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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.'"
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.
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.
Reality is defined by the maddest person in the room
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.
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.
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.