Ad-supported Textbooks Are Here

prostoalex writes "Talk to any student about the price of the college textbooks, and you're likely to hear similar complaints about the cost of the textbooks, the rip-off buyout prices at local college bookstores and insidious publishers who keep changing editions every few years just to change the page numbers and kill off the used books market. Freeload Press, says the New York Times, will distribute ad-supported electronic textbooks to students of 38 universities. However, it seems that neither professors neither New York Times are impressed with the quality of titles so far: 'The reading difficulty is created by Freeload's use of PDF images, which retain the printed page's layout without reformatting. Navigating around a single superwide, supertall page requires lots of clicking and zooming and patience. The company will soon use improved software that can automatically adjust the text so it is more legible, said Tom Duran, a founder of Freeload Press and its chief executive.'"

Comments

lazy professors

[legoburner]

I wonder how long it will take for a lazy professor to include an advert in a test, or how many of the stupider students learn the adverts. I hope they have some standards to make the adverts very different to the text and not like a large number of magazines which print adverts that look a little like articles.

Re:lazy professors

[BakaHoushi]

History 101, chapter 57, American Revolution

"...due to a pounding headache, General Washington couldn't think well enough to keep his troops in line. Luckily, a medic delivered to him new TYLENOL FAST ACTING GEL CAPLETS, the soothing action of which cleared his head in just minutes, letting him order his troops properly, and ensuring the victory for the Americans.

Tylenol: Fast acting strength, protecting America from the British since 1776"

Re:lazy professors

[john82]

Or perhaps a generous infusion of Exxon "advertising" allows one to focus less on certain pesky environmental (oil spills) and economic (profiteering) issues?

great!

[macadamia_harold]

The company will soon use improved software that can automatically adjust the text so it is more legible, said Tom Duran, a founder of Freeload Press and its chief executive.'

Does it also automatically adjust the text to reflect new information received from the Ministry of Truth?

Re:great!

[AnyoneEB]

Uh, how does that relate to the software being able to change the font size/page layout? The feature being suggested sounds more like a web browser's ability adjust the layout when you resize the window.

This doesn't solve the original problem

[Antony-Kyre]

This doesn't solve the original problem of the textbooks being expensive in the first place. If we simply throw money funding towards higher education, and say, "No!" to newer books that don't give us anything useful, problem solved.

Re:This doesn't solve the original problem

[Anonymous Coward]

I work for a (UK) textbook publisher which also sells its textbooks in the US.

Here's why US textbooks are so expensive:

In the US, textbooks are frequently published in hardback format. While a hardback costs very little more to actually produce (about $3 dollars more than a paperback), you can sell them for almost twice the cost of a paperback version because the market allows it.

In the UK, textbooks are almost always paperback (we sell a few hardback copies as well in the UK, but mainly to professors who will be using the book extensively for several years, and so want something very durable).

So why don't US textbook publishers publish in paperback? The traditional way (in both the US and the UK) to get a textbook adopted by a professor teaching a course (and hence secure sales from all of his/her students - sometimes up to 500 individuals - and these adoptions frequently last for 2-3 years-worth of students because professors, like all humans, are allergic to change) is to have a Sales Rep visit every single professor teaching a relevant course and try to convince them to buy it. In the UK that's not too expensive - the UK is fairly small and urban centres (and hence universities) aren't too far apart, so few Reps are needed and travel costs are low. The US is huge and urban centres (and hence universities) are separated by huge distances. Lots of Reps are needed and travel costs are higher becuase of the larger distances.

The upshot is that US textbook publishers mainly publish in hardback format (usually about twice the price of a paperback, but for a very small increase in production costs) in order to claw back some of the costs of these Sales Reps. In the UK, the market wouldn't stand for that - paperback textbooks at paperback prices are the norm, and besides the Sales Rep costs that need to be paid for are much much smaller, as mentioned above.

