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We Rent Movies, So Why Not Textbooks?
Hugh Pickens writes "Using Netflix as a business model, Osman Rashid and Aayush Phumbhra founded Chegg, shorthand for 'chicken and egg,' to gather books from sellers at the end of a semester and renting — or sometimes selling — them to other students at the start of a new one. Chegg began renting books in 2007, before it owned any, so when an order came in, its employees would surf the Web to find a cheap copy. They would buy the book using Rashid's American Express card and have it shipped to the student. Eventually, Chegg automated the system. 'People thought we were crazy,' Rashid said. Now, as Chegg prepares for its third academic year in the textbook rental business, the business is growing rapidly. Jim Safka, a former chief executive of Match.com and Ask.com who was recently recruited to run Chegg, said the company's revenue in 2008 was more than $10 million, and this year, Chegg surpassed that in January alone."
Editions.
In all reality, how is this all that different from a student buying a textbook at the start of a semester and selling it back at the end? I also think that the endless cycle of "new" editions of the book can put a crimp in the plans for this service, since schools will require the latest edition of a book, which will be impossible for this company to find cheaply online, meaning that they'll need to price to rental to pay for the full cost of the book in just a few semesters (before the new one comes out).
Interesting idea, but I'm skeptical as to how well they can keep costs low enough to be a truly economical alternative to buying.
you only get one or two semesters out of textbooks before the company releases a new edition. I don't see how this business model solves that problem.
One of our competitors trademarked the term "hypothesis". From now on, we will call them "boneheaded ideas".
Given the following points:
1. Student pay ridiculous prices for half-useful photo-laden authoritative textbooks, only to sell them back to the publisher-run book resale cartels for 10% of the price they paid.
2. With the current trend of Big Copyright, every written work must have an owner/copyright holder. Therefore, you do not own the books you have copies of.
I own my experience of the book, or the movie, and put forward that those experiences, being mine, grant me ownership of the work as my experience as much as the money I paid for the 400 pages of paper and ink.
We will look back to the beginning of the 21st Century and laugh at this Information Prohibition.
kulakovich
Libraries anyone? During my 2nd year at uni (I didn't think of it for my first) I just got all the text books I needed from the library. Most of them were 4 week loans and could be renewed on the internet - so it wasn't really that much of a hassle.
schools will require the latest edition of a book
How do schools justify requiring the latest edition of a book to their students?
College textbooks have limited re-use because the publishers make new editions strictly of the purpose of obsoleting them so people don't buy used books and are forced (or at least encouraged) to buy new ones instead.
Renting something that only can be used 2-3 times means you end up paying a LOT to rent it. If the company who rents it is to make a profit, they have to charge a significant fraction of the price of the item to rent it.
For example, in the article, $69 (including shipping) to rent a book that retails for $123. You can probably find it used for $85 and sell it again when you are done (for peanuts).
http://lkml.org/lkml/2005/8/20/95
This is a business model that will be specifically forbidden with electronic books. And enforced by encryption or proprietary formats (which are, in a practical sense, the same thing), which in turn are protected by the DMCA.
To an economist, or public policy maker, that makes the new technology stand out like a sore thumb as not an improvement on the old.
This is an example that has been lost in other media as the new format offers many benefits over the old - the ability to have a movie at home at ALL, the ability to copy music easily and with no lost fidelity. But about all that electronic books give you over the old is a reduction in volume and weight (search capability, much overrated - books always had indexes and tables-of-contents, and besides, you're supposed to be learning the whole textbook).
The new media have only a few generations of history, most of it with shifting technologies - copying music at all was not possible for the general public until the cassette recorder in 1968.
But with electronic books, book rental couldn't exist, used book stores couldn't exist, and believe me, they'll be gunning for libraries themselves.
The dramatic contrast with centuries of tradition about how society does business with books might finally get it through politician's heads that enabling new, more restrictive copyrights is robbing the public.
Every book I buy is "rent" to my family/friends and my girlfriend
For business, renting books would not be profitable because people will need much more time to read a book than they will need to watch a movie and take the DVD back.
OK France is 1/5 of the size of the US so maybe it cannot be compared, but I know only France as education system. In the primary/secondary we got the book loaned and had only to pay up a fine if we scribled it or worsened its state. From high school (lycee) and especially university there were old book sold from student to the previous. Some shop even speciliazed into doing that (Gibert Jeune for example in Paris is where I got my expensive QM books...). Only around 1 year out of 4 to 6 years we had to buy new one because change in the programs. But all in one it came relatively cheap. And in case you are asking, that was 25 years ago.
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When I was in school it was "Here are the homework assignments, they're only in the new version of the textbook".
Even if all professors in that school followed that policy inflexibly, there exist more than one school.
With electronic textbooks, this model won't exist because publishers prefer selling subscriptions allowing access to their entire catalogue, rather than individual texts. They'd rather the institution buys one of the expensive subscriptions, which allows unlimited downloads of any eBooks. The value comes from a continual supply of new books being made available to subscribers, not from individual book sales.
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were it not for one fundamental difference: one action is consensual, the other isn't.
Most writers do not want you copying/distributing their work without compensation.
Drugs are happily made and happily bought.
Typically, the publisher will stop selling the old edition
In other words, the old "Disney vault" trick. Is there a reason why professors haven't led the way in switching to textbooks published as free cultural works?
Most of the time, lectures cover all the material from the textbook, the text is mostly a fallback if the lecture's aren't clear.
The primary reason for having textbooks is that the assignments are based on text book chapters, if we could have a service which charges say a certain amount, maybe $0.10 per chapter question lookup and put that online, that would be much much more beneficial.
Bonus if they can also provide answers to the selected questions for (perhaps) a fee, that will cut down on google searches for solution sets. Now most of you are crying foul because of plagiarism, but face it if the student can't figure it out, they're doomed anyways, this is is more for the ambiguous questions where, "hey...I did it this way...but I'm not exactly certain they want it done this particular way", or "Gaaah!, This methods takes forever, is there a more slick way of doing this?"
They don't justify requiring them.
If they don't need to justify requiring an expensive textbook, then the students don't need to justify transferring to a less-expensive school.
2nd hand book stores are common in poorer countries. At the university I attended, most students bought and sold their books at 2nd hand stores. It may be a new concept in the (formerly) rich USA...
Excuse me, but please get off my Pennisetum Clandestinum, eh!
The whole textbook market is a scam to rip off students. The vendors keep churning the book versions simply just to keep saturation low (why do we need 17 editions of an algebra book?).
At one point, I had purchased a marketing book only to find that a new version had come out right at the beginning of the semester. The prof apologized for the problem and handed out an addendum for the students with the early edition. The only changes were to the end-of-chapter quiz questions. And most of those questions remained the same - just with the question numbering changed slightly.
They weren't even trying to be creative with the fact that they were screwing the students. Everyone knew this to be the case and accepted it. I think that I was the only person who was upset by this obvious racket.
Is this what we should expect for everything from now on? If schools really cared about anything but profits, then we'd have a mandatory open-source textbook market where academia would be free to create and modify textbooks. These textbooks would cost nothing. Certainly, there would still be a need for private market textbooks (on arcane and/or rapidly changing subjects) but I can see a substantial portion of textbook requirements displaced by an open system.
Wikibooks is a good example for anything that has a featured book. But a lot of books I see there, like the one on digital signal processing, are full of "25% done" modules. About how much of a typical undergraduate engineering or arts curriculum can WB featured books serve?
It doesn't matter how you slice it, the text book industry wants to get their $150/book/semester out of you. They don't really care how they get their income, as long as they get it. They'll either do it by making you buy a new book, which you can keep, or by charging you the same amount for a book that you can rent for the same amount of money, only now you have to turn it in when you're done, instead of having the option to keep it or sell it again.
You see? You see? Your stupid minds! Stupid! Stupid!
"search capability, much overrated "
I alarmingly disagree, I've found countless books via google search via google books, try doing THAT in a library, really fucking time consuming. Anyone who thinks e-books are not a godsend in many ways (easier to copy, edit, update, etc) over dead-tree have not thought about it hard enough.
Wikibooks is a great example of the limitations of traditional books. Try mass collaboration on deadtree, going to be a lot less efficient.
nobody rents in europe, it's a dead market. for a good reason, not piracy but competition in dvd sale market. the US market is filled with single company monopoly's and thus people are more prone to download illegally from the web (us piracy numbers on average are higher than anywhere else, except for china *these people are starving to begin with...*)
I attended Eastern Illinois University, and I can't remember what the rate was, (I think around 200 bucks a semester) but you rented your books, and returned them at the end of the semester. This saved me a ton of money. If you did want the book, you had the option to purchase it at the end of the semester.
search capability, much overrated - books always had indexes and tables-of-contents, and besides, you're supposed to be learning the whole textbook).
I have to disagree with this. Tables of contents only cover general topics, and indexes cover only a few hundred terms (an exhaustive index is by definition as long as the book itself). But what if you're interested in looking back at something you saw once and don't remember clearly? What if you're looking for an exact, specific formula, statistic or quote? And this all ignores, of course, that electronic search takes 3 seconds and gets you exactly where the searched term is, but with paper books it takes minutes (often to take a 30-second look at something. Talk about lost productivity). Also, in all of my school experiences, I've never once covered 100% of a textbook.
then why not also have public libraries of movies
The last time I checked Allen County Public Library in Fort Wayne, Indiana, it had collections of movies on VHS and DVD for lending.
Music especially doesn't cost so much more to produce that a book
It's also much easier to copy ever since home taping. Unlike tape decks, photocopiers made by Xerox can't just copy an entire book by the user mounting the source and destination media and pushing Start.
When I was in college, during the Cretaceous period, we shared textbooks within our study groups. We then sold them to the next semester's students, if possible. Pissed off many published professors and the school bookstore.
Of course, back then, they were fragile clay tablets. Highlighting was a bitch.
If implemented right - it saves first and foremost HUUUUGE amounts of time. Usually also money - while you could resale/etc. books yourself, there will also be those editions you have hard time reselling...
Yes, the cause of the second problem are schools requiring latest editions. I can see the point in college/etc. level education (though even there only with some portion of books), but there's really not much point in highschool level education.
And while schools are the cause of complications, they can be also the best solution...if there's some will to do it. Because it's not only about latest editions, it's also about students having the same edition.
Now, arguably I'm biased, since my highschool was probably the only one in medium sized-town that had a solution - give 1/8 to 1/6 of the price you'd pay yourself at the beginning of the year, and you have all the books needed. And what a convenience, having them just wait for you in the first week. Just give them back, for next year students. Everybody has the same editions, money you give is for partial replacements, oldest editions had typically 10 years.
Essentially it was for-pay library, with enough copies of each book that everybody had one for themselves. After "classic" solution of primary school, it was simply superb.
But it was also evil socialism in action...
One that hath name thou can not otter
I believe there are copyright issues. As with movies, don't you need a special performance copy/license in order to rent it out? I'd imagine the same goes with books.
There is a difference between reselling a book, and renting it out. However, what harm would there be, if a student simply were to lend out a book, free of charge? Other than by the time it wears out, it's done for.
I work at a college and have heard this from a lot of students. They do lots of bargain shopping. One thing we've seen a lot of as of late is profs who give their students PDFs of scanned pages and tell them to print that out in a lab.
Aside from some obvious issues on copyright, we're implementing a print management system this fall. Every student gets a quota per semester. If your prof just told you to print out a text book, are you going to waste most of your quota on that?
We rent Textbooks, so why not the answers? If I am going to take the final tests, I dont need the answers after I am done with the exam. Every exam should have a model or unique numbers, that I can just type into google and get the answers hhahaa.
It doesn't work that way. We can't just simply "force" a product to exist. If it doesn't exist already, then that typically means there isn't a happy medium between the cost of providing such a service and the cost to the users of the service. That's the way that free market works; if it can be done, and people want it, then it usually is done. If it doesn't exist, especially if it is a service in high demand, like free knowledge, then it means that, most probably, it can't exist without massive subsidies, or slave labour.
You know, there is a difference between trolling and pointing out the flaws in your reasoning. Just saying.
The local Community College is experimenting with renting textbooks. The departments have to agree to use that edition for 3 years, which, I suppose, is why two of the three books are custom texts so the edition won't change. It's actually cheaper to buy a used text and sell it back to the store, but it's a cheaper up front cost for the rental. So far it seems to be working out ok, but it's only been running one semester.
The big scam to me isn't the textbooks, it's the online access codes that you have to buy for some classes. No way you can keep or sell back those!
You shouldn't have posted AC, you were actually insightful.
You did forget to mention when the instructor requires that you buy HIS book as required reading for the class, regardless of what ego-fluffing crap he had written. Most, but not all, instructors are teaching because they can't hack it in the real world of their chosen field. I've gotten this both from the instructors and from the idiots who are churned out of various universities who glow over their degree, but can't handle simple functions of their chosen profession. How can you spend years studying something and not have a clue of what you're doing?
For IT work, I'd hire someone who spent 2 years exploring their chosen field at home or at a lower level job and can explain topics in detail, rather than a graduate of a 4 year institution with their warm fuzzy diploma and no clue of how to really do the work.
Honestly, I've hired both, and found it to be more than abundantly true. 2 years of tech school, 4 years of university, or the guy who's installed every distro available just to see how they work?
