty on the individual sale would be.
Ask yourself this how many chemistry 101 texts do you actually need ? Pascal plus data structures, algorithmic complexity ? Electricity and magnetism ? Strength of materials ? These are subjects that have been done to death !!! What you have is a captive market in students, and professors looking to supplement their income.
Textbooks should be the cheapest books of a type you can by. The traditional markup on a paperback book is between 400 and 500 percent hardbacks are similar. The reason for this is that its hard to predict winners and books that dont sell are destroyed in mass. The process is called striping, the covers are removed from books and mailed back to the publisher. The reason books are stripped is because the publisher doesn't think it worth the shipping cost to have the book back.
Textbooks don't have the problems of regular books. A publisher knows in advance exactly how many books to print within a few percent. The bookseller if they know the books are going to be used next term can just keep them and adjust their order accordingly.
The only reason textbooks are pricey is that STUDENTS HAVE NO CHOICE BUT TO BUY THEM and that publishers are willing to bribe professors to get their books used.
Just Compare the price of a schaums guide on a subject to the cost of the textbook.
Why even bother running it through OCR?
Unless you're blind or care about accessibility, it's probably a lot easier -- provided the document is in any kind of printable form (and it's pretty hard for something not to be printable, since at the end of the day you can always do a screen capture) and just save it as a rasterized PDF. Yeah, it sucks for someone that uses a screenreader, Braille terminal, or other nontraditional output device, but it's just fine for 90%+ of people. If you can view it on the screen you can make a copy of it.
Sure, you won't be able to select and copy text, but it's good enough to read. And you preserve the formatting, equations, diagrams, etc.
On a side note, does anyone know of a PDF viewer program that ignores the "No Print / No Copy" restrictions? Some old versions of Apple Preview used to, but apparently the functionality has been implemented recently. It's a very silly scheme, since it depends on the viewer to correctly interpret the flags, so DMCA nonwithstanding I think it's not really a "crack" to break it. I assume that there are commandline Linux utilities that parse PDFs that either ignore it by design or could be fixed so that they do -- anybody have an example?
I also assume you could probably manually edit the file and reset the flag, although I haven't read the PDF spec in great enough detail to know how this is done.
(Note I'm not talking about encrypted PDFs here, just the silly "Un-printable" ones.)
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
Please help entering the code [xccr.com]: 2,2,7,6,6,4
By the way, what's the deal with xccr.com?
What does entering that code do, exactly? I must be missing something.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
The only one I'm aware of is FFES (Freehand Formula Entry System)
http://freshmeat.net/projects/ffes/
Not opensource AFAICT is Infty:
http://www.inftyproject.org/en/
William
Sphinx of black quartz, judge my vow.
What?
Maybe a few people do that, but not most people.
The very, very great majority of college/grad students buy used books because they're cheaper. Sometimes 20-50% cheaper, if you get them directly from another student.
Most people always tried to get the closest to "mint" condition that they possibly could, too. If a book is marked up or heavily highlighted, it's secondary-market value plummets. Heck, a heavily-highlighted book isn't even worth crap on Half.com; it automatically becomes "Poor" quality, regardless of the quality of the binding, cover, etc.
I don't know anybody who went through the stack of used texts looking for one that was already marked up. Most of the time, all the good, clean ones went first, and then the people who came last got the crappy ones that were all dogeared and written-in.
I also know (and did this myself) a lot of people who wouldn't EVER write in or highlight in their textbooks because it destroyed the resale value. I had to constantly stop people from getting their pens near my expensive Physics texts, because I didn't want to mar them. Totally mint, you can recover almost all of the purchase price of an expensive book, assuming it's used the next semester. I always used to look at textbooks as a sort of rental or negative-investment. I'd buy them, use them for the semester and try to keep them in as good shape as I possibly could, and then the next semester I'd try to sell them and get back the highest possible percentage of my input. By the time I finished school, I was pretty good at it.