When the company I work for started selling one of our latest (paperback) textbooks in the US, we were slaughtering the (hardback) opposition on price (and our textbook is much better, natch!). We weren't using the expensive Sales-Reps-travelling-the-country method to get adoptions, we were using other much cheaper (and obviously not-to-be-disclosed-here) methods to promote the book. The professors loved the book for the quality of its content, and the students love the price.

I'm sure US textbook publishers will wise up at some point soon (some probably already are - I only really know about the academic discipline that the company I work for publishes in) but until then we'll keep getting those valuable adoptions.

Re:This doesn't solve the original problem

[pimpimpim]

You probably were already implying this, but let me restate: Not all new books don't give something useful!

Education is something that is actually advancing, be it slowly. It's important to have access to new books, for example something that integrates new insight into the material, or is based on new knowledge on how students can learn better. I, for example, learned mechanics from a book that said in the introduction that 'the SI system will probably not be very popular'. So our class ended up to spend more time converting args/dyn to some understandable unit than to learn mechanics :)

I can give you other examples, from widely different fields: for example a process in cellbiology where receptors have been found to posess a sort of baseline activity, which you can oppose with inverse agonist drugs, in a much subtler way than just using antagonist drugs. Other one: a friend from eastern europe learned english from books that are by now 30 years old or more. She probably has a pro in grammatical knowledge of the language now, but speaking it is much more difficult, because any new expressions weren't in there, nor the more new learning methods to actually have conversations etc.

The examples above were all for first year knowledge in the respective fields. But to be honest, there are also bad examples: there are unfortunately enough professors that are vague in telling which books you should know, or want to promote their own book, and you end up buying books that weren't important for the class and you are likely to read never again.

Re:This doesn't solve the original problem

[eggoeater]

We weren't using the expensive Sales-Reps-travelling-the-country method to get adoptions, we were using other much cheaper (and obviously not-to-be-disclosed-here) methods to promote the book.

You mean like mailing a copy and then calling them?

Re:This doesn't solve the original problem

[zlogic]

Well, in Russia a lot of hardback textbooks cost about $1-$2, with the exception of about $15 for really large or well-made ones. What's more, a lot of technical books (such as O'Reilly, Wrox) cost two to three times cheaper than the original English version. And they're all legal!

Re:This doesn't solve the original problem

[kerrbear]

In the UK, the market wouldn't stand for that - paperback textbooks at paperback prices are the norm

Can I just say, this makes porting the books around a hekuva lot eaiser too because they are lighter. The Chinese do it even one better. They break up their course books into seperate booklets, all in paperback so you are not carrying around an entire years worth of material with each book! This can make your backback about ten times lighter. Now, of course, a decent eletronic format could solve the rest of the weight problem. But it doesn't look like this is it.

Re:This doesn't solve the original problem

[Millenniumman]

The prices aren't high because of marketing, they are high because they can be. If a course requires a book, then students have to buy it. The books compete to be used in courses, but after that they must be used by the students. If everyone used the same book, prices would be astronomical.

Re:This doesn't solve the original problem

[Frumious Wombat]

If you want prevent the spiral in education costs, then convince your (legislature/board of directors) to (1) reign in the explosion of deans with their retinues, (2) reign in the athletics departments (if you aren't top 10 nationally, cut the program back to intramurals and fire the surplus coaching staff), and (3) reign in the entitlement mentality of students these days. The last would go a long way to controlling costs, as things they consider necessities now (such as single dorm rooms at all levels, well-equiped modern gyms, cable tv to the rooms), were luxuries or unavailable 20 years ago. Trim back the gilding, and control the explosion of non-educational management, and you'll have a shot at controlling costs.

Re:This doesn't solve the original problem

[rbrander]

>The prices aren't high because of marketing

Well, "sez you" ... I was working from the post of the one guy who claims to work in the business.

>they are high because they can be.

I *think* you are agreeing with me. Prices CAN'T be high in a free market because a competing author and publisher will produce a book of equal quality and be happy with a 10% profit instead of 200%. So the only way for "because they can be" to be true would imply market failure.