The self-trained explorer at home turned out to be the best. They'll be more willing to honestly tell me where their weaknesses are, so I can tutor them as problems happen, and they will learn. For example, one guy told me, "Well, I don't know sendmail that well." Fine. It was a webhosting gig, but I generally managed the mail servers. I'd send him notes on my changes, and he'd ask questions. It wasn't long before I'd get notes in saying "I made this change, for this reason" to a primary mail server, and the changes would be correct.
The 2 year tech school grads came in with resumes listing all of our technologies, and telling me they knew their stuff. It was all regular industry stuff. We didn't reinvent the wheel, we simply used the existing technologies to their fullest. I asked about Cisco, and they both said "I successfully passed the Cisco class, I know how to work our equipment". Great. I needed an IP and password set on a new switch, and installed in a DC. I was going to make the rest of the changes before it was really used. It sat on the bench for a week until the first told me "I don't know how." {sigh}. I gave it to the second, who did the same thing. What? If you aren't guided through it by an instructor, you have no clue of how to operate it? It wasn't urgent, but it didn't need to sit idle on the bench for 2 weeks. I never liked leaving equipment in the office, when it could be in the DC ready to use in a pinch. They were trained to pass the tests, not how to practically operate anything. They wasted 2 years of their lives, the tuition money, and two months of my office space.
I handed it off to a guy that said "Well, I never used it, but I'll try.". It took him about an hour, but he did it right and asked me questions on preconfiguring ports for me. Above and beyond. I like that. I didn't want the ports done, I had my own config to lay over it for that. I just needed to be able to access it from the office. :)
Now, when I get to a position where I'm hiring again, my same rules will apply. Great if you have a degree, but you'd better have the practical application of the required technology before I'll consider you. So, a guy sitting at home for 2 years messing with it will always have preference over a guy who sat at a university for 4 years, unless the university guy can also show me that he's had a couple years of hands-on work with it.
Serious? Seriousness is well above my pay grade.
What count is (if I understood correctly) that you have one program per state. So on state level the size argument don't hold at all. What COULD be the biggest problem is 1) new edition every year and 2) state/school force use of the new edition instead of skipping once every 4 or 6 years. After all at ground school and at high school level, it ain't as if basic math, physic, reading, biology, history and geography were changing that much. Naturally if school let themselves get caught replacing book every year such program or business model don't make sense.
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I just finished a Statistics class for Business with a new edition of a book released. The Prof goes on to state that he will only refer to the new book when quoting page numbers, which may or may not have changed. He tells us he won't entertain questions about what content may be different from the previous version because he doesn't really know. He gives us a nice story and his sympathies when it comes to college textbooks and the pricing scheme between new and used. He talked about how the revision process works: how publishers only allow slight changes to a set number of chapters and maybe 1 or 2 major chapter revisions. He explained how the compensation process works. And he eventually realized that his name is all over the textbook because he's the primary author.
I must say, that is pretty much the only thing I really learned in Busniess Statistics.
Though I finished school a couple years ago getting books anywhere besides the two authorized campus book stores was a huge hassle. First they were the only places that could find out what books are needed for classes. Second they didn't include the ISBN numbers in the print out. Third they wouldn't let you know what books were needed for what class until about a week before classes started. So basically if you wanted to buy your books somewhere else you need to print out a sheet w/ all the books needed for your classes, find the books, and write in the ISBN numbers (or risk doing a title search), and then find them online, and hope your professor doesn't require the book for the first couple of weeks. One time I had a professor tell us to return our books to the bookstore, and buy them somewhere else. Also he said don't tell anyone this because he got into trouble w/ the university last semester since they run one of the bookstores. I don't know how many schools run their bookstores like this but I wouldn't be surprised if a majority of colleges do.
Give every child a netbook at their first school day, and let the textbook companies create a website. Then reproduction is practically free.
I bet the whole netbook, the monthly rate that pays the texbook company people of your choice (or rather of the choice of the school you chose), and the WLAN will still cost less then a tenth of the price of the textbooks, over the whole school time.
Then, some people invest into paying people to extend free textbooks (eg. wikibooks, but with more background checks),
base WLAN/WiMAX will become a citywide utility that is payed trough taxes (because anyone uses it anyway, doing it together will be cheaper),
and those netbook will become disposable goods,
and we get it all for free. (Because it will just be a feature of something that you buy anyway because of other reasons.)
Any sufficiently advanced intelligence is indistinguishable from stupidity.
You already can:
http://www.chegg.com/
(A bunch of people in my summer English class are using this site, it's legit.)
Wonder why the publishers just don't sell PDF versions of the book for $10.00. I'd think doing that would save money on paper, shipping, printing, electricity, etc.
With the use of notebooks/netbooks so prevalent in schools, I'd think this would be a no brainer.
I would not want to rent my books, because I want to keep them for reference in the career that they are supposedly providing us! I mean, how are you going to remember EVERYTHING in those books beyond a semester or two after the class, let alone when you actually need it out in the professional world? I think the only books I sold back were for some of my freshman level stuff like anicent history, sociology, etc. I kept all the rest of my engineering books and even some other books I found interesting, like my American Literature anthology books. Plus they look really good on my shelf at work ;)
Everyone wants to save money on textbooks. We get it! However, when you really think about it what we really need is textbooks we're going to keep. The mentality of everyone from the publishers to the students (government, schools and book stores) needs to change. Textbooks should have lasting value. They should be an integral part of education and something a person would refer back to in their career. I wouldn't mind spending money on books if that were the case. Renting textbook or selling them back or trying to artificially cheapen them in some way only compounds the problem. Let's fix the root of the problem for once instead mending it with stupid schemes.
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You can't extend IT to be representative of the whole world. Just because IT has some ingrained hatred for anyone with college experience doesn't mean college is worthless.
In France, school's books are provided by the schools, because public education *must* be free for all children.
After that, in collège, lycée and université you are on your own. But wait, no in fact : there are several big NGO related to family, education and so (mainly PEEP and FCPE) which for a very small yearly fee will lend you all your needed books.
Those NGO have existed for ages and are very active in school everyday life (helping for the schools trips, etc).
The government is imposing school programs (no creationism, thank you :), and is validating the school books proposed by the publishers. So the teachers have a reasonable choice on what material to use, the costs stay low because of standardization and the families don't suffer from high prices.
(when can we have, at least, proper international support ? Not the whole planet is limited to ASCII-7, you know...)
The university of Wisconsin Whitewater has a textbook rental service. http://www.uww.edu/StdRsces/textbook/index.html the rental fees and cost of useing te service are part of the seg. fees
I was apparently one of the lucky few to never have to worry about this issue. My university (Southern Illinois University at Edwardsville, not too far from St. Louis) rented out texts themselves. I knew we were in the minority but I was actually shocked to not see any other posters state their universities did the same. Each semester the weekend prior to the first week of classes I would stop by the Textbook Services building, print out a list of text books and search the aisles for whatever was on the list. At the end of the semester I'd return the books and be done with them. The most I remember paying for the rental fee was just over $150, for 4 or 5 classes. Great system, and at the end of the semester if you felt the text would be valuable to you in the future you can buy it at a discounted price (it's used after all).
It wasn't until my 400 level classes that I had to buy texts, and even then it was only for 2 of the classes. It really helped cut costs nicely.
If it doesn't exist, especially if it is a service in high demand, like free knowledge, then it means that, most probably, it can't exist without massive subsidies
That might be true of an actual free market, but we don't have a free market. Not in textbooks, and not in a lot of things.
For one thing, the existence of copyright already makes this a market in which the government has intervened and set rules. Besides that, schools often require that students use a specific edition of a specific textbook, so students aren't free to shop around for a better textbook product.
Given that the vendors of textbooks are completely dependent on schools to require specific textbooks, the schools absolutely can "force" a product to exist. Whatever requirements they put on textbooks in order to use them, those are the requirements that publishers will meet. They're already forcing a sort of product to exist as it is.
Now it's possible for them to set requirements so unreasonable that no one will be able to meet them, but there's no evidence that open source textbooks are impossible.
This is one of those few times when the mod system has failed. We already have a free, open source, modifiable text for every topic. It's called Wikipedia and it's the living embodiment of why we have professional, accountable, paid editors for text books. Editions can be viewed as a scam, or they can be viewed as the one tool professional publishers have to continue to generate money to pay for more quality products. If it was mandatory to go to college and buy texts I might be a bit more sympathetic, but its ones own choice to participate in the system. I really think that this is one of those cases where if you think that you can do it better, then put up or, well, you know...
I've been doing all my 'studying' at Cheggit for years!
Yeah... in general, if you want to learn something at all, you take classes outside the Business school. All business school activities are just extended cocktail parties.
"They were pure niggers." – Noam Chomsky
Two reasons.
One: Because movies are (slightly more) profitable. The vendor buys it, and rents it out over and over again for a few days at a time with very little risk of damage. A textbook would be 'out' for a whole semester, and may be substantially worn when returned. Where is the benefit? The textbook may, or may not be part of the next years curriculum, so I pretty much need to get the full cost of the book plus the profit margin from the first renter. No benefit to either party.
Two: Captive audience. If I charge too much for a movie, or require you to buy it, many people will watch a different movie. I cannot say... That textbook was unavailable for a reasonable price, so I will use this one instead.
As others have pointed out, textbooks are quite the scam, with minor editions being updated to require purchase of new books each year.
No one wants to take the chance that they're answering the wrong question on an assignment, or missing a factoid that is asked on a test, that happened not to be in their edition.
For some subjects, evolving of the texts makes sense; for some established fundamentals, it's senseless.
What would be interesting would be for some website to track differences between editions, to let students know where they stand; it would really call out the perpetrators of this "edition scam" and reduce their power greatly.
Alternatively, I wouldn't be surprised to see a trend towards copying/pdf'ing (i.e. piracy) of texts to save money for students. Piracy often crops up in cases where there is inappropriately high pricing (most computer games, IMHO); I can't see an area more ripe for piracy than the textbook industry. (Not that I'd condone it, just that I think the prices are inflated, and the requirements for new texts are artificially and inappropriately imposed.)
One thing that always seemed odd to me was that each year, in each course, the professors seemed surprised (or feigned surprise) at how expensive the book actually was, and indicated they wouldn't have chosen it had they known how expensive it was. Are their kickbacks or something?!?!? (I taught one year, and was given a big armload of texts to examine and choose between; I wasn't told prices, and simply picked the best one based upon its merit. So if there was a kickback scam, no one approached me; thankfully, for their sake :)
Love many, trust a few, do harm to none.
Well, when I see people who's majors never apply to their real life jobs, then I can start to apply it out. Why spend 4+ years learning psychology or accounting to work a high level customer service job? English majors that start doing low end accounting. Really, other than doctors and lawyers, I haven't known too many people who have worked in the field that they studied for years.
It can be argued that they got a well rounded education, but since I'm fairly sure that English and math were required at some point during their 4 years of "higher learning", I should assume that they can write something resembling a grammatically correct document, or not completely fail at making their formal presentation to executives or business partners actually add up.
That doesn't apply to everyone, but it seems to always apply more to those who's claim to fame is "I graduated, I deserve a job." It's more like, "I spent a lot of money on my degree, the world owes me now."
I'm not talking down about people who go to school. There are plenty of smart people who did, but it's not because they spent years at a university, it's because they were already smart. We have been lead to believe that to be successful you must get a degree. It's simply not true. Generally, it's a money making scheme. Universities make an absolute fortune, and the return for the customer (student) is much less than it should be. The best thing I've heard from any university graduate is "I'm proud of myself." Good. Too bad you didn't find a better way to boost your ego than either spending tens of thousands of your families money, or putting yourself so in debt that you'll be paying for years to come.
Serious? Seriousness is well above my pay grade.
For IT work, I'd hire someone who spent 2 years exploring their chosen field at home or at a lower level job and can explain topics in detail, rather than a graduate of a 4 year institution with their warm fuzzy diploma and no clue of how to really do the work.
This is a classic bias comparison - you're comparing two groups, but also starting out by defining that one is better than the other. You can't then conclude that one is therefore better than the other - that's a circular argument.
E.g., I might as well say "I'd hire someone who has never had any education and can explain everything in detail, than someone who's been to University, done a PhD, spent years working in the industry, and has no clue how to do their work"!
You can't generalise from your bias anecdote, and then making a generalisation. Anecdotes aren't evidence, and correlation isn't causation.
If schools really cared about anything but profits, then we'd have a mandatory open-source textbook market where academia would be free to create and modify textbooks.
Schools don't write books. Authors write books, and writing a good textbook is hard work, and boring too, compared to other work available to somebody who is competent to write one. I have only written one so far, and would only do it again if paid handsomely. The same goes for revising my first book.
Who is going to write your open-source textbooks? And who is going to pay the authors?
Note: I'm not American, and I acknowledge that the US textbook market is a racket. It is faily obvious from how US publishers try to convince me to switch to their books.
You can't extend IT to be representative of the whole world. Just because IT has some ingrained hatred for anyone with college experience doesn't mean college is worthless.
Yeah, it tells you that college is useless for IT work. You don't need to know computing theory to do it any more than you need to study electrical engineering to be an electrician. That doesn't make it any less valuable; I mean, it's useful and it pays decently. It's just not the sort of thing that benefits from academic training. If I want someone to design a circuit, on the other hand, or control a rocket, or build a highway overpass, I'd want some academic training, as those disciplines require a great deal more theoretical background.
My University here in the U.S. already rents out textbooks. One downfall that I have noticed from this is that people do not take care of their textbooks when they are not paying for them.