Nobody buys marked-up books at a premium, at least that I ever saw. If you want a cheat sheet, you just go and buy a cheat sheet, or photocopy somebody's notes who took the course last semester. That's not hard to do, and most of the time you can get someone to loan you their notes either for free or for a few bucks, plus a few dollars and half an hour of standing in front of the copier at Kinkos gets you your own little workbook. If the person you were getting the notes from was organized, you could probably get all of the returned homework assignments (problem sets) and exams, too.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
(not a reply intended for the original poster, who likely knows all this already)
Since the advent of the internet/WWW and high-quality desktop printing have made mailed-out paper journals less necessary, a number of free "open access journals" have recently arisen. A number of others are making content free a couple of months after publication.
The idea is that cost should not prohibit anyone from accessing scientific information, whether that person is an undergraduate in London or a professor in Nairobi.
http://www.biomedcentral.com/openaccess/
http://www.wsis-si.org/oa-facts.html
http://www.wellcome.ac.uk/node3302.html
Freedom: "I won't!"
Who really cares? Books are niche. Most people do not read books anymore, they watch the idiot box (which in 2 years I will not have since Finland is forced into digital era and I do not want to pay for crap I never watch). Easier to dload TV series from the net, see if I like it, and it I do, order the DVD's. Except that I do not, since DVD is a DRM hindered evil format.
Phuh... where were we.. oh yeah. I like books. I read books. Digital media is bullshit, except for preview :-)PS: Just read the two Kevin Mitnick books halfway through at work using nokia 770 - and just ordered the REAL versions from amazone. Amazing.
Paying for digital crap is not buying anything.. it's a short-term license to get buttfucked.
'Once scientists, even the dim-witted social scientists, get muzzled, the Western Civilization is finished.' - oldhack
I hope I'm around decades from now when some revolutionary events happen that "change what we know forever", just so I can laugh when the orginizations that hold the DRM on textbooks try to weasel out of the blame. (of course followed abruptly by soiling my Depends)
Wanna fight ? Bend over, stick your head up your ass, and fight for air.
I had to buy a signals & systems book (Oppenheim). I didn't want to pay $120 for a new book or slightly less for a used one, so I got an international edition off eBay for $20ish. It's actually pretty good quality. But the kicker is the list price, which the seller of my book covered with nail polish. I scratched it off to find "300 Rs." Currently, $1 USD = 45 Rs.
Som years ago I worked on a user experience research project for an eBook reader. These days I'm a college psych professor.
eBooks currently appeal to only a very small number of students. I think the reason is usability:
--eBook readers are a pain to read
--Reading lots of text on a computer screen is not easy on the eyes
--On either a reader or a laptop you're going to be limited by battery time, or tethered to a spot
--Books take a beating a lot more easily than electronics
--Books won't have tech support issues, they're unlikely to break in an unrecoverable way
--Books can be resold
--Books are more easily markable
--Books don't have to be booted up in order to quickly look something up
--Books are more accessible to a wider array of students
Now, there are certainly advantages to eBooks. Currently my publisher offers an eBook of my Intro Psych text for about half the price of the original, so the student will be better off going that route than buying new and reselling to the bookstore. An eBook reader or laptop is certainly easier to carry than a stack of 6 700 page books, too. But I think that overall, the eBook is just not a mature technology yet in terms of the comparability of its user experience with that of regular old books.
As for my classroom - I've been frustrated recently when one text was updated after only 21 months. Grrrr. But I leave a copy of each text on reserve at the library for student use.
old.
I can't STAND books with boogers, hair, and other organic (food, spit) shit deposited, smeared, even in the tiniest amount. If I could SEE it, I would fork over some extra money for a new book. If the book cost over $50, I would not take the class.
In fact, hi-lites distract the hell out of me. I prefer to do my own hiliting and make my own "dogears". More, I haven't got a single resalable book. About 99% of ALL my books (even magazines), whether for school or pleasure/personal enrichment have enormous markups, underlining/hilites, dogears and such. That makes my books "PERSONAL", which is something current technology doesn't seem to make plain with digital content that you can trust to mark up and REMAIN as you wish it.
