Slashdot Mirror
Colleges May Start Forcing Switch To eTextbooks
An anonymous reader writes "Here's the new approach under consideration by college leaders and textbook manufacturers: 'Colleges require students to pay a course-materials fee, which would be used to buy e-books for all of them (whatever text the professor recommends, just as in the old model).' That may be 'the best way to control skyrocketing costs and may actually save the textbook industry from digital piracy,' proponents claim."
Currently, students at most universities aren't required to buy textbooks. They can borrow them at the library (frequently on reserve) and save money (at the cost of time and convenience). I can't see this working without some opt-out mechanism at the very least.
The irony of this proposal is that many professors, realizing that book prices are just obscene in the academic market, are preparing their own materials and giving them to the students for the cost of printing them.
This is clearly just an attempt by the textbook marketers to kill the secondhand book sellers.
As my wife says, "calculus has not changed much in the last 6 years, but my textbook has gone through 3 revisions in that time!"
Which is nice. Don't let anyone resell their materials from a prior year. The textbook companies will be thrilled!
"Who is the Journal of Quantum Physics going to believe?" --Stephen Hawking
They just want a more effective way to shut used-textbook merchants out of the market so they can more fully exploit their students.
The World Wide Web is dying. Soon, we shall have only the Internet.
Might offer a bit more bulk-buying pricing power, but not sure if I like the eBook aspect.
Granted, this seems analogous to requiring new purchases.
I listen to both RIAA and non-RIAA stuff if I like the music, tangential business/politics nonwithstanding.
Book prices will still remain close to $100.
You'll lose your right to resell your old books.
Accessibility for us disabled folks will be an artificial extra cost, to satisfy the imaginary property brigade who think text-to-speech isn't a right.
Back in my day, I had to steal text books in physical form from the university bookstore. Now you whippersnappers can just log in to your compuboxes and mash a few keys. Also, the bookstore was located uphill in both ways.
Are you kidding me? This is designed to kill the used textbook market.
Or has that been integrated into "digital piracy" definitions already?
I was forced to pick up a e version of my math textbook for 70 bucks, no option but to do so since the book is tied to the eclass that the collage out sourced it's vitual classroom to. What makes it extra special is the profssor lets us take the final in person with open book... but we're not allowed to have any type of computer. So if we want to actually use the book on the final we're force to print the whole damn thing out. Collage is dumb.
Technology, the cause of and solution to all of life's problems.
Universities collaborate to produce textbooks (pay the author, an editor, possibly some layout/graphics staff) and then release the finished textbooks under a Creative Commons license (by-sa-nc for example).
You know, to provide better service and education for their students and society as a whole.
Only the parasites of the textbook industry could think this was a "helpful" idea. Lemme guess - they'll be selling DRM-boobytrapped versions that expire at the end of the term, but cost every bit as much as a dead-tree, non-expiring version.
By the time I was in grad school at GaTech, undergraduate courses were spinning revs every quarter, and the only thing that would change would be the problems. This eliminated the book buy-back market almost entirely, because profs of course would require problems from the book.
Undergrad level calc has not changed in the last 20 years. There's no reason someone shouldn't be able to use a calc book handed down from a parent or older sibling. Yet, term after term, every student is nearly compelled to spend $140 on a new book.
It's no wonder our educational system from cradle to PhD is a complete failure. Institutions are too focused on productizing and profiteering rather than growing the world's best talent.
Has the cost of paper and shipping gone up substantially in the past few years? If not, I don't see how ebooks will amount to some sort of major cost savings for a textbook manufacturer. All other costs are the same in an ebook. As almost everybody else in this thread has already deduced, this is more about shutting out the used book market.
I read the internet for the articles.
Is that why the prices are gargantuan compared to other books?
You know what the difference usually is between the fourth and fifth edition of a textbook is? A little bit of reformatting, and a couple extra anecdotes. Yet the professors are told that they need to use the new material and they force it down on the students so that someone who wrote a book 5 years ago gets some income for the next 10 years, or maybe its the publishers, I don't know.
Point is - they set up the used book stores in colleges for a reason, so you could re-use text books. In some fields this has worked well, but in other fields, authors have just started to rehash their books to make money.
In all honesty - education material should not be privatized, their shouldn't be an issue with digital piracy because it should all be made publicly available. Wanting to LEARN shouldn't come with a cost. When I pay money to a college or university its for the professor's time, who is an expert in the field and can answer any questions the textbooks can't. It also covers the upkeep of the infrastructure. The only cost incurred with a textbook should be the ones manufacturing the book.
Education as a money making industry sickens me a little.
In the near future, "Ownership" of materials like textbooks and computers, will be discouraged, and eventually phased-out in favor of licensing.
For a "small monthly fee" or a "small fee", you will be allowed to use certain e-materials, and allocated time on a mainframe.
Drop the course? No Refund for the text/computer time.
Finish the course? No selling of the text.
Want to help the next generation? Your paper notes are the only thing you can "sell".
Ownership and first sale are slowly being phased out. We need to control who is learning what, and keep learning to the priveledged few.
Since more and more people can afford education, we need to increase little "fees" here and there, to make sure only the truly rich and deserving can afford it.
A new world order is coming, change is coming, get ready.
We are not paying all that money just for the textbook material, we are paying for the knowledge of the professors, and the shared experience with other people. Putting additional restrictions on the materials themselves for profit goes against the entire ethos of open information sharing, which is the cornerstone of university research.
