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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.
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
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
Not all schools are as liberal with their policies as your school. Where I was students weren't allowed to remove library copies of the textbook from the building.
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.
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.
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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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.
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.
Frankly, I think the police couldn't care less. They're just as brainwashed as everyone else, but in a hypothetical situation, where an informed and rational adult consumes drugs responsibly, what would they care? What would anyone care?
What people are scared of is the abuse. And someone made them believe that every drug user will abuse the drug and become a liability to society. And THAT is the crux of the matter.
It's the same thing with a lot of other 'problems'. Guns come to mind or people with unusual sexual tendencies. Somehow, the first thing people think about is 'Oh God, what if someone MAKES me participate? What if I become the VICTIM!!!11!!!'. It happened with homosexuals, it's happening now with pedophiles and private gun owners.
I mean most police officers don't do the job for the cash, as far as I'm informed, they don't make much money. Wouldn't you agree that they'd rather go after those who hurt and kill other people, rather than those who've been made into bogeymen?
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.
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.
Oh, and I think the parent poster's whole statement is a rather brave assumption. The kids I know can pretty easily decide whether they like a certain situation or not.
Personally, I think there is only a crime if there is a victim. A child knows when something is uncomfortable or/and painful, wouldn't you agree? So let's assume a child does have sexual contact with an adult, yet does not feel the situation was a bad one.
Under that hypothetical scenario, where is the victim? Is it important to make the child feel bad about the situation after the fact? Why? Because society deemed the act bad? Why did it do so? We know the Romans were pretty laid back about such things, so obviously that worked out for them, didn't it?
I was under the... uh... delusion that we try to protect the children from harm. This whole witch-hunt for supposed paedophiles feels a lot like pushing a situation into a preconceived mould that we deemed harmful and are therefore no longer willing to allow for those situations to be anything but.
And before you people explode and jump me like starved vultures a carcass, I have had contact with people who have had sexual relations with adults while they were kids and actually have fond memories of those encounters. There is thus evidence that such encounters can be positive. So how is it we're all so single-minded about this matter?
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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^^^^^ THIS.
The online material for textbooks is how the textbook publishers assassinated the second-hand market. The one-time-use codes for Mastering Chemistry/Mastering Calculus/Mastering Physics/whatever are the biggest racket these criminals could have added to their already-a-racket.
Textbooks are turning into extortion.
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.
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.
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)
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.
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.)