I can only imagine the peril I'd be in today. Find the LAST copy of the required book. It's smudged with some dubious "stuff" that has "texture" or "terrain" to it. The books cost too damned much, and sometimes I (conspiracy theory here) feel the instructors or professors and the book industry work to jack up the prices and force on students certain books already too pricey to begin with.
Much of the material could be generated in PDF these days, and if the publishers WANT to use DRM self-destruct code, then set it up so they students have to log in each time they attend class and sign in using a random/one-time password scheme. They just better price it right, so it's commensurate with "losing the book" after the semester's over. This would save a LOT of people from lugging and disposing (non-recycling, I'm thinking of here) of mostly reusable books.
OTOH, there will always be the risk that "revisionist historians" might update the books at login-time to exploit "current events", which makes the books susceptible to becoming marketing tools. But, if the marketing defrays the cost of the book....
Previously: "Linux... Toward the Sunrise..." Now: "Linux... Toward the-- No, now, part of Every Sunrise"
Around here studennt association organize "book" fair/party at the start of new one so that student of the next year can buy book from the last year directly from the students. That work very nice.
C. Sagan : A demon haunted world:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0345409469/
visit randi.org
OK, I'm confused. Is returning textbooks a US-centric thing? I'm at an Australian uni, and once you've bought a textbook, it stays bought. You're free to read it, sell it, give it away or burn it to save on heating bills (not a bad idea on the average student income) if you so desire, but return it? Not anywhere I've heard of.
we need printed books that are slowly f...f...f... fade away.
This is the one reason I prefer ebooks in the first place -- you can search through them. And that requires OCR at least.
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
The textbook market is such a racket. So many classes have a "required" textbook that you never use anyway. At the end of the semester you can open it and still feel and hear the crackle of the newness of it. Their biz is such a sanctioned scam its ridiculous. But so is the whole "good ole boy" educational system anyway.
I heard that there was a professor that had written their own textbook, it had a coupon in the back that was good for a one letter grade upgrade... buy the book new and turn in the coupon - turn that B into an A, or that D into a C.
And of course since the prof was the author, he got a cut of every new sale.
http://arxiv.org/abs/physics/0412107 has a paper by me and a friend (who is also a physics professor) on how terrible introductory physics textbooks are. The paper itself is open source, by the way, and the source is available at the link above (click on "other formats").
The paper includes prices and weights for most of the textbooks. For the first version of the paper, about a year ago, we checked the prices and shipping weights by hand at Amazon. For the revised version last month, we wanted to complete the table -- but the already-checked prices had mostly gone up, so we had to throw out all the old data. I therefore wrote the Python script included in the source; I'd include it below but the posting robot complains about junk characters. The script will extract ISBN numbers from stdin (which was our tex file), look them up at Amazon, and give you the prices and weights. I use it track the prices of my (least) favorite books. Not one has got less expensive.
In our survey, the average book price was $152 (and average weight was 6.8 pounds): for boring and often incorrect, unphysical problems and explanations. It's no wonder so many people hate physics, and we have only ourselves to blame if we lose all our funding.
Every physicist should put their (good) textbooks at http://arxiv.org/, where they would be available, sans DRM, to everyone in the world. We are supported by the public; why should the public have to pay twice, the second time in the form of royalties?
Very enlightening. Particularly the third (this one).
I noticed that the stock xpdf that is installed by Ubuntu's repositories (Universe) is the regular one from foolabs.com, which "respects" the nocopy/noprint flags; however the discussion on the Debian mailinglists seems to indicate what appears to be a consensus for including a version with a flag option ("--ignoreperms" or similar); does anyone know if any of these patches have been integrated into the mainline Debian version? I couldn't find any information just by looking at the package's site; since Ubuntu is branched from debian-unstable I'm guessing that it's not been integrated.
IMO it should; integrating a "Are you sure you want to ignore settings?" patch seems totally in line with at least my understanding of the Debian philosophy.