Rhymes that keep their secrets will unfold behind the clouds.There upon the rainbow is the answer to a neverending story
I attend an online university for my masters program. As part of this program, because it is new, they offered a pilot whereby students enrolled from the outset would receive free e-books. Being that I am poor (single income, one child and a SAHM) I welcomed this offer.
The software used is miserable to operate (slow, buggy, required me to sit on with their tech support for over an hour to resolve an upgrade issue). It takes upwards of 15 minute to print a single chapter because it adds text with your name and e-mail address assigned to the account (for DRM ) to every page.
While I am grateful for the free books, if I had the choice between the two I'd definitely go hardcover. The student should be able to make the choice between the two mediums, not the school regardless of whatever their motivation is.
Or perhaps maybe give out a grant to write a textbook. Open textbooks for freshmen level classes should be possible, and is being worked on. It's ridiculous making freshmen pay $200 for a physics textbook, that IMHO is worse than the one I paid $80 for 10 years ago.
There are about 400 students in the 100 level physics classes at my school. That's $80,000 for just 1 year of books, in one subject, only freshmen level, at one university.
So obviously it's millions per year per subject nationwide. Don't you think for a couple million we could get someone to write a free textbook, and then we can save millions year after year.
It's almost as insane as paying so much for journal subscriptions, instead of switching to open publications.
e-Books are generally DRM-controlled to the extent that students can't sell them as used textbooks. This actually increases the price over paper books in most situations.
Bruce Perens.
No way is anyone going to be *buying* any books. You'll be renting it.
Patriotism is a virtue of the vicious
some professors get kickbacks from book sales and they seem to be ones who are the ones who like to find ways to force you to buy them for that class.
Considering that college tuition (something that the college has even greater control over) is one of the few things to increase in price faster than textbooks, I see this as being a really great idea.
Actually, I think this is in part that the colleges are upset that the money that goes to textbooks doesn't go to them. They obviously don't care about how much the cost goes up, just look at tuition. What the college administrators care about is that the parents and students see this steady increase. If they can move this into a fee that is paid right along with tuition, they can hide this cost and get rid of one of the sources of complaint.
The truth is that all men having power ought to be mistrusted. James Madison
Why not work with the local "bookstore" to have available for a semester's rent an e-reader (kindle, iPad, Nook, etc) pre-loaded with all of your books? With some additional coverage for insurance for lost/stolen/broken devices. Nice for the students to just submit their course listing to the bookstore before the semester break and come back and get all of your "books" for roughly the same price (or cheaper if the e-versions would actually be reasonably priced...lol) as buying the hardcopy. The extra bonus is getting the reader (and possibly all of it's apps) to use of the semester. Seems like everybody could profit from the deal. Well, not the paper mills and printing press folks.
http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.html
That crazy kooky Stallman. What nonsense fearmongering will he rant about next?
This is ludicrous. I'm a little over halfway through my CS degree, and I've generally managed to avoid buying textbooks (picked up probably three or four the entire time I've been attending classes) because, well, pretty much anything I could possibly need to learn from a textbook is already available for free online anyways, and its saved me easily thousands of dollars. Now schools are talking about simultaneously taking away students' ability to seek out alternative sources of information and forcing intrusive DRM technologies on them? Thank God I'll be graduated before this gets a chance to become commonplace.
And before replies start pouring in about how I'm cheating myself and my grades will suffer...you're wrong. I'm consistently making 'A's in my classes, book or no book.
Or of course, they could just use free (as in freedom and price) CC licensed textbooks. I wrote two such undergraduate textbooks:
http://www.jirka.org/ra/
http://www.jirka.org/diffyqs/
That should save some money. Both are classes where a traditional textbook is $100 or so
In acentury... sure. A few centuries? Nope. q.v. Cauchy's wrong theorem. Basically two centuries ago, analysis was a mess and it took a lot of hard work from Cauchy, Fourier, Weierstrass, Dedekind and many others to clean things up and get to a solid foundation with the characterisation of the reals as the unique ordered field and the epsilon-delta definition of continuity.
By "piracy" they of course refer to fair use for academic purposes. I have had multiple publishers reps tell me that any use of their materials without payment to them is piracy, and then they tell me they have never heard of fair use, and that I must have made it up...
Time is an illusion, lunchtime doubly so- Zaphod beeblebrox
Professors here at Ohio State have a variety of ways to deal with secondhand book sales. Some textbooks here are only available in looseleaf form so they cannot be sold back. Many are "OSU Edition" copies, to ensure they cannot be sold online; to book stores in other regions; or at all after 1--2 years once the publisher comes out with the next edition. Barns & Noble, the "official" OSU bookstore has a program called "textbook rental" to curb resale of used textbooks. Then, one of the worst models is in the Physics department; they have an agreement with the publishers and a company called WebAssign, where although you can buy a used copy of a textbook, only the new ones have a "product key" which you need to do your (required) online homework.
Under none of these circumstances do professors pay anything for students, and (for obvious) reasons professors get the materials for free and most don't have a clue what the books cost until a student tells them (which they ignore). I can't say I'm surprised by any of this. Publishers make enormous profits by revising textbooks and requiring newer versions, and because students (who have to buy the books) don't have a choice. All the while, these new techniques are being upheld as "cost saving" and "convenient" for students. Consumer choice and