This is a business model that will be specifically forbidden with electronic books.
I must've imagined my O'Reilly Safari subscription then.
Incidentally, its a business model that publishers continue to attempt to prohibit with paper books: I reached for the nearest book on the shelf and it says this:
This book is sold subject to the condition that it will not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out or otherwise circulated without the publisher's prior consent... ...which is especially ironic when the book I picked up was Thomas Paine's The Rights of Man, in the public domain everywhere.
They weren't even trying to be creative with the fact that they were screwing the students. Everyone knew this to be the case and accepted it. I think that I was the only person who was upset by this obvious racket.
It was a book about marketing, and you were upset by something like this?
Somehow I doubt you were going to pass that course...
np: Pinch - Chamber Dub (Soul Jazz Records Singles 2008-2009 (Disc 2))
"I'm not anti-anything, I'm anti-everything, it fits better." - Sole
I don't think it's fair to say that the _whole_ textbook market is a scam to rip off students. At least nominally, the purpose of new editions of textbooks is to include information which has become relevant since the last edition was published.
I really only know one textbook author, Stuart Russell, who is writing a new edition of a textbook. He's taken a significant amount of time to revise old chapters and write entirely new chapters to include in his book, which is the most widely-used textbook on artificial intelligence. It's not just a renumbering of the end-of-chapter quiz questions.
In relatively new and diverse fields like AI, research results become standard practice fairly quickly, so textbooks have a legitimate need to be updated.
He's facing a biased sample.
Face facts, if you know what you are doing in practice and have an appropriate degree there is no way on earth you want to wind up in IT (as it's commonly defined and as the GP defined it).
IT gets the dregs of the college grads, lot's tech school grads and self trained geeks. Of that choice the self trained geeks are generally the best option with the only downside being they will get a degree then get a better job.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
The "mandatory" part doesn't make a lot of sense. You can't force authors to write books for free. And although a lot of free textbooks do exist already (see my sig), you can't guarantee that for a particular subject, the best book will always be a free book rather than a non-free.
But other than that, what you're suggesting seems similar to something California is doing now. Motivated by the California state budget crisis, Governor Schwarzenegger has announced a Free Digital Textbook Initiative, which has gathered a list of free, online high school math and science textbooks that are aligned with state content standards. The intention is to have the books used in classrooms in fall 2009. This article has some useful background, but it mistakenly suggests that the arduous state adoption process will be an obstacle to the FDTI; statewide adoption only applies to K-8, but FDTI is doing high-school books. There was a previous, unsuccessful effort called COSTP, which tried to produce a history textbook using Wikibooks. Here is a BBC article about the present effort, and here is a newspaper opinion piece by the Governor. This is a transcript of a speech by the Governor, with some interesting Q&A at the end. Twenty books were submitted (press release, links). The four books from traditional publisher Pearson are consumable workbooks, not actual textbooks.
Find free books.
It was a marketing class, right? The "obvious racket" was just part of what the textbook was supposed to teach you.
SIGSEGV caught, terminating
wait... not that kind of sig.
tl.dr
Good help is hard to find.
I appreciate your insights into hiring but they would be more useful in a discussion about hiring. Here we're discussing renting textbooks.
It's happening. I just contributed a chapter to a free text. "Open source" isn't such a good idea, because you'd like a little more reliability in your text books than, for instance Wikipedia.
One problem is that there IS proofreading, layout, etc. costs associated with even an electronic textbook. In most cases the contributors end up paying that. For me, it counts as a publication, and the publishing fee isn't too bad, but there would be a LOT more cheap/free textbooks if you could deal with that.
I agree that someone with a passion for working with computers is probably going to do a better job, but it can be difficult to find out the guys who REALLY installed every distro and the guys that know just enough to get them by the interview...unless you dedicate a lot of time to the interview process.
Keep in mind also, that there are some applicants with degrees that ALSO sat at home and loaded every distro....doing their classroom work and doing their own side projects.
We live in capitalism. Anything you can do to take money from others is far game as long as it's not illegal. Control the supply and people will pay whatever you deem. Even then, scare tactics and absolute control can get you past the pesky illegal.
Our city hired a private contractor to hand out parking tickets. They're so good at it, they hand them out even if you've done nothing wrong, and you can't contest it. If you don't pay, you lose your license. The city and state attorney general won't do anything about it, the city gets a portion of the proceeds of course.
That and book scams don't surprise me. In all reality, it'd make sense to buy a kindle, buy electronic text books, and "unnecessary edition changes" can be less costly. But it's the same resistance as Music CDs to MP3 players.
"Most, but not all, instructors are teaching because they can't hack it in the real world of their chosen field."
That depends very much on the field. I'm sure there are some where that is the case. In many, many fields the guys teaching are taking a couple hours of the day out from "doing it" in order to teach.
There are a few things they teach at universities that do not fall under the purview of the humanities or arts departments.
We already have the massive subsidies though: most professors who write textbooks are not doing it on their own dime, but as part of their employment with a university. Then they get to pocket the profits. The universities can simply change this arrangement so that professors in their employ who write textbooks related to their field of research, which can pretty reasonably be considered works-for-hire, are required to open-source them.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
It does seem to be highway robbery selling textbooks in the US. I'm a teacher and was using a great book this semester - hardback sells for $ 100 in the US. I found a European edition for 60 â (about $ 84). During the semester, the German translation came out. Despite the extra effort needed to produce the translation, it only cost 40 â (about $56). In hard back.
I think teachers should start writing their books open access.
Brevity (plus it was a side-topic) kept me from saying more than "much overrated", but I stand by the opinion. One reply talked about searching FOR books, which is different from searching IN books.
I was referring specifically to textbooks in the post, and not reference. You jump into a reference to answer one question, and get back to your essay or engineering problem. A textbook, you're supposed to cover - and if you aren't at least tempted to look at material in it that isn't in your course, you're missing much of what post-secondary is all about.
Yes, there's a "loss" of time spent leafing through a book to find something you want - i.e. checking each of six mentions of "Henry Kissinger" in a history book to find the Kissinger quote you wanted - but it's not a loss to your education.
I do worry a little that we are getting better and better at searching out specific facts, but worse and worse at just knowing a body of knowledge, where it is parallel-searchable in your brain, cross-referenced holographically with everything else you know. (The source of creativity and non-linear thinking, many think.) This question is being hotly debated in the Atlantic recently, with its duelling articles on "Is Google Making Us Stupid?" a while back vs. "Is Google Making Us Smarter?" this month.
Obviously, we need both - and I've no doubt whatsoever that today's students are getting very, very good at search; it's the "body of knowledge" part that I fear is in danger. I'm absolutely not some anti-Ebook luddite; I'm just not transported by them as some huge revolution.
To repeat: searchability is nice even in a textbook, but it may not be of enough added value to compensate for rentability or re-saleability.
Not to mention the now-ludicrous, unjustifiable prices textbooks now have to start with...
I'm not sure that this has failed yet. Wikipedia doesn't really claim to be a textbook replacement. Projects like Connexions seem to be the place where open source textbooks will succeed or fail.
Allen County Community College in Iola, Kansas and its satellite school in Burlingame, Kansas rent out textbooks. At the end of the semester you simply return the books and that's it. It's a pretty good deal.
My god, it's years old copypasta from 4chan. Don't feed the troll.
Slashdot's lameness filter also blocked me from submitting, so here is some boring, (almost) pointless text.
Wow you were lucky, I was instructed to not even open half of the "required" textbooks in most classes and of course none of the books were available as used. Soon we got into the habit of showing up for the first class without books and asking the instructor which one were actually going to be used or useful.
Apocalypse Cancelled, Sorry, No Ticket Refunds
Actually this article sounds more like a slashvertisement
Ten percent of cops are completely dirty.
Ten percent of cops are clean.
Eighty percent of cops wish they were clean.
Paraphrased: Frank Serpico. He would know.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
You make a good point. One of the things I liked about my business school (I'll plug it a little: Webster University, based in St. Louis) was that all the instructors were current or retired managers and corporate officers, with years of experience in marketing, accounting, finance, leadership, etc. My Operations professor was an industrial process engineer for Hallmark. They were flying him cross-country California to Connecticut and back every two weeks because he was that important to Hallmark (which led to some confusing class scheduling, but it was worth it).
The books were just books; the people and the ideas made the degree worthwhile.
True, but it is a textbook replacement in many cases. Coverage of many specific topics in Wikipedia is excellent, and it's often able to get to the point without a lot of rambling and page-filling.
I recently completed a business degree, and I found that very often I came away with a much better understanding of some topics if I went straight to the Internet -- there is a rich world of short-subject articles out there from people who care passionately about teach particular topics. Wikipedia is a great source, but not the only source.
Unfortunately this is all too common. In fact once e-books catch on, say goodbye to the cheaper second-hand market. That'll be the next way they make their profits.
I'm not sure they need or want payment. Give me the table of contents from a typical textbook, and I can probably assemble a couple of hundred free sources of information that easily surpass the content of the textbook. It seems to me that most professors go to the textbook because they want a structure imposed on the class, not because it is the best (or in some cases, even a competent) source of information.
I found plenty of mistakes in my business school textbooks, and dozens of examples of freely available Internet resources that explained the same material in clearer and more correct ways. The 30 pages on isoquants and isocost curves in my microeconomics textbook were easily surpassed by an 8-page article posted by a professor at Seattle University, for example.
From my personal experience (I study in Amsterdam), it seems the problem is not as bad here as it is in the US. Many of my classes use books that are a few years old allowing me to find second hand text books at much lower prices. On the other hand, there are a number of classes that do require you to buy the books new (or if I can't find it in the secondary market), and it pains me to pay ridiculously high prices for them. As others have mentioned, the changes between editions seem to be trivial at best, and with the extent of consumer protection in Europe, I'm surprised the publishers have not been prohibited from doing this.
I think of Wikipedia more as a textbook supplement than a textbook replacement. Even in topics that I study outside of a classroom, I may go to Wikipedia first, but then I invariably go to the library or the bookstore in order to continue learning.
I'd like to think that someday I could start at Wikipedia, and then continue my study by downloading a book from Connexions.
But then you won't have any professors who want to write textbooks because they want to make money off them, so you'll have fewer-if-any textbooks coming out of your institution, so you look bad, so it's harder to get good professors in general.
(There are some schools where this could be an exception--MIT offers the material for a number of courses online for free--but not all schools will use it or any free materials produced by those free-textbooks-only schools, and those schools have the clientele where, generally, cost of books doesn't much matter to the student.)
"You can either have software quality or you can have pointer arithmetic, but you cannot have both at the same time."
I don't agree. I learned quite a bit from my accounting courses, and while I could probably have picked up the basics of modern marketing through other means, having a knowledgeable expert (my professor formerly worked in Apple's marketing department) made the process a lot easier.
And I learned quite a bit from the other courses, too, even those which were just "extended cocktail parties". Social skills are as important--or moreso, for many jobs--than any technical skills you might have.
"You can either have software quality or you can have pointer arithmetic, but you cannot have both at the same time."
Give me the table of contents from a typical textbook, and I can probably assemble a couple of hundred free sources of information that easily surpass the content of the textbook.
Thing is, by the time you do that once, you're not ever wanting to go near it again. It's expensive just to get people who want to collate data and churn it out in textbook format.
"You can either have software quality or you can have pointer arithmetic, but you cannot have both at the same time."
I pick up some extra work at the university bookstore during their busy season, and, while maybe some fields like pharmacology genuinely do need the latest textbook (maybe), I almost want to cry when I see students buying $200 first- or second-year calculus books, subjects which have not changed in 250 and 100 years respectively.
The concept of renting textbooks will fail, as far as my limited (USA) college experience goes.
Too many book companies bundle a book with some bullshit CD content (no returns after the software is opened, of course) and an online service for providing automatically-graded quizzes. The teacher uses the online quiz thing because that's easier than doing it themselves--but the quiz server is controlled not by the teacher or the college, but by the book publisher.
Every new book comes with a password (usually inside the software package) and that password is only good for one length of that course. After that, the publisher cancels the used passwords, and the result of this practice is that everybody has to buy a new book every year. Any "books" that had the password used have basically no value at all, because their passwords won't work for the online quiz system anymore.
This is why computers in the [general] classroom has failed in the USA--and why it will continue to fail into the foreseeable future.
Textbook publishers only see e-books as an easy means to pirate their products, and so they have no interest in supplying electronic versions. What use of computers they do engage in, they have only used it as a means to render used books practically worthless.
~
I guess I 'm a beneficiary of the system. In my apt I have hundreds of texts I've bought for a dollar or so. Often these texts have original prices of $100 and upwards. Perhaps they are slightly out of date ( avg 10 years or so) but the basics of the disciplines are all still the same. I also have a collection of upwards of 60,000 e-texts, but that's a different matter.
When I was at the University, more than half of my text books had been written by the professors teaching the courses. Naturally, you were required to BUY the textbook the prof wrote, thereby lining the pocket of said professor. Not only that, but I distinctly recall buying the 12th edition of a book that had been published only 3 years prior by the professor. Each 'edition' was of course an update to the prior one.
In America today you can murder land for private profit. You can leave the corpse for all to see, and nobody calls the c
We have a non-optimal free market in college textbooks, much like how we have a non-optimal market for medical care.
My public schools would purchase a huge number of textbooks, then use them for a decade, especially for the subjects that don't change much. Math is a good example. The cost of a book, averaged over it's life, ended up being quite reasonable.