If the educators forcing you to use the product were getting kickbacks, it would all make sense, a closed-loop racket. Yet many posts appear to indicate that profs are distressed by the situation as well. Leading to the assumption that the profs have no meaningful choices outside a tight little publishing cartel that limits choice.

Cartels can only form where the barriers to entry are high, or again some maverick will start up a publishing house and offer cheaper books. Is that the case, or have we missed something?

don't know whether to laugh or cry

[geoff lane]

``Hey, I've got an ebook that is difficult to read, let's sell it to students. We'll fix the readability problems later.''

The world is in serious need of open textbooks to put an end to the ripping off of students. This problem existed 30 years ago and so far nothing has been done to prevent the publishers making education more expensive than it need be.

Re:don't know whether to laugh or cry

[AnyoneEB]

The list of completed books is pretty small, but Wikibooks is working on open textbooks. I see they even have PDF version of some of their books. Maybe at some point, it will be reasonable for a professor to use one of those. Then again, it seems like the only time when professors really absolutely require a book is when they assign homework out of it. In that format, it is hard to make the instructor's solution manual difficult to obtain. :)

Saving $$$ on college textbooks isn't hard

[rolfwind]

In college, I always find older editions of books on the internet and save myself a ton of money. For instance, during summer semester, I took the 7th edition psychology textbook instead of the 8th edition. An 8 edition new would have cost me $115, a used one $95 at the campus bookstore. The 7th edition, brand new (sealed) with shipping cost me $9.95. For a lot of classes, that racks up to serious savings. And the only difference is the cover and the color of the layout, all the content is the same. I've seen this where with numerous books which stayed the same content wise for over 6 editions in the row, changing the cover and perhaps the layout just to make it seem different. I compared a old english college textbook (1992) and the new version and all they did was swap 3 out of the 21 essays. That's it.

A word of caution, old editions are a bitch in the rare case that your teacher is a stickler for "homework" problems and collects them (this is more in the lower college classes and a problem if old edition pages don't match up just right and they tend to jumble problems around) and your school library doesn't lend out the new version of the book. It's best to attend the first couple days of class and determine if buying a book at all is necessary (some professors essentially ignore the book for all pratical purpose and test you on their lectures). I can't tell how many times I went to class just to find out that the book is a big waste of money. Especially true if the class is a requirement and you don't give two shits about it.

I even used completely different texts (titles) in Math course where I just find that I prefer one author over another without problems.

E-books are not ideal for degree level study

[ctid]

I teach in a university in the UK and I must say that I'm not convinced that electronic books are the best way of reading around a subject for degree-level study. When I'm trying to learn about something that is very new to me, my preferred approach is to work with two or three books which cover the topic. I find the relevant section in each book and keep all the books open at the appropriate pages on the desk in front of me. After a while, I'll normally find that one of the books is easiest for me to understand, so I will focus on that one but refer to the others when I need clarification. If one of the books is not helping at all, I make another trip to the shelves to find something else and see what that can contribute.

I've never been able to replicate this "system" using electronic means and I tend not to try any more. However, my students never seem to try to use books in this way. If they want to find out about something, they type a phrase into Google and then start picking through the thousands of hits they inevitably get (I teach computing). Typically they will give up quickly because the amount of information coming back is overwhelming, but even if they do find something, I'm sure they struggle because it's very hard to take in a lot of information when you're reading it off a screen (I believe that this is less true if you already know something about a topic). Ironically, the only complaint we regularly get about our classes is that the library is not helpful, even though we have bought literally hundreds of titles in the last couple of years. We now believe that most of our new students have never used a library before they come to the university, so we're going to actually show them how we go about learning new things using books. Not sure how we're going to do that!

I think I've rambled off the topic a bit here; I think my point is that I would discourage my students from buying electronic books in general. As a university lecturer, I think it's my responsibility to: (a) Recommend the minimum possible number of books for purchase (usually one per module); (b) Ensure that there is a good variety of relevant books in the library; (c) Encourage my students to actually use the library when their Googling fails them.