A computer is like a pocket knife. It's a tool, which has many uses. It's not the responsibility of the maker of the tool to look over the user's shoulders. Powerful tools can by their nature be used for good and bad, in the same way that I can use a pocket knife to carve wood or stab someone. (Albeit perhaps ineffectually; maybe that analogy would have been better with an axe or nailgun.)
Going offtopic here for a moment: Some days I wish the people at the PLF would put out a distro. Call it "Useful Linux." Combine together all the tools that are prohibited or that you have to jump through obnoxious hoops in order to use in various parts of the world -- proprietary driver licenses, encryption, DVD playback, audio codecs, DRM removal/ignorance. The hell with the licenses, the hell with local laws, put it all in there, release it as a Live CD, hosted only from Free countries / on PirateBay-type BT trackers. I think it would just blow people away to use an OS that didn't have any artificial limitations on it out of the box, just for once; an OS created as it ought to be created in the absence of political meddling. Not so much as an actual distro -- I'm not suggesting that it be maintained -- more as just a statement, a one-off curiosity.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
dude, wtf are you smoking, seriously? such a mishmash of ideas and half-assed comments!
If the book cost over $50, I would not take the class.
You probably majored in literature or some shit like that.
Almost any undergrad course out there requires books in excess of $100.
I know my Biochemistry books were about $300, which is pretty average. The intro to quantum mechanics was one of the cheaper ones, maybe $80 for both textbooks.
A while ago (weeks, not more), we saw an eBook
.CHM files in other folders (on the same machine)
which was downloaded either via Azureus -or- a
link, itself indirectly accessed from the site:
http://ebookshare.net/
work only in some directories; ie, copies of the
wouldn't work.
The copy did work (at least sometimes...) from
the root folder of another machine. Why & how?
Some sort of copy protection gone wrong? Or per-
haps a free-to-open 'n' times mechanism? Maybe
just a flakey couple of machines?
Weird, in any case... (If happened with just 1
or 2 files out of many others from / via the
above site in 2006.
Any ideas? TIA.
Textbooks (with Bonus DRM root kit CD!) are a waste of money.
Any teacher dependent on textbooks isn't working hard enough.
A good professor should be able to teach all courses from his own notes, and free information.
Drive these copyright hounds out of business buy boycotting their filth.
II'm surprised many college students haven't decided to stick it to the book publishers. I figure some group somewhere would have started scanning the major textbooks and distributing them P2P. Many books could be scanned and probably be less than 20MB. If most of those $150 books were freely downloadable from Kazaa or a torrent I suspect bookstores and publishers would start to feel the hurt. I've had many classes that required a book, but few actually required you to have it in class.
Ninjas don't carry tic tacs
From the website:
"Connexions is a rapidly growing collection of free scholarly materials and a powerful set of free software tools to help
* authors publish and collaborate
* instructors rapidly build and share custom courses
* learners explore the links among concepts, courses, and disciplines."
There's not much Computer Science material there yet, but there are quite a few Engineering and Bioinformatics modules, and the most popular modules are on introductory music theory!
Also be sure to check out the Google video presentation. I've seen this presentation live and it's pretty amazing what they're doing. For any of the content online, they can produce a full bound textbook for a fraction of the cost of normal textbooks.
When I was getting my marketing minor, I took a services marketing class.
Well my prof had decided to go with this specific company http://www.atomicdogpublishing.com/
These guys are very sly. They sold a paperback book with a serial number. All of our quizzes (not tests, just quizzes) were online and through the publisher's website. We could only log on to the website using an unique serial number as provided with the text.
The book was complete, but there were extra notes, points, presentations, flashes, diagrams, animations etc on the website that were helpful but not 100% needed.
Point of the matter is that these guys enticed the professor to use this book/web hybrid model so that grading of quizzes was easy for her. In exchange, EVERYONE had to buy the book just to get the serial number so that they could take the online quizzes. This forced an absolute monopoly and effectively nulled and voided the resell market for this course.
It's a very shitty thing to do but a very intelligent example of services marketing.
Libertas in infinitum