Once you get into the college market, you get the problem that the one specifying the textbook isn't the one buying it. You not only lose economy and bargaining power of scale, you lose your choice. Due to copyright, you can't have 'generic textbooks' that will have the information in the same spot. Well, you could, but you'd have to use out of copyright textbooks, and there isn't much money to make producing those. Add in that many professors get kickbacks for using somebody's textbook, if they don't write it themselves, and you have a nasty situation.
This can be handled somewhat by having some sort of ethics rules by the college - no kickbacks allowed; not allowed to get royalties on book sales for your own class(maybe even college). You still have the problem that even the better colleges still have problems because of the distortion by the rest of the market.
Textbooks cost money to write, especially if you want to do it properly. Everything should be vetted and sourced. Even something like a math textbook should be gone through three times making sure that all problems are of the correct difficulty level, and that the answers are correct. Depending on size, you might end up with a 2nd or 3rd edition making minor corrections.
I have no problem with a textbook costing $20-80, depending on the subject. A basic algebra book should be a lot cheaper than a full color modern history text, for example. Printing a large textbook isn't as cheap as a paperback, and even basic hardcovers cost more than $20, today. Digital editions should subtract that $20(or so).
Don't get me wrong, I'd like to see copyright free textbooks, but there's a limit on charity, people DO deserve to make a living. I just don't think they should make a living by gouging.
I don't read AC A human right
Yeah, I do think it would have to be done by the schools at "the top" first, since they have the cachet and money to push something like that through. Professors are not going to stop working at MIT or CMU or Stanford because of a change in rules about textbook publishing, so they could probably pull it off.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
CheggPost was started at Iowa State University by three guys: Josh, Mark, and Seager (can't remember their last names). When it first started it was a site for buying/selling textbooks among other things. I remember hearing a few years ago that they sold the site. Rashid and Phumbhra may have been the founders of the textbook rental business model, but the website was originally founded by those three guys at ISU.
"When the two entrepreneurs started Chegg, then called CheggPost, in 2003..." They definately didn't start it, and I don't think they bought it until around 2006 - 2007. It'd be nice if the article would give the original creators of the website some credit.
Both of the professor written textbooks I had in college were non profit for the professor (if not others), in one the prof set up a scholarship fund with the profits, and another the prof had waved his fee altogether (even making digital copies available for free) because he was sick of the practices described above. He actually had to circumvent the college rules in order to do that too. The 50% markup over B&N or Amazon is big money for the colleges, they didn't like him selling a 20 dollar book.
Not every professor would do it for free of course, but there would be more than enough.
Liberte, Egalite, Fraternite (TM)
Agreed. I use Wikipedia constantly while working on my Computer Science degree. While the teacher is rambling about the traveling salesman problem, I can read all about it, and hear about other people's interesting solutions (my favorite is this, where you replace two paths and check if the new path is shorter).
I really don't understand why we have textbooks at all in CS. If I want theory, there's Wikipedia. If I want documentation, you can look at the language/library documentation.
"Open source" isn't such a good idea, because you'd like a little more reliability in your text books than, for instance Wikipedia.
*facepalm*
Open source != Wiki.
Just because anyone can submit a patch to the Linux kernel, doesn't mean it has to be accepted. Just because anyone can fork the Linux kernel, doesn't make the new one official.
All this would mean is a creative commons license, so that no one entity can have a monopoly on all future versions of a given textbook, and so that people can fork when needed -- for example, a professor might want their own edition...
It in no way means that a given edition would be editable by anyone, or would be any less trustworthy than if it were under a different license. There's no particular reason you can't have a respected author and editor release just as reliable a text under Creative Commons as they would under "All Rights Reserved."
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
Given that the vendors of textbooks are completely dependent on schools to require specific textbooks, the schools absolutely can "force" a product to exist. Whatever requirements they put on textbooks in order to use them, those are the requirements that publishers will meet. They're already forcing a sort of product to exist as it is.
Except if the requirements are such that no vendor can afford to meet them... for example, if the requirement is that the vendor provide a free, open source product. You may get volunteers to create such a product, but companies generally can't, unless there's some way for them to make money in some other way. Or to put it another way, you can say that you want a Ferrari for free, but no one is obligated to provide it to you.
He reinvented the libraries!
You hit the PhD's qualification on the 3rd part. It wasn't that he spent years at a university. It wasn't that he got his PhD. He spent years in the industry, and learned how things really work.
Consider this. I took an intro to computers course once. The teacher had a PhD in computer science. He didn't have the basic fundamentals of current computer technology, and recited the dated information from the book as fact, rather than being able to say "Oh, this book is outdated. He could count in Base 2. That I was almost impressed in. If he was using a cheat sheet during his lecture or not, I don't know. Over the course of the first few days, through various discussions, he realized that I was actually well briefed on modern computer technology, and he would ask me for clarification of topics and to assist students. When I wasn't doing that, I entertained myself by sitting in the back and writing stupid graphics programs in QuickBasic. I only used QB, because it was on the machines. Anything I could accomplish in an hour, I did, then I deleted it at the end of the day.
In time, since he was the department head, and most knowledgeable person on staff, I knew I wasn't going to learn anything there, and went back to freelancing. It may not have earned me a degree, but I did learn from doing real world work and troubleshooting. I made more money over the next 4 years than I would have wasted in school, and have been accomplishing more than my college educated peers since then. I've done tech support through C-level jobs. The last I heard, he was still teaching at that school.
Serious? Seriousness is well above my pay grade.
Agreed. I have two or three old textbooks on my shelf that actually served (and continue to serve) as good solid references in my day-to-day work. Most of the others that I had crammed up my book bag were hardly worth opening even while I was taking the class, and frankly should have been handed over to Nazis for a good bonfire.
It seems that there are two classes of professional text - 1) those geared to classroom environments with questions and example problems written by some professor who never did a real thing in their entire career, or 2) books written by professionals, for professionals actually practicing the profession.
Once in a blue moon you actually get an academic text written by someone who actually practiced in the profession. And even more occasionally you get an instructor that makes you buy and use the non-academic text because that is what you're actually going to use in practice - also likely because the professor actually came from the practice.
I don't think the textbook market system itself is broken, it is just flooded with texts written by professors who never actually worked in their field. Sadly, the universities are also jam packed with these instructors, pretending that they have some idea of what is happening in the field. They don't.
There should be a internship system or minimum industry experience qualification for professors. Sadly there isn't, and there never will be, as the swollen heads in academia and the actual people working in the profession don't mix well in most universities.
You can learn a lot about an applicant by actually talking to him. Slide through the standard questions, and ask about what he or she has done. If they have done interesting things, they'll love telling you about them. Ask questions from there, or go off to the side.
Myself, I like shaking applicants to see how they handle pressure. I just make up a random scenario, and see how they handle it. It's fun to build it up with a little backstory too. While they're answering, throw in "the COO is standing over your shoulder with the CEO on the phone, they need this resolved, we are losing about $1000 every minute this isn't working." It's amazing how easy the question can be, and some applicants will just freeze. But hey, the candidate that freezes for one department may be fine for another one without so much pressure, and some skilled guidance above them.
I had one who needed to consult the man page for my question. I told him "on page 8, it says -x does blah blah blah", which is what he needed from the man page. Of course, the page number was arbitrary. I'm not that good. The text may have been a little off, since I was just reciting what he needed to know. I'm not trying to destroy them in the interview, I just want to see if they can get a correct-ish answer together in a reasonable amount of time. Even if they're a little off, they would have found out when they tried it.
Serious? Seriousness is well above my pay grade.
And those are the ones who I deeply respect.
Serious? Seriousness is well above my pay grade.
I'm not sure if he realized this or not, but he was extending the call-B.S. to the next level. The premise of this article is that textbook publishers and their authors have a little scam going, and maybe they do. But what about 4 year universities and their graduates? Is it true that they are transmitting the latest and the deepest technical knowledge that can't be realistically gained through self study or from some zero-prestige online program, for a couple hundred thousand USD less? Maybe not.
Using the term open source to apply to absolutely anything is stupid. All books are open source - just open one up and there's the plainly understandable content. That's why I put "open source" in quotes. What you're describing isn't even like open source, where anyone can start up a project and the project itself changes constantly. What you're talking about is plain old "free."
What you want is someone who's a recognized expert to edit the thing, and a bunch of other experts to write chapters for it. Then you publish it on the web for free and maybe charge cost or cost + a little for hard copies. In other words, exactly how the textbook publishing business works now, except for the last bit.
There are groups who are doing this. Here's one. There are some problems though. You're asking the authors to work for free. That's not really a big deal, because they already work for free. You're also asking the editors to work for free. That's a bit more of an issue since they usually get paid something now. In the real world, there are other costs that have to be met, so it ends up costing the authors.
I just finished writing a chapter for a free textbook, just as you describe, in May. The result will be absolutely free to you. It cost me about 400 Euro. You can see why not everybody is going to be falling over themselves to do that. The free text library will grow, but slowly.
That simply isn't true in Physics, and I suspect that it isn't true in any other discipline, either. Professors write textbooks on their own time--they just happen to also be employed by a university. It's like if you had a job at McDonald's and a second job at Wendy's--McDonald's isn't paying you to work at Wendy's, you just have two jobs.
And, to head another myth off at the pass, professors who choose to use a textbook they helped write for a course they teach are not allowed to keep the profits. That why you so often see photocopied/laser printed editions when the professor is using his/her own book. Nowdays, they often they just give the students a PDF version.
From your post I get the impression you're probably a product of an American applied IT/CS program. Everything I've heard suggests to me that particular system is particularly broken.
My undergrad and grad studies were aimed at preparing me for a research career. All of my professors were active researchers, except for one who was mostly retired, but was a nobel laureate (shall we count him as a "can do?"). In grad school, one of the things they liked to do was have a course coordinator (also an active researcher) and individual lessons taught by experts. Many times we'd have a lesson start late, and when it did start the neurosurgeon/neurologist/interventional radiologist teaching it would show up in scrubs and have to stop once or twice to answer a page.
I know one guy who did a more industry-oriented IT/CS type degree. He had one instructor who frequently had to reschedule classes because he was being flown across the country to consult on short notice. Of course, both he and I were going to (different) public universities, not located in the US, so your mileage may vary.
That's not what the article says.
I suggest you read it again. The article says they collect the books that are sold at the end of semesters.
'While Chegg primarily rents books, it is also essentially acting as a kind of "market maker," gathering books from sellers at the end of a semester and renting -- or sometimes selling -- them to other students at the start of a new one.'
And from their site:
'All rental books are like new or good. '
Note it doesn't say the rental books ARE new, they are "like" new.
http://lkml.org/lkml/2005/8/20/95
I do like those types of interview questions but some people can take them in the wrong direction and focus on (What I believe) is the wrong thing. I remember years back I had worked as a Novell Administrator and was applying for a more lucrative Novell Admin job. I had worked with 3.x, 4.x, and 5.x using Zen and other tools (For the life of me I don't remember a thing about Novell at this point as I found a job doing Active Directory administration and have not seen a Novell server since).
Anyway, at the interview the lady wanted me to describe setting up an NDPS printing Environment. There were three components to it and I simply couldn't remember the name of one of them (Agent, Broker, and something else...see...I still don't remember). She just wouldn't let it die. Instead of maybe shifting to more Novel Trivia she kept going back to it. It is something I could have found out in 1 minute online...and setting up NDPS printing was pretty easy anyway. I did not get called back for that job.
In retrospect, although I ended up as a Microsoft Admin and would have preferred eventually getting into a Unix/Linux Admin role, I sure am glad I did not get that Novel 5.1 Admin position. As far as I know that company is still running....Novell 5.1. Would have been a dead end.
I guess my point is, the questions can be good but you can happen to pick an aspect of a technology that the person has done and they still might not be able to answer correctly. ;) Although it sounds like you come up with more interesting things than describing NDPS printing.
You pay for the book via taxes and don't get to keep them from class to class.. Sounds like rental to me.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
Except if the requirements are such that no vendor can afford to meet them...
How is this adding something? Did you notice in my post where I said:
Now it's possible for them to set requirements so unreasonable that no one will be able to meet them
The point is the textbook industry as it currently exists is already the product of an unfree market. The current realities of the textbook market are caused by those un-freedoms. If someone has it in their head to try to fix the situation, it isn't too sensible to complain against them on the basis of interference in "the free market".
Or to put it another way, you can say that you want a Ferrari for free, but no one is obligated to provide it to you.
There are lots of problems with this comparison. First, we're talking about textbooks and not Ferraris. Ferraris aren't necessary for the education of our youth and the betterment of society. Second, it's not a question of whether anyone in particular is obligated to provide textbooks, but whether schools and students should be obligated to pay exorbitant fees to textbook publishers.
Finally, the expense of Ferraris isn't generated by artificial scarcity created by copyright law. Ferraris are expensive, at least in part, due to the materials and labor to create each one. However, once a textbook is created, it could be copied indefinitely by anyone at practically no expense, if not for copyright law. Seeing as copyrights are an artificial right granted by society for the sake of the betterment of society, publishers using the copyright to the detriment of our education system seems to me to be an abuse.
Anyway, all of that isn't really the point. The point is, open source textbooks would be a boon for education, and I haven't yet heard a reason why it's unworkable. Even if it stops being a valid commercial venture to some extent, that may just be an issue of technology making an industry obsolete-- buggy whips and all.
there's no evidence that open source textbooks are impossible.