Re:E-books are not ideal for degree level study

[Baavgai]

For those of us who grew up with nice, comfortable, dead trees, nothing will every really replace the feeling of hefting them.

However, younger folks seem far more at comfortable with reading from a screen. Don't assume that the media will necessarily be an issue for most new students. The issue is primarily one of format.

If an electronic resource is presented in such a way as to be easily navigated, then it is superior to it's printed counterpart in may ways. Being able to search an entire book with a click is invaluable.

I have PDF and print versions of many technically references. The PDFs get opened first at which point the paper is usually only for browsing.

Re:E-books are not ideal for degree level study

[ctid]

I have PDF and print versions of many technically references. The PDFs get opened first at which point the paper is usually only for browsing.

I'm 43 and I recognize that I have grown up with books and that I am comfortable using them. However, I've been playing around with computers for more than half of my life and I've been on the web since the start, so I'm used to reading stuff off a screen. My views on paper vs screen are based somewhat on the sheer shallowness of my students' approach to learning. I can't help feeling that they don't concentrate enough when they are trying to get information from a screen. It's unusual to see a student spend a significant time staring at a document on a screen, for instance. They tend to search for something else before they will scroll through the document they have already opened. On the other hand of course, they have no idea how to get information from a book.

I'm aware that much of what I'm saying is impressionistic - I've certainly never measured any of this stuff - but introducing my students to another source (ie books) must be better than what they are doing now.

The importance of education

[Colin Smith]

Interesting that it's seen as a source of cost cutting in the US.

Still. Be happy. The world is happy to continue loaning you the money needed to buy their products. Don't you worry yourself about paying it back.

used texts increase the price of new texts

[TubeSteak]

Professors, however, are not blind to the shocking prices of new textbooks. Nor are they deaf to the complaining voices of their students. They know that students increasingly buy used textbooks, and that this in turn affects the prices on new texts that sit unsold on the shelves.

Riiiight...

There's two different people selling books:
Publisher ---> College Book Store
College Book Store ---> Student

If the publisher is losing sales to used books, the book store could easily absorb any publisher price hike, considering that the book store is selling the used texts and is part of the publisher's problem.

My guess is that being in the textbook business is like being a utility company. You get to ignore normal market dynamics and act as if your minimum profit margin is enshrined in law.

There's really no incentive for anyone other than the student to act in a rational manner.

Textbooks are pretty much a scam anyway...

[IICV]

Undergraduate textbooks are nothing more than a scam. Calculus, physics, chemistry and biology on such a basic level have not changed significantly in the past decade; why do I have to buy books which were printed this year?

Oh, right, because the problems that are assigned out of the book get shuffled every printing by magical pixies. Literally shuffled; in one of my recent classes, the professor would assign the (optional) homework out of the seventh edition of the text, but also had a list of where the exact same problems were in the sixth and fifth. I checked with one of the older editions in the library, and aside from the color scheme this was the only change. The explanations were all the same, which is a good thing since I'd hate to think our fundamental understanding of the principles of vector calculus had changed so quickly.

I've actually had a couple professors talk about this; apparently, such decisions are usually made by the department heads, and the people teaching the class just go with it - not that it's just the higher-ups getting kickbacks. Publishers drop old editions like hot potatos; in another of my classes, the professor refused to move on to the sixth edition and taught out of the fifth, because apparently they'd swapped some of the chapters around and he didn't want to deal with it. Even though the sixth edition had been released that same year, people had so much trouble finding copies of it he eventually gave up and published an equivalence guide. This was in a course where the material didn't quite need to be taught in order, which is probably why they didn't just stop at the homework problems.

Anyway, in order to keep this 3:00 am post from being completely offtopic: there is absolutely no reason at all for anyone to charge money for textbooks in the first place, much less put ads in them. The basic principles have been known for longer than anyone currently in college has been alive; all that really needs to happen is for some philanthropist to fund writers who are good at writing teaching texts, and then release that into the public domain - and don't talk about those open textbooks, I doubt any professor will teach out of something without officious credentials.

