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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."
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.
The worst that I ever saw was when the prof wrote the book, which contained a tear-out sheet of problems, and refused to accept copies of the sheet - only the original. The on-campus bookstore then refused to buy back the book because it was incomplete.
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.
That might be true in some cases, but in others it's just that the professor doesn't realize how expensive the book is. For example, my statics prof last semester -- who didn't choose the book himself (it was chosen by a committe, so as to use the same one for all statics classes throughout the Institute) -- was complaining about the quality of the book to begin with, and then got even more angry about it (not to mention incredulous) when we pointed out that the stupid little paperback textbook cost us all $100 each.
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
I once had a professor that required us to buy his book for the class. It was a specialized simulation and modelling text and instead of just printing out the homework problems to go along with his slides (which were better reading than the text of the book!) he had us use the problems listed in the text. It was a crappy way for him to force 10 new sales of his book every other year, knowing that he got at least 50% of the $130 price tag of the book. That was a direct case of the profs and publishers benefiting.
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
This is true with some of the professors I've had. Newer editions of a book are not always required and in one case, the professor himself had a website with corrections on it just so that students wouldn't have to pay $150 just for the newest edition. As far as I'm concerned, unless professors specifically refer to the textbook a lot or give assignments out of the textbook, it's not worth buying.
However, the books I have bought I wouldn't think of returning. Why would I want to sell the book back (for a small fraction of the cost) when I can keep it and refer to it later on in the future.
You can also sell them directly to someone else, you don't have to go through the book store. MIT had a book swap at the beginning of each year where you could drop off books and ask whatever price you wanted. They'd keep them on display for a few days and collect the money for you. It worked pretty well for everyone -- you got better than the joke of a price from the bookstores and the buyer got better than the jacked up used price as well.
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.
Try reading Feynman's lectures. I love them and can't put them down! They are considered by many to be the best physics lectures ever to be written. I actually don't understand why they aren't used in every physics school. My personal suspicion is because then the publishers would have nothing left to do.
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!
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.
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.
from the looks of his homepage url it looks like he is here in the uk. We don't seem to have anything like the issues with textboooks that you yanks do.
this idea of forcing students to buy lots of expensive textbooks seems like a US anomoly not a general thing accross the world.
note: i'm known as plugwash most places but i screwd up registering that here somehow in the past and now can't register
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.
Yes indeed, there're several!