That was my first thought too - why not have open source textbooks? Solves the problem completely.
But then I remembered "teacher's editions".
Each textbook has a teacher's edition that has all the answers in it. Any open source book would logically have to have the same, if it as a product is to provide the same utility. And if it's available to the teacher, by the definition of open source it would be available to the students as well. Suddenly you'd see a lot of people getting 100% on their homework - they'd just copy it out of the teacher's edition.
I'm trying to figure out a way around this but I think that textbooks may be in that rare class of problems that open source and full disclosure doesn't solve.
Weaselmancer
rediculous.
In University, I remember having professors who pleaded with us to buy the newest edition of the textbook, which was only available on campus in the bookstore.
I've compared editions quite a number of time. Occasionally the differences are stark enough to warrant the purchase of a new edition, sometimes a few changes are tagged on just to churn a profit. The most memorable of this was a textbook for my logic course, where the edition cost more than $50 more than the previous edition (already $150) and had nothing other than two new chapters, which were horrible. Our professor for that course made a powerpoint for fun just to explain how badly the chapters "sucked."
Then there are the professors you can be sure get some kind of commission from the publisher for forcing their students into buying the newest editions, knowing they were garbage.
Anyway, veering into off-topic land now so I'll stop. I hope this rental system really works out and does provide new editions. I spent near $10000 on textbooks in my four years and half of it was totally unnecessary.
But the reality is that this "well I've never done it before but I'll try" is not a function of the degree, it is a function of the person.
Also regardless of what you say, many companies screen out resumes of anyone who does not possess a 4 year college degree. So I would say get the degree for nothing else other than to stop HR from throwing out the resume.
Get a Masters degree if you want to learn about computer science. A bachelors degree is more than enough for most jobs and the research jobs often require a doctorate. A masters degree may help you initially because employers often count it as 5 years experience (once you get a year of work experience, prior to that a masters and no experience is not that different from a bachelors and no experience).
But anyway you get people with doctorates who don't want to explore or try to do things too. I have noticed some PhD people who are way below even my level of things who can't keep up with me in a conversation about computer stuff or who take a few minutes to grasp a question I raise. I have also noticed some people who don't even have bachelor degrees who can program in their sleep better than me. It really depends on the person.
Probably the best test you could do is invent some fictitious piece of hardware (or for a programming job invent some programming problem in an antiquated language) and have them configure it. If the test is something that no one can know (but it has to be reasonable...I'm not going to spend a 40 hour work week unpaid [or even a 10 hour work week] without a job) then they will have to be a go getter and try to figure it out on their own. I would say even if they don't succeed but put forth a reasonable effort then it is probably worth hiring them.
The university that I attended (and worked at for a while) has been renting textbooks through the campus-run bookstore since my father went to school there (about 35 years). The concept is not new. What will be interesting though will be seeing how some of the textbook retailers (Barnes & Noble, Amazon, etc.) will respond to a more public method of renting books. Personally, I'm more interested in increasing the popularity of electronic textbooks than I am traditional textbook distribution......
You make some valid points, but I can assure you that a real 4 year BS in CS has it's place. For example in software development, having a deep understanding of the nuts and bolts can *often* be more important than practical experience when you're talking about more than a simple app.
expandfairuse.org
Those are cool professors. I wish there were more like them. I just don't think there are. :-/
"You can either have software quality or you can have pointer arithmetic, but you cannot have both at the same time."
Right, it's just the mid-tier and lower schools where that becomes an issue, unless they're just following the New Trend. And even then...ech.
"You can either have software quality or you can have pointer arithmetic, but you cannot have both at the same time."
I know what you mean about harping on a bad question.
I interviewed for Google a few times. Once we started out with what I knew. I know nothing about Python. He asked specifically Python questions from there out. After a few of those questions I reminded him, "I know nothing about Python, but can answer your questions in a half dozen other scripting languages." He continued, so I continued on the "I don't know. I'm not a Python developer. I can get you an answer if I can take some research time on it." Finally he said "You don't have the skill set that I'm looking for." No shit. Nowhere in my resume does it say Python. I never claimed to know Python, and he could have saved us both 1/2 hour if he just accepted my answer to start with.
A following interview about a year later, I had a nice talk with the guy before the test. He said there is a holy war at Google, where half the company wants exclusively Perl, and half the company wants exclusively Python. This guy was Perl, so I did great with him. The following interview the next day caught me a little off guard. I wasn't feeling well to start with, and the guy went into "Tell me how Telnet works." I gave him the overview. Then the working description. Then the technical description. Through being asked about 8 times "Tell me how Telnet works.", I got down to opening of ports, the fundamentals of how TCP works, etc, etc. I got to the point was "I don't understand what you're looking for in an answer. Please clarify the question." His clarification was "what does Telnet do in detail." I told him that I had gone as deep as I could. I simply couldn't go any further. His broken english didn't help much either. I think he was an assembly programmer, and wanted me to spell it out on that kind of level.
Ya, I did a little Novell work way back when. I'm really glad it hasn't come up since. At most I tell people, "I touched it over a decade ago, and don't remember any of it now." I'm fairly sure there were printers shared to Windows desktops through a Novell print server, but my recollection is so vague, I couldn't tell you if it was NDPS or something else. :)
I have had interviewers harp on ADS, and other than an overview, I can't really get in depth. I'm a Linux guy. I can make a Windows machine work, but I don't want a Windows job. I never apply for Windows jobs. I don't want to be interviewed for a Windows job. If that's all the have to ask, then I'll sometimes answer them with, "I think you're looking for someone with a different skill set than myself." :) I know perfectly well that I'll end up removing viruses from an executive's Windows machine on occasion, but I prefer that to be because they trust me with their machine, not because it's my job. I don't mind doing favors because I can. I know it works both ways. :)
Serious? Seriousness is well above my pay grade.
That reminds me of a test I did, when I was the senior tech in a crappy computer store many many years ago. He came in, we talked, he seemed to know his stuff. I wanted to see that he did, so I pulled the next customer machine to repair and gave it to him.
The motherboard was dead. We sold the absolutely lowest end crap that was possible, and I knew it. It was a job though, and the pay wasn't all that bad. He swapped motherboards, and that didn't fix it. I told him to put a different board in, and still it didn't fix it. He did everything right. As it turned out, both motherboards from the stock room were dead. That was kind of expected. We had about a 50% failure rate on those boards. :) Even though he failed the test, because he didn't get the machine working in about 15 minutes, he got the job. He did everything right, he just got broken parts. After we hired him, I warned him about the known failure rates. Most of it was the vendors fault, but some of it was our management. They didn't want to return any parts, so even though we tested it and showed that it had failed, they'd hand it back to us a couple days later as "new". We started tracking serial numbers on all broken parts, just so we'd know when they did that to us. That's part of working in a crappy computer store.
Serious? Seriousness is well above my pay grade.
You did forget to mention when the instructor requires that you buy HIS book as required reading for the class, regardless of what ego-fluffing crap he had written.
And what if he/she happens to be one of the world's experts on the field? I have never bought a textbook written by a prof that was as people often imply: nothing more than a way to gain more income. The few I've used have been excellent. Also, universities have ethics boards for exactly this reason; if you are going to require a book that will end up giving you royalties, you have to demonstrate there is not a better one, or work something out with the publisher so that it's cheaper for your students (I had this once--our price was substantially lower than retail, because the prof. was not getting royalties--his idea; it's also a great book. Sitting right next to me now, 10 years later).
Most, but not all, instructors are teaching because they can't hack it in the real world of their chosen field.
Bullshit. In fact, it's such ridiculous bullshit, I can't believe I'm replying, but:
Finally, there's your example, which is insane.
If I were looking for someone to fix my drain, I'd look for a plumber, not a PhD in fluid dynamics. I once saw a hilarious Junkyard Wars episode where there was a team of NASA physicists vs. a team of guys who had a well-regarded lowrider shop in Miami. I'm sure you can guess who won. Just because theoretical knowledge does not always map to real-world skill does not mean that theoretical knowledge is useless--the real world skill is a physical manifestation of the work done by the theorists. The former simply would not exist without the latter, and the latter is far, far more difficult to learn than the former. As in your example, a guy with no education can set up your server, but if he wanted to learn all the stuff the PhD knows, it would take the 10 or so years the PhD spent. On the other hand, if you had hired the PhD, you might have a bumpy few weeks or even months, but he'd fill in the practical gaps in his theoretical knowledge and you'd be fine.
You might even be better off.
... there are these buildings called "libraries".
I run: Windows, OS X, Linux, FreeBSD. Just because you have a hammer, doesn't mean everything is a nail.
When I studied math at my college, most of my textbooks were old. By old, I mean there were no new editions whatsoever... for instance, the classic Baby Rudin textbook on mathematical analysis is at least $140, and on Amazon, it says that the last edition was made in 1976. So why does it still cost so much? McGraw-Hill is a pretty huge publishing company, so I figure they still need to make a profit, yet they do not need to churn out any more editions...
Further, while publishers often change the books by an infinitesimal amount, I've seen cases where classic textbooks were practically raped and were changed drastically for whatever reason. Case in point: the freshman level Halliday / Resnick physics textbook. I believe in the third or fourth edition, it was concise and easy to follow, without so much verbose explanations that made no sense whatsoever. Nowadays, it's almost exactly identical to the Jewett / Serway textbook, which seems like it's competing against the Knight textbook for the lowest common denominator explanations possible. But I suppose, if I was the publisher, I would ruin a perfectly fine textbook in order to turn a profit.
"Hegelians, who love a synthesis, will probably conclude that he wears a wig." - Bertrand Russell
My, you should check to see if the publishing industry has any openings for shills.
There are quite a few career fields where you aren't allowed to practice unless you have that little piece of paper from a college. And colleges are known to make it "mandatory" to buy texts, wither there are changes in the new edition or not. So, technically it's not "required", but practically you have a snowballs' chance in hell of getting into a professional career field without complying with the practice.
How many "high quality" history texts need to be written (or "revised") to support the local administrations philosophies? Your argument seemingly boils down to: Their traditional business model needs to be protected. If they can figure out how to add value, then I'm sure their careers will be spared. Else, they'll hit the unemployment lines like the rest of us. What, in your not-so-humble-opinion makes them superior to economic pressures that everyone else is subject to? Hmmm?
When you want something built, come see me. If you want correct grammar and spelling, get a F*ing liberal arts student.
Here is a thought experiment. In 10 years time when physical textbook publishing is close to having died out and students have to buy individual texts through some Kindle like device, do you think the publishers will still revise textbooks constantly. They shouldn't have to right - because in SlashDot-Think the only reason for the constant revisions is to kill the secondary market. The reason for the constant revisions is that the people who select textbooks for courses are constantly tempted to jump ship by newer and shinier textbooks - sort of like Apple iPhone users who can't stick with the same phone for more than 12 months before needing to upgrade to whatever new shiny version is released. So even in the future where there is no secondary market (because you cannot transfer ownership of a DRM'd file) you'll still have constant revisions. If textbook publishers snooze, they loose. If they don't publish a new edition, some other text that offers something more enticing comes along and suddenly no one is buying that textbook.
Most, but not all, instructors are teaching because they can't hack it in the real world of their chosen field.
I don't buy this for a second, especially not for science & engineering professors. First, have you looked at how hard it is to get a professorship somewhere recently? It's almost certainly a lot more competitive than your typical industry job. Second, you don't put yourself through a Ph.D. program unless you want to do research (or perhaps if you want to teach at a non-research institution), so most professors are in it because they want to research.
About the most you can say is (1) they are in a university because they can't cut it in an industry research lab (but that's not saying much, at least in CS, because the industry research labs are also very good and competitive), and/or (2) they are in a job that doesn't have a particular industry counterpart (outside of research labs), like theory people or pure math profs, or perhaps profs in liberal arts. (I don't know what, if anything, is available for, say, an English PhD outside of a professorship.)
In most fields of salaried employment, you can't do a job on the side that is too closely related to your main area of employment, without the employer owning the resulting IP. For example, if Exxon is paying me as an petroleum engineer, and I developed an improvement to an oil-refining process "on my own time", it would be very difficult for me to avoid them owning the resulting patent. If it's totally unrelated, of course, you're on more solid ground: Exxon would probably have no case if I developed some stamp-organization software in my spare time.
But my impression is that most professors are writing stuff in the area that their salaried employment is hiring them to work in. In most cases, they don't make too much effort to even keep it separate: I've had professors try out early drafts of their book in university courses (which they are of course being paid to teach), use university computers and software to write them, print out drafts on university printers, etc.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
I really like your test design, and I know how frustrating it can be to get a novel test design to work without taking up all your time.
Have you tried the following?
1) Just have the mark reader spit out a CSV file, instead of actually marking the sheets. Then you can just bring that data into Excel with whatever scoring system set up (IF statements, etc) that you like. This is how I handled the test I used to coordinate (given to 2200 people a year, in three sessions).
2) It's dopey, but Survey Monkey (surveymonkey.com) will do raw data export. I've never used it for class, but I have used it for research, giving a test to 300 people. You have to do a little cleanup of the data, but if you do it routinely, I'm sure you could just script that in Excel, and bring it all the way out to a scorefile.
There's got to be a way to make your life easier while preserving your test design. I wouldn't want to use it for the kind of testing I do (standardized), but there is a world of difference between classroom assessment and standardized assessment. I think your idea is perfect for the classroom, and I respect you for spending the time and effort on it!