Now I'm hallucinating bugs crawling on my legs. Or at least I hope I'm hallucinating. Either way, it's time for sleep.

It depends on the subject - and the students

[njdj]

Talk to any student about the price of the college textbooks, and you're likely to hear similar complaints

I wonder if the person who wrote that has talked to enough students.

On my desk is the 3rd edition of "Classical Electrodynamics", by J. D. Jackson. This title has been the standard text for advanced classical electromagnetism for about 40 years. The 2nd edition came out in 1974, and the 3rd edition (the latest) in 1998.

The book is a sturdy hardback, designed for decades of use. I still use it occasionally, and I have a PhD in Physics. It's priced at $97 direct from Amazon, or "Used and new from $55" from Amazon's resellers. This is cheap for such a book.

Any student who thinks he/she can afford an iPod, but not a book like this, has got seriously screwed-up priorities.

Re:It depends on the subject - and the students

[gsn]

Unfair example using Jackson as an illustration of low version numbers.

No complaints about the price of Jackson or any of my physics textbooks. I buy the hardback ones used from Amazon or Abebooks. I'm keeping all of them and I want them to last. I atually buy some Indian textbooks for friends when I go back home every other year but they tend to fall apart at the seams during the semester. I wish all of them were hardback - Misner, Thorne, Wheeler isn't and its like Jackson for GR.

The point about the low version numbers with Jackson is not even he reads it which is why we have such few editions. Its sort of the trial by fire as you enter grad school. Occasionally you can look up stuff and I was using it look up skin depth yesterday with the talk about RF shielding. All the stuff I'd really want from Jackson are "the proof is left as an exercise to the reader." I've been taught EM by two generations of professors and they both used Jackson when they were grad students. And they both hate it.

There is certainly a lot of editions with something like Young and Freedman (upto v.11) or Serway and (Faughn|Bichner|Jewitt) (upto 6 I think) and the only thing that ever changes is the problems and page numbers. That said I don't really consider these physics books - I hate the intro physics plug and chug philosophy and whats with the ridiculous colour figures with smiling kids - black and (white|blue) figures with terse captions or none at all! That will lower the price!

Illegal in Belgium

[lowieken]

In Belgium, ad supported textbooks are illegal. Any publicity/sponsoring in education is illegal, in all three language communities, which is where the responsibility for education lies.

This is part of the very broad consensus in our country that education is a public good. Messing with that is guaranteed to get all kinds of people really angry.

Its not so bad

[JustOK]

I really think that [Drink Coke] anything that improves [Save on Laptops at Dell.ca] what we are teaching the next generations [Shop at Walmart] is a good thing. If ads help in the production [/\/\cDonald's] of the text books, and to keep costs down [Amazon.ca] so that more people [NetFlix] can be better learnerers [HeadOn. Apply directly to the forehead] is a GOOD THING.

Imagine the implications...

[Deanodriver]

They would have to control what advertisements are allowed in what textbook, otherwise, who knows what could end up in them? Imagine a church group advertising in an evolution textbook, for example...

I'm crying

[tomstdenis]

... because god forbid our children [and yes that includes college kids] actually LEARN A DAMN THING. Let's make more money, take take take, and now let's be even more invasive.

It's already hard enough to motivate kids to study. Now they'll have ads bothering them? I really fear for the future.

Any smart professors would just change their teaching style to avoid text books as much as possible [hint: there are usually other books on any given topic outside the mainstream academia].

Tom

Why do we still lack electronic books?

[cubicledrone]

What is the problem, precisely? Are we so fucked up? So utterly incapable of bringing a fucking product to market that we can't figure out a way to manufacture a piece of portable hardware that allows people to read books from a screen? I mean yeah, I know we can't get back to the moon, and can't provide for ourselves and have to borrow money to have kitchen appliances shipped 10,000 miles so we have something to put on the shelves but are we so bereft of vision that we can't build a simple book reader? Is it really that much more complicated than say, a calculator?