The difference between an open source software project and Wikipedia is that with software there are gatekeepers, so you can't commit nonsense, so you can keep standards high, etc. Why, exactly, is that not acceptable for a textbook project?
I think future textbook were licensed not published.
Pray that not happen
the best part is thought that once you do it once you don't HAVE to go near it again!
an open source textbook wouldn't have the same problem of having to change the version number and the order of the questions at the end of the chapter every year just to prevent a used textbook market. so it could stay the same until something major changes in the field!
Of course, all of this aside, I'm ok paying for textbooks, I just want the option to buy last years edition of the book that hasn't changed in 20 years, instead of needing this year's edition so that my page numbers and end of chapter questions line up (no other differences the majority of the time)
1 Not pwned, just answered.
2 and 3, thanks for the kind words.
3 I use Excel heavily for transporting data between electrophysiology recorders and statistical analysis packages and so forth. I can see what you're saying. I'll try it. Thanks.
And 2, watch the split infinitives.
"I may be synthetic, but I'm not stupid." -- Bishop 341-B
If it weren't for the profits of textbook publishers, why even bother printing them off? An ebook reader can handle most of the content a textbook has to offer, and even with how expensive they are, they'd still be cheaper than the bookload of a full cycle in school, without the heavy lifting. Heck, laptops too.
Did it have an introduction that is still under copyright?
... they bought class sets of books, hired them to the students each year. Students saved money and the school either broke even or made a profit. It's a bit trickier with university materials which tend to go out-of-date more often, but the business model is viable.
Who do those textbook publishers think they are? Sounds a lot like RIAA behavior there...
I listen to both RIAA and non-RIAA stuff if I like the music, tangential business/politics nonwithstanding.
I've found that I can successfully get through some classes without the textbook; thing is, I often don't manage to figure that out until a few weeks in.
Often, I won't need to the textbook to actually *learn* the material, but I need it to get ahold of the homework questions. (I live off-campus, so it would be a PITA to borrow the book from a classmate, who's probably on a tight schedule to get the homework done himself.)
[Charitably thinking], perhaps the books are assigned because some other students learn in a matter that means *they* *do* need them.
I make a point of asking the professor for the booklist before the quarter starts; that way I have some lead time to get it off of Amazon or whatever (Maybe I could be more adventurous in choosing online bookstores, but they still 0wn the campus bookstore)
Heck, about all I use the campus bookstore for is double-checking that I have the right ISBNs
Have had trouble finding students who are about to be in class such-and-such to sell the book to. Out of pride if nothing else, not going to sell back at the campus bookstore's crap rates.
I've run into other components of the racket, but I've never gotten assigned a book written by the professor himself...my profs have, as far as I can tell, for the most part been understanding [but somewhat powerless] about this mess. One assigned us PDF'ed excerpts from her copies of the books in question, for instance.
I listen to both RIAA and non-RIAA stuff if I like the music, tangential business/politics nonwithstanding.
I am taking an off campus courses of a top American University graduate program here in Taiwan. The exactly same text book sold here in Taiwan is about 1/5 the price of U.S. book store. Our U.S. professor always come to Taiwan to buy the text book they need. It is a total rip off for the U.S. students IMHO.
The purpose of writing is to inflate weak ideas, obscure poor reasoning, and inhibit clarity....Calvin
Your professor wrote the $200 textbook he uses for class and releases a new edition every year, and you ask why you have to buy them instead of rent them?
My name is Dieth, I too hate everyone equally. I am unaware if everyone is as fat or as retarded as the parent poster who obviously spends all his day refreshing slashdot trying to get a first post, possibly while looking at stupid pictures on idle in another tab. I am very sure that 4chan out bads us in the this world, or possibly the script kiddos from IRC in the mid 90's. I can get pussy and have had ex's come crawling back for some cock. I wonder how insecure the parent poster is. I do not have a facebook and I jerk off to porn at pichunter. After taking our football teams captain down multiple times I was begged by our coach to be an interceptor for our team a request which I had to deny to pursue fencing sadly I was too much of a masochist for football to be appealing. I am currently versed in many forms of swordplay. I was asked to leave public school because I stood up in Honours math and screamed at idiots who didn't understand what we covered at the beginning of the week to get the fuck out and stop holding me back. After which I graduated a year and a half ahead of my peers with an average of 94% across all subjects, (English brought me down you can probably tell from this writing), my school did not use a "letter grade" system. Although I do not believe that any portion of my schooling is a true reflection of my abilities. I wonder if the parent poster is just a remembering his glory days in highschool when he was popular instead of the washed up slob he is now, who probably still lives in his parents basement, probably eternally watching some old 8mm footage of his winning touchdown for some school game that no one else but a handful of people in his city of residence can remember. Outside of school I repaired business networks, and peoples home computers making money hand over fist which allowed me to pay rent to my parents when times got rough for them. Repairing networks and enterprise middleware is now what I do. I moved out of my parents household when I was 18, about 9 years ago, because my sleep schedule, or lack of one, conflicted heavily with theirs. I did not know that jacking off to hentai was a sport if it actually is where do I sign up? I can last a LONG time and shoot heavy loads. (Not sure if either those would be used to judge in the competition it was purely imagination) Currently I live in Montreal, and can attest to the fact that every woman here is hotter than any girlfriend the parent poster has ever had, his all probably compare to Surrey girls who only come out for trash day. Some of you probably are fags, some of you are probably straight, whichever your sexual preference it is I don't mind, if you are a fag, please don't hit on me, I'm straight, and I have been known to deck guys who hit on me when I'm drunk. Please don't kill yourself, please assist me in further ridicule of the parent poster! Thanks for reading. (or listening if you are blind and using a text to speech reader, I find it very hard to listen to text without one).
I'm sorry, but you'll have to provide better reasoning than simply "the market is not really free". Regulation is done with the purpose of making the free market work better, because without it, the freedom of the market becomes its own worst enemy. A good example of this is antitrust legislation, designed to correct the inherent imbalance of power between people and corporations. A similarly fine example is, as you mentioned, copyright, which prevents competition in distribution from cannibalising demand for new works, and thus causing the whole system to collapse. With these regulations, the free market can actually exist, and only then can it start functioning.
So, if you wish to show that my statement isn't the case here, I suggest you appeal to a specific regulation that is hindering the creation of open source textbooks. It certainly isn't copyright, since copyright can be revoked in full or in part.
The evidence that such textbooks are "impossible" (they're not really, more on that later) is that we know that they already have a more than ample demand (one that outstrips the competition due to their price), that they have a functioning free market, but they still don't exist. It simply means that people who can provide such a textbook are unwilling to do so. Perhaps being open source is one of those "requirements so unreasonable that no-one will be able to meet them".
But, I don't think such textbooks are "impossible" so much as unlikely. I think we simply need someone with some knowledge to take the initiative and start writing an open source textbook. I predict that if such a person starts, and advertises effectively over the internet (through blogs etc), then the open source textbook market would actually take off. I also predict that their information would be justifiably treated with suspicion, like Wikipedia is treated today, but will still be a valuable source of knowledge.
You know, there is a difference between trolling and pointing out the flaws in your reasoning. Just saying.
Do the Universities themselves see any profit from these churned editions? I suppose that some professors might if they were among the authors. On the other hand either the University or the professor(s) could be receiving a kickback from the textbook companies. If there are kickbacks or other corrupt practices going on then there ought to be a federal investigation and prosecutions to punish the guilty. We don't allow US companies to engage in corrupt practices over seas (Foreign Corrupt Practices Act so why should we allow them to get away with it here at home? It would probably be better for everyone involved if, at least on primary subjects, the universities collectively maintained and published peer reviewed textbooks in mostly settled areas like mathematics, chemistry, physics, etc; especially for undergraduate level courses.
Didn't RMS come up with this idea about twelve years ago? It's basically the same thing...
Commodore 64, Loading up the dance floor!
You know there are people who messed with a lot of things at home, and then got a four year degree, right?
And you gave them, what two weeks?
I'll admit it's shameful that they sat there for two weeks and accomplished nothing, a few Google searches should have turned up a clue at least, but often a four year degree teaches you some of the fundamentals that practical learning alone never covers. You'll often see the difference only when it's far too late. Whereas the practical day to day stuff can be taught in a day.
Question everything
... where we paid a textbook fee and essentially, rented the textbooks for the academic year. You picked them up at the beginning of the year and turned them in at the end. If you beat them up too much, you got charged extra.
Of course, that was quite a few years ago. Long before the publishers began the practice of demanding the absolutely ridiculous prices they charge for textbooks nowadays. The last time I went back to my alma mater, I took a trip through the college bookstore. There were a few textbooks that cost as much as what I recall paying for the entire set of texts I needed for a semester. But... even back then, the publishers were doing everything they could to suck every last dime from college students. A non-university book store -- featuring mostly used textbooks (they paid the students more for used texts than the university store) -- opened up just off campus and went through hell to get themselves established. Publishers fought with them at every turn. (The University wasn't all that happy about their opening either.) Why the University couldn't have negotiated with the publishers to do get better pricing for texts was often asked. (And never answered.) One of these leasing deals would have been welcome, too. While I was able to use many of my textbooks for one than one semester (esp. the Calc and some of the engineering texts) I got stuck with a few that I needed for elective classes that were not accepted to be sold back to the campus book at any price since the text for the next scheduled time that class was going to be offered was going to be different. It sure would have been nice to lease those books.
CUR ALLOC 20195.....5804M
Selling your textbooks. Just another way of saying "I spent several hundred dollars and a few hundred man-hours learning something I'm never going to need to know again." Oh, sure I could peruse the textbook every once in awhile just to refresh, but, nah...
Prisencolinensinainciusol. Ol Rait!
While open source books are nice...I use them to supplement the text books I issue, it isn't something that will likely replace texts. Why would I write a text book and release it for free? It is bad enough that adjunct professors get paid crap, but if I write a text book I should release that for free? I think not. Even if I were to eventually find that full time slot, the pay is a lot less than what I could find even working for the government. Writing text books is one of the ways professors make up some of the difference between the salaries professionals make in the same field.
Open Source: Eroding the Digital Divide
This is like comparing Apples and Oranges. Books are used again an again by students or ardent readers. One can read a novel/ reference or any subject book again and again, are also helpful for reference purposes (basically knowledge gain). Movies on the other hand are more of instant gratification, a point of view of the Director of the movie (movie could be based on a book though), how many times would one see/ refer to the same movie, where as books are always useful (specially text books)
No Black or White only shades of Gray
While your idea is fine, that only works for the 2-3 copies available. And some libraries only allows you to renew twice before you have to hand it in and wait for a period of time.
lol. you said "period."
A computer science degree isn't the same as a technical certificate. Computer science is about the philosophy behind how computers work and why they are designed the way they are. Technical certificates are about getting real, hands-on, practical things done on computers, but having a limited understanding of the insides of them.
A good example would be my networks subject. We learned about all the levels of the networking stack from application layer (email, http etc) right down to physical layer (electric or light pulses on a wire). The material on routing dealt with topics such as why we need routers, different routing algorithms and the graph theory behind these algorithms, how the internet routes around damage... Not once did we have to configure anything on a router and nor should we have had to - that isn't the point of university.
Good university students, who want a job in the industry when they graduate, would apply their knowledge - typically by learning the practical applications in their own time. Yes we had plenty of programming assignments, but doing all the assignments would not be enough practical experience to be ready for the work force. Or if a graduate with no outside uni experience went into the workforce then you'd need to give them some time to learn the skills required for their job. At the very least they should be able to demonstrate their learning and research abilities.
At one point, I had purchased a marketing book only to find that a new version had come out right at the beginning of the semester. ...
They weren't even trying to be creative with the fact that they were screwing the students. Everyone knew this to be the case and accepted it. I think that I was the only person who was upset by this obvious racket.
You didn't do so well in that marketing class, did you?
He thought it was digg. Now there's ironic.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Inevitably the people who have a vested interest in SALE of new textbooks are the people who use thier own textbook as a lecture/coursebook.
I saw this a lot during my years at University, where several lecturers would bring out a new variation every one or two years. We'd all get the "you'll benefit from the extra notes and of course be able to sell the book onto next year's class" and then find out after buying it that the lecturer revised the book slightly every year.
Anyone with the previous edition of the coursebooks had small but inevitably annoying missing information.
--- This meme is memory intensive
If research institutions counted an free text book towards the publishing necessary for tenure then you would have an almost limitless supply of people willing to write about every esoteric subject imaginable. They do this now in the form of journal articles, where many authors pay fees to the publisher simply for the honor of being published.
[[citation needed]]
It isn't IT, it's just JWSHyte. He flunked out and he's had a chip on his shoulder ever since.
..of a mythical place called 'liberarey'(?) or something like that where you can 'rent' text-books and stuff? Apparently they had one at college but nobody knew where it was...
Because maths, geography and English language change so much in a yearly basis ....
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
Seems it was more about business than statistics...
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
after purchasing an internationl edition of a statistics book,
and finding out i needed the specific book, published for my
university i stopped buying text books.
Borrow a book, buy/borrow a good book scanner, .jpg whatever
create the pdf, or
return the book.
Profit
Oh yes indeed! Information wants to be free. Apparently you're supposed to make money by speaking tours and adding value by putting a different girl's name in the text.
Anyone who says that (along with the magic phrase "business model" and/or "freedom of speech") gets modded up. When I disagree with them I get dogpiled to minus infinity. So it must be right.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Strange, here in the Netherlands some schools already run a textbook service. You rent the books from the school, at the end of the semester you return the books and they are checked for damage (will cost you extra). The begin of the semester has everybody making protective covers for their textbooks. The big advantage is that the schools decide which edition is used and buy the books in bulk.
Using the term open source to apply to absolutely anything is stupid. All books are open source - just open one up and there's the plainly understandable content.
You could say that about many things that we don't consider "open source". Sure, I can read it, but it's going to be as tedious to retype it all, let alone preserve formatting, as it might be to disassemble a program and try to make changes. Give me the original document, in machine readable form, then we'll call it "open source".
However, I tend to use "open source" as a replacement for "free software", as it's a much easier to misunderstand term. "Open source" generally means "remixable" -- you don't often have something claim to be "open", yet have a license that prevents derivate versions.
What you're describing isn't even like open source, where anyone can start up a project and the project itself changes constantly. What you're talking about is plain old "free."
Free as in freedom, yes. But this is precisely why I tried not to use that term -- I just read "free" and assumed you meant "zero dollars".
The project itself changing constantly is not required for open source. It's usually a result, but not required.
What you want is someone who's a recognized expert to edit the thing, and a bunch of other experts to write chapters for it. Then you publish it on the web for free and maybe charge cost or cost + a little for hard copies.
I don't see how this forces it to be at cost. You can't completely gouge, but it's unlikely you'll have people lining up to print their own competing editions.
It's also not what I'm suggesting. That may well be a good structure for providing that content, but again, "open source" is just the way it's licensed -- does not imply zero cost, does not imply any particular model of contribution. Some have a large pool of trusted people with commit access to some common SVN branch. Some are more distributed -- a network of Git repositories, but you still probably want your patches signed off on by someone in the loop. Some have an official version controlled by a corporation, and some are so chaotic as to have no leadership at all.
But then, if by "open source" you meant "wiki", you can see my confusion. I have never seen the wiki model used for software development -- only, y'know, wikis. Software development has pretty much always forced you to either be trusted, get your patch signed off on by someone who is trusted, or fork it and try to build your own web of trust.
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
Probably there are many more professors who would like this but you have to be pretty untouchable to be able to take on your employer, do something they really don't like, and still stay in your job.
These professors are probably so senior in their field, international leaders I'd guess, so their employer (the university) can't afford to sack them.
There's likely to be a lot of other professors who'd like to follow the path of breaking the system and losing their employer's money but don't have the security to be able to afford to do that. Maybe they are just good professors rather than world-leading and have to worry about house payments, paying for their teenaged children's college education, etc, and can't afford to get the sack.
Except if the requirements are such that no vendor can afford to meet them... for example, if the requirement is that the vendor provide a free, open source product.
Re-introduce truly limited copyright terms. If copyright was 14 years, all the textbooks I used in school would be public domain now. As it is, it would be very difficult to reduce copyright terms. People who have published under those terms would be sure to challenge it in court. Perhaps some form of eminent domain argument could be used, I don't like the chances though.
Without the current plundering of the public domain by the copyright barons, we'd already have free textbooks. As it is, the best I see is to make better use of old materials and publish new materials under a CC license. Most likely to happen among home-schoolers or developing nations that don't have an established education system.
http://marriedmansexlife.com/
"Remember? Remember? Google, or google not. There is no 'remember'."
-- With apologies to ... umm, you know... that little wrinkled guy in that old film about forces.
Especially as many textbooks are written by professors now, and often almost totally for academic recognition (well, it's not for the money).
Editing Wikipedia (and I imagine, Wikibooks) feels like using Subversion. Slow, awkward, and my changes get accidentally overwritten by the next guy. Maybe once wikis are based on a better source-control model than the "one definitive master" and global-locking we'll get better books.
Do universities in the US really depend on textbooks that much? I guess it depends on your degree, but when I did mine (in computer science) there was no requirement to buy or use any textbooks at all - you learn everything you need to know by taking notes in lectures, attending practical sessions, and the handouts given in lectures.
I would argue that any lecturer who requires the students to use a book, at least in computer science, shouldn't be teaching at a university.
the people who get to decide which kinds of publication "count" as research output and which ones don't are never academics themselves.
In general, who makes this decision? Google research output evaluation doesn't pull up any Wikipedia articles or other general overviews of the process.
Consider this: whoop de fucking doo.
It certainly isn't copyright,
Without copyright there'd be nothing but open source text books; the exclusionary aspect of copyright is only mitigated to a very limited extent by the ability of individual authors to 'copyleft' or revoke copyright.
a more than ample demand (one that outstrips the competition due to their price)
From what I've seen of the textbook market the demand is mainly driven by staff using other peoples (students) money to suck up or as friends doing favours. With monopoly pricing (which copyright ensures) the revenue is always maximized at a pricing point where some customers cannot afford the product, and when those paying are not the ones to decide what product to buy the price will reach the absolute pain limit for the customer group. Such pricing has almost nothing to do with free market supply-demand.
that they have a functioning free market
As noted, the textbook market is nowhere near anything like a functioning market. I fact, it's barely possible to get further away from one (customers not deciding on product/product not subjected to competitive tenders/product replication restricted).
Do all of your peers earn more money then you? Are they more popular? Better looking?
"Most, but not all, instructors are teaching because they can't hack it in the real world of their chosen field."
Those who hold this notion obviously have a very limited understanding of academia.
At least in the world of science, scientist covet teaching positions, particularly at prestigious universities, as this provides them the opportunity to seek competitive grants to conduct "leading edge" research and to have access to the smartest and most capable students to assist them in pushing the envelope. If you work for a private company or a government entity, you have very severe restrictions on the direction your own research takes.
I wasn't suggesting that you would HAVE to charge only cost, just that it would be an ideal setup for the printed version to be available for a reasonable price. I also wasn't suggesting that "open source" would mean a wiki system, although I can see how my original post might have given that impression.
I don't think the license is nearly as important for a textbook project as it is for a software project. Forking a software project is sometimes a necessary evil, but forking a textbook project might have some serious disadvantages if the system ever scales up. One of the reasons that what few free texts exist aren't used more often is that they're hard to find - it's far easier just to use a text from a major publisher than it is to find a free one and make sure it's credible. If we end up with a number of textbooks that are mostly accurate, but were forked from a credible source because someone wanted to add some special touches of their own, that decreases the signal to noise ratio.
Another problem is that open source projects are normally run and supported by people who are basically making something they themselves want, and sharing it with everyone else. I think that's why most open source software, except those projects ruled by benevolent dictators, have trouble with usability. They're written by programmers, for programmers. Very few people who are qualified to write a textbook actually want a textbook on that subject. That is not to say the idea can't work, just that it will be slower to take off than open source software because it relies entirely on altruism as opposed to a mix of altruism and self interest.
...from places called "libraries.." and for free no less.
Remember, you can't beat free..
We download movies, so why not textbooks?
I don't know of any such rule at any level of government, so you'll have to check the policy of the school in question. I went and looked up my alma mater's rules. Section 4.2 deals with textbooks. In practice, the "special oversight or management procedures" is generally turning the royalties over to the university.
If you'd managed to survive a bit longer at uni, you'd have figured out that computer science and information technology are different fields.
Well, when I see people who's majors never apply to their real life jobs, then I can start to apply it out. Why spend 4+ years learning psychology or accounting to work a high level customer service job? English majors that start doing low end accounting. Really, other than doctors and lawyers, I haven't known too many people who have worked in the field that they studied for years.
It can be argued that they got a well rounded education, but since I'm fairly sure that English and math were required at some point during their 4 years of "higher learning", I should assume that they can write something resembling a grammatically correct document, or not completely fail at making their formal presentation to executives or business partners actually add up.
That doesn't apply to everyone, but it seems to always apply more to those who's claim to fame is "I graduated, I deserve a job." It's more like, "I spent a lot of money on my degree, the world owes me now."
I'm not talking down about people who go to school. There are plenty of smart people who did, but it's not because they spent years at a university, it's because they were already smart. We have been lead to believe that to be successful you must get a degree. It's simply not true. Generally, it's a money making scheme. Universities make an absolute fortune, and the return for the customer (student) is much less than it should be. The best thing I've heard from any university graduate is "I'm proud of myself." Good. Too bad you didn't find a better way to boost your ego than either spending tens of thousands of your families money, or putting yourself so in debt that you'll be paying for years to come.
Don't assume that IT work is the same as software engineering, systems engineering, computer science or simply coding. I've done them all, including Tier III support (SysAdmin, App Container Admin, dude-who-tweaks-shit-to-make-production-run etc) as well as software engineering and just plain-dumb coding. No fucking way that I could have done the last two, to the level that I've done them, for the projects that I was involved with, without a college degree, including algorithm analysis or automata theory.
But for IT work, yeah, I can see a 2-year technical degree being more than sufficient for it.
Obviously for IT work, I would do the same as you - hire people who tinkers with stuff over someone with a MS degree in CS who has never assembled a small home network with linux using his home-made twisted cable. But for software engineering or simply foot-soldier coding, forget it. I would prefer someone that has a degree and experienced, followed by someone with a degree and who demonstrate good knowledge when faced with a good set of questoins, followed by someone that does not have a degree, but has a shitload of experience in software engineering or coding (you know, the old-timer type of coder who has been at it for 2 decades).
Summary: IT work =/= software development. Background requirements are different for both.
The technology we are using right now to exchange posts, that's been the work (for the most part) of those PhD people you like to generalize about. Let me know when you find the next guy with a 2-year tech degree who invents a new algorithm or networking/programming paradigm ;)
p.s. Use a greasemonkey script to increase availability.
The problem with textbooks is the same as the problem with healthcare costs. The person making the purchasing decision is not the person paying. In healthcare, the patient makes the purchasing decision, but medical insurance pays. With textbooks, professors make the purchasing decision, the students pay.
Of course many times the students decide the value of the textbook does not match the cost and do not obtain a textbook. However, this does not create an alternate market (except for used copies) because generally a textbook only has any value for the student if their professor is using it. As a publisher there is limited incentive in producing an inexpensive textbook since most of the publisher's customers for textbooks (professors) don't pay any attention to the cost of the textbook. Even when they do, they don't usually actually understand the pricing. For example, I used to manage college bookstores. I had a professor change to a new textbook because it was "cheaper". The professor knew the price in the bookstore for the existing textbook. The publisher of an alternate textbook told him that the cost of the new textbook was $X, which was about $20 cheaper than the price in the bookstore of the textbook he had been using. The problem $X was about $10 more than the cost to the bookstore of the book he had been using, so the new text book cost the students $12 more than the old textbook. The price the publisher quoted the professor was the price they charged the bookstore, the price the professor knew for the old textbook was the price the bookstore charged the student.
The truth is that all men having power ought to be mistrusted. James Madison
Here's an open source text book:
http://www.eecs.berkeley.edu/~bh/v1-toc2.html
The product not existing isn't a result of there not being a demand or a drive for such a thing to exist. The problem with the textbook industry is that we have professors getting kickbacks from the book publishers, and the students are stuck with the inflated bill as a result. Given the choice, any student would obviously pick an open source textbook over one they have to pay $150 for. The plethora of open source software is proof that we aren't in a shortage of people willing to donate their time to open source projects, supporting the freedom of information.
Maybe if the students had a say in the textbooks that they were being taught with, we wouldn't have the duopoly that is currently being abused by professors and textbook publishers.
An open source book of universally known facts...
While copyright, time and energy are factors in creating an open source publication... what needs to be done is an open source book(s) of universally known facts to be use to educate the next generation of children.
What can be done today... an independent panel of educators who confirm and organize information used to educate our children.
For example -
1) History - open source until the last 20 years.
Ex. American Revolution - other than the version the British are telling (lol) is the same from state to state... (or should be)
2) Math - it is freaking numbers, man!!!
3) Science - open source until the last 20 years.
The list goes on... until the books get smaller and smaller and common knowledge takes over as a universally known fact.
Within my frat, it was common to rent textbooks for a semester. If an underclassman needed a book you had, it was common courtesy to let him use it for the semester, and he would repay the favor with beer or twenty bucks. So this sort of thing DOES occur, just not in a formal or organized way.
In Soviet Russia jokes are formulaic and decidedly non-humorous.
From your link:
I wouldn't exactly call it "open source". :)
You know, there is a difference between trolling and pointing out the flaws in your reasoning. Just saying.
You're a FUCKING RETARD.
What you just said is- if it doesn't exist, then it can't exist. So everything that doesn't exist just can't. You're a FUCKING RETARD.
Why don't you take your 19th century "free market" Ricardo / Ayn Rand / Friedman "I wish my theories had the gravity of physics, but they don't so I'll dress them up in mathematics and pretend that I am describing 'laws of economics'" fucking physics-env, Chicago-school Latin America democracy overthrowing, dictator installing, valueless pile of intellectual bullshit - second only to Marxism in the long list of total crap assumptions ever inflicted on humanity and fucking shoot it.
Thanks.
Publishers are getting the short end of the stick. They sell a new book once for $100. The bookstore buys it back for $10 and sells it again for $80.... that is $70 of pure profit! If they do it again... that's the big money! Lets not go crazy about the publisher being greedy cooperate blah blahs who are stealing money from poor college students. They are offering just offering newer editions to replace the aging models, much like car companies. The newer models are not that much different from the older ones, so why sell the same edition/model/version for the next 50 years? In all honesty I think it would be better for the publisher to keep the same editions, textbooks wear out in 5 years of anyhow and the publisher wouldn't have to pay people with college degrees to update and edit the books.