Actually I know the problem is some rat fuck middle manager with his donut stuffed ass wedged into the org chart between the guy that has ALREADY INVENTED THIS PRODUCT and the people that can approve manufacturing it. In fact the guy that has already invented this product was probably fired and is sitting at a sandwich shop someplace studying for his real estate exam.

Want proof that middle management consists of 99% lying rat fucks? We don't have an electronic book reader. We can't bring this product to market. We couldn't do it if we wanted to. The rat fucks win again. There you go.

That's not the only things they do.

[Pollux]

you're likely to hear similar complaints about the cost of the textbooks, the rip-off buyout prices at local college bookstores and insidious publishers who keep changing editions every few years just to change the page numbers and kill off the used books market.

I'm a high school teacher who just had a marvelous time over the summer trying to order our next set of pre-calc books for our district. I needed to phone the company to find out the price of the textbooks in order to draft a price quote for the district before they would approve the order. I was trying to find out from the salesperson what the price of the pre-calc books were, using the ISBN from the sample book they had sent us. The problem I was having was that the ISBN of the sample book I had was different from the ISBN of the book that they were selling on the website, and both were different from the ISBN of the textbook that the salesman gave me over the phone. It took another 30 minute call to find out why.

Apparently, the ISBN of the book on the website was the wrong website. The pre-calc book I was searching for was published by Pearson Education, which owns a whole slew of subsidiary publishers, including Prentice Hall, Scott Foresman, Addison Wesley... I found the book I was looking for on Addison Wesley's website, though the book I wanted was apparently on Prentice Hall's website. But here's the kicker...The salesperson from the original inquiry gave me the ISBN for the college bound edition, instead of the High School bound edition. When I asked what the difference was (they were priced the same), she explained that the high school binding is much stronger and is meant to last for a good seven-eight years of abuse, while the college binding is only designed to last for two years before it starts to fall apart. I was surprised, and I asked the salesperson why the college kids get the poorer binding. She explained that the college bookstores (though I'm sure the publishers love this as well) don't profit as well of used book sales, so they want books to have a short lifespan. It's easier when the book is falling apart for them to refuse buyback.

And it makes perfect sense. I remember a whole bunch of my textbooks that would really fall apart in a year's time back in college, and I always wondered why my high school books could take so much more abuse and still come out alright. My prob-stat book in particular was shedding pages faster than a balding man would shed hair. Just another way publishers are trying to screw students in the long run.

free textbooks

[bcrowell]

Here is a recent USA Today article that talks about something similar to what you're referring to. Free textbooks aren't hypothetical, they already exist. A sugar-daddy philanthropist isn't required; professors are already doing it for the same reason they've always written textbooks. (Hint: they've never expected to make any significant amount of money on the typical textbook.) Some good starting points:

• theassayer.org
• textbookrevolution.org

I'm currently working on a CD that's meant to convince professors to think about using free books. The idea is sort of like TheOpenCD: all those apps are freely available on the internet, but many people don't know about them, or don't know how to find good ones without searching through a million web sites.

Why is a Calc book $100?

[cjsm]

I was shocked when my nephew was taking calculus a couple of years ago and he had to pay over $100 for a book. When I went to college in the early 70s it was around $25, if I remember correctly. What is the excuse for this price? There is no new information in them. Its not like a medical or computer science book where there is new data coming out every year which must be incorporated into the text. There is no reason to rewrite them every year. There is no need for new editions. There are already 1000s of editions available. They could just select the best written, clearest classic texts from 1910-1990 and republish them, and it would probably be a superior text then the run of the mill average text nowadays.

The truth is, the writers just copy from older texts and rephrase them. A Calculus book shouldn't be priced at any more then $30, since it should be priced like a commodity product, which is what it is. Charging a $100 a pop proves it is a crooked scam between book publishers and universities.