Yes, that is true in a very vacuous sense. All commercial textbook writers would eventually stop trying to even break even on textbook-writing, pack up, and go home. Don't then delude yourself that this would mean more free textbooks. Any small increases would be a result of teachers having less choice, and thus being forced to contribute his own time in order to tailor the information to his students/teaching methods. That is not a good thing, especially considering the labour borne from such efforts is not aimed at progressing the book, so much as making private tweaks.
The excusionary aspect of copyright? What exclusionary aspect of copyright? It's always been an optional endeavour. This "limited mitigation factor", in fact, sinks pretty much any possible exclusionary factor.
Actually, tell a lie, there is one exclusionary factor. It's an unfortunate fact, but copyright begins to exclude other business models because it actually happens to be more successful than other business models. It produces more popular artworks in greater volume, and sustains the artist in the process. Artists prefer it, most customers prefer what they get from it, the only unfortunate part is the price, but many of us don't mind paying for the things we voluntarily decide to keep.
Your point is well taken. I have little doubt that back-scratching takes place. The proportion of times it happens, however, I'm less sure about. However, I would say that there would be plenty of teachers/professors who don't mind choosing based on the quality of the book and the price who would be interested in such a project.
People, learning independently of a teacher also buy textbooks. I, for example, am waiting on two cheap textbooks, nothing to do with my uni work, to arrive in the mail for some holiday reading (yeah, I know I'm a nerd; that's why I'm here). I would be happy to get an equivalent free textbook instead, if it were of decent quality.
Hell, we can even see demand here. There seems to be quite a bit of support for this idea. Besides, exactly how much demand does an open source project need? Surely the problem isn't that we have a bunch of willing and able people under the impression that people only want to pay for textbooks?
You know, there is a difference between trolling and pointing out the flaws in your reasoning. Just saying.
You're talking about two different things here: (a) your conjecture that nobody will write free books that are good enough to replace non-free ones, and (b) your feeling that you wouldn't write a book for free. B is your choice. A, on the other hand, is false. See my sig for a catalog of hundreds of free books, many of which are very high quality textbooks.
Find free books.
For Dan Halbert, the road to Tycho began in college--when Lissa Lenz asked to borrow his computer. Hers had broken down, and unless she could borrow another, she would fail her midterm project. There was no one she dared ask, except Dan.
This put Dan in a dilemma. He had to help her--but if he lent her his computer, she might read his books. Aside from the fact that you could go to prison for many years for letting someone else read your books, the very idea shocked him at first. Like everyone, he had been taught since elementary school that sharing books was nasty and wrong--something that only pirates would do.
And there wasn't much chance that the SPA--the Software Protection Authority--would fail to catch him. In his software class, Dan had learned that each book had a copyright monitor that reported when and where it was read, and by whom, to Central Licensing. (They used this information to catch reading pirates, but also to sell personal interest profiles to retailers.) The next time his computer was networked, Central Licensing would find out. He, as computer owner, would receive the harshest punishment--for not taking pains to prevent the crime.
Of course, Lissa did not necessarily intend to read his books. She might want the computer only to write her midterm. But Dan knew she came from a middle-class family and could hardly afford the tuition, let alone her reading fees. Reading his books might be the only way she could graduate. He understood this situation; he himself had had to borrow to pay for all the research papers he read. (10% of those fees went to the researchers who wrote the papers; since Dan aimed for an academic career, he could hope that his own research papers, if frequently referenced, would bring in enough to repay this loan.)
Later on, Dan would learn there was a time when anyone could go to the library and read journal articles, and even books, without having to pay. There were independent scholars who read thousands of pages without government library grants. But in the 1990s, both commercial and nonprofit journal publishers had begun charging fees for access. By 2047, libraries offering free public access to scholarly literature were a dim memory.
There were ways, of course, to get around the SPA and Central Licensing. They were themselves illegal. Dan had had a classmate in software, Frank Martucci, who had obtained an illicit debugging tool, and used it to skip over the copyright monitor code when reading books. But he had told too many friends about it, and one of them turned him in to the SPA for a reward (students deep in debt were easily tempted into betrayal). In 2047, Frank was in prison, not for pirate reading, but for possessing a debugger.
Dan would later learn that there was a time when anyone could have debugging tools. There were even free debugging tools available on CD or downloadable over the net. But ordinary users started using them to bypass copyright monitors, and eventually a judge ruled that this had become their principal use in actual practice. This meant they were illegal; the debuggers' developers were sent to prison.
Programmers still needed debugging tools, of course, but debugger vendors in 2047 distributed numbered copies only, and only to officially licensed and bonded programmers. The debugger Dan used in software class was kept behind a special firewall so that it could be used only for class exercises.
It was also possible to bypass the copyright monitors by installing a modified system kernel. Dan would eventually find out about the free kernels, even entire free operating systems, that had existed around the turn of the century. But not only were they illegal, like debuggers--you could not install one if you had one, without knowing your computer's root password. And neither the FBI nor Microsoft Support would tell you that.
Dan concluded that he couldn't simply lend Lissa his computer. But he couldn't refuse to help her, because he loved her. Every chance to speak with her filled him with deligh
Re-introduce truly limited copyright terms. If copyright was 14 years, all the textbooks I used in school would be public domain now. As it is, it would be very difficult to reduce copyright terms. People who have published under those terms would be sure to challenge it in court. Perhaps some form of eminent domain argument could be used, I don't like the chances though.
I am completely opposed to any form of "eminent domain". What I would propose is for all existing copyrighted works, they would get 14 years from the passage of the new copyright rules. Any new copyrighted work will only be restricted for 14 years.
Without the current plundering of the public domain by the copyright barons, we'd already have free textbooks. As it is, the best I see is to make better use of old materials and publish new materials under a CC license. Most likely to happen among home-schoolers or developing nations that don't have an established education system.
I never said that free books are not and will not equal the quality of non-free books. I do not issue sub-standard reading to my students. What I said was that any free book system will never replace the non-free book system. Without the incentive, you will not get enough authors to continue on. Also, since many professors depend on this revenue, they will not issue or write free books. Yes, it is my choice. However, if I were paid enough to do my work, I would gladly write free. Unfortunately that is not the case. Free books are great. They are also a great way for authors to break into the field. Once their works get known, it becomes easier to publish further works. Again, I never said that free books were not as good. I am not sure where you got that. What I said was I do not see them replacing paid texts any time soon.
Open Source: Eroding the Digital Divide
Not sure where you are going with this, but I disagree with a couple of your statements (assuming I have interpreted them correctly). First, information does not "want" to be free. Information has no wants whatsoever. YOU may want it to be free, but that does not make it universal. There is a lot of information out there that should not be "free." Information is one of the three aspects of the triad of power. Physical force and monetary force being the other two. It us usually the recipients of information who want it to be free. Those who work hard to create that information usually do NOT want this, as they would like to be rewarded for their hard work. If you build a house, can I move in for nothing? Or would you like to be paid for that work? Information is no different. You wish to give it away? Great. Most of us who are in the business of getting that information to students would rather be compensated for the work. Your second paragraph makes little sense to me. However what I WILL say is that the freedom of speech refers to your right to say whatever you want (with some restrictions). It does NOT refer to the price you pay for information. I am free to charge whatever I wish for the speech I am free to spew. You are free to pay for it or not. If I write a text, and I, or another professor, declares that you must have that text for the class, you may pay for it, or you may feel free to not take the class. It is that simple.
Open Source: Eroding the Digital Divide
The bookstore can only guarantee that they can get a copy of the latest edition of the book for each student.
Your comment makes the same point as ceoyoyo's comment. Please see my reply to that comment.
It is entirely acceptable for a textbook project. However, it's essentially the same model as we have now, i.e. professional gatekeepers. The money just comes from different sources. I applaud the people who do this well, it's just not the model that appeared to be under discussion until you brought it up; I also caution that "free" isn't. The money always comes from somewhere, it's good to have transparency regarding funding. Note that I'm not arguing against a well run OSS type text, merely cautioning that while it can be done well, it's not as simple a proposition as some would make it seem.
Try your comment again without the "shill" dig leading it off, eh? Then re-read my comment. I'd applaud anyone who can do texts well, but I've never seen one done well that doesn't cost a ton of money to produce and that money needs to come from somewhere. If you don't like how "local administrations philosophies" require many multiple versions of texts, then vote, get on school boards or show up to school board meetings, and make yourself heard. In the mean time, there's a market for high-quality texts and someone is going to fill it. If you can show me a model that gives the quality that we have in current texts from publishers like Cengage, Houghton-Mifflin, and Pearson Learning for free or substantially lower cost then I'll stand corrected. Until you can do that, or create it yourself, then you're just dreaming out loud. (BTW, I'm sorry if you're out of work as your post implied, but you don't earn a living by dreaming, you do it by making dreams reality)
As for the degree? Go to a library, learn what you need, then start the business of your dreams. Bill Gates has no earned degree. A degree is a shortcut into the system. It says that you agree to pay thousands to get the education that the system wants, that you'll have a certain set of desired skills, and that, essentially, you'll play by their rules. In return you get hired first, get business loans first, and have some hope (but not much) of reaching the top slowly by playing the game. Texts are just one part of that system. If you don't like it, then fix it, change it (eg. drop out of the system), or STFU. I'm just sick of reading posts about how easy it is to do something, and how someone should do it, and never seeing these whiners produce.
Disclaimer: I have that degree, and I work every day to bring down the cost of texts (no, not in a publishing house). If you can do it better than me, go ahead. I welcome competition, but have yet to see any from Open Source Text projects.
technology making an industry obsolete-- buggy whips and all.
Except that the textbook industry is currently the product of a market that is NOT a free market. And publishers are in fact abusing copyright for a profit, and that is hurting our education system.
Look, open source textbooks will work. I don't think that examples of why they won't work are compelling.
Please provide me with a list of publishers who supports more than one edition at once.
Wikimedia Foundation, which publishes the Wikibooks featured books, would be on such a list. Every module of every book on Wikibooks has a revision history.
what makes you think they are going to go to the effort of creating a textbook for free?
As of right now, professors have to get articles published in reliable journals to score points toward tenure. Ideally, they'd have to contribute to the university's set of Free textbooks as well. As for textbooks for K-12 classes, I can see contributing to a textbook as a requirement MAEd degree.
A PDF is not open source: the LaTeX generating the PDF is. That is very much source code (TeX is Turing complete). Essentially the same argument applies to non-TeX authoring systems.
It is very hard to make a change to a book and redistribute it. Is your "free" textbook distributed with its source (i.e., .doc, or .tex or whatever) that is, libre, or simply without cost, gratis?
I agree you can't force free books - but I wrote a free textbook.
http://blog.dotphys.net/physics-textbook/
No nonsense and just the basics.
There is a place to rent Text Books......The library Sure, the library may not have the on you're looking for, so maybe they can start buying more of what you need for class.
If textbooks are a scam perpetrated against students by forcing out new unneeded editions, then it is on the part of the textbook publishers and not the institutions that utilized the books. The schools don't want a college education to be any more cost prohibitive than it already is. I think that renting textbooks is a fine way to combat this purported scam, and a wonderful way to save a little extra doe in college. Naturally there may be some textbooks you want to keep for reference and some you will not, but either way there are cheaper places to get them than your campus bookstore. Such a place is http://www.bigwords.com/ They are a price comparison textbook search engine, and they give you the option of searching for books to rent or buy. You can even sell back ones that you have bought using their site. Let this be yet another weapon in your arsenal to use against the exorbitant prices of college these days.
Supposing the book was generated from Tex. Contrary to what physicists think, Tex isn't even close to universally used.
PDF is actually a subset of the PostScript page description programming language. It is also an open standard and royalty free. So there you go, that PDF you're complaining about is a hell of a lot closer to "open source" than the Word document it was probably made from.
Well, that and Mathematicians and Computer Scientists (ok, they are the same thing).
No professional typesets in Office. ".doc" is just a placeholder for whatever source was used to create the PDF. I hope you don't think that decompiled C programs's assembler source is good enough to be "open source."
You don't understand the university has no interest in reducing the total cost of attendance. Universities that cost more are perceived as better than those that cost less.
So you're saying post-secondary education is a Veblen service. A counterexample: when Rose-Hulman was trying to draw me away from Purdue back in 1999, it positioned itself as the middle ground between "State U" and "Overpriced U". Besides, state universities and community colleges have to answer to constituents who pay income tax.
Fireball!,Fireball!,Fireball!!
I am completely opposed to any form of "eminent domain". What I would propose is for all existing copyrighted works, they would get 14 years from the passage of the new copyright rules.
Since the rights to those currently existing works are currently considered property for much longer than 14 years, for the government to remove those rights and place them in the public domain IS a form of eminent domain, if they are compensated. If not, it's just outright seizure, a dangerous thing to let the government do.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eminent_domain
Eminent domain (United States of America), compulsory purchase (United Kingdom, New Zealand, Ireland), resumption/compulsory acquisition (Australia) or expropriation (South Africa and Canada's common law systems) is the inherent power of the state to seize a citizen's private property, expropriate property, or seize a citizen's rights in property with due monetary compensation, but without the owner's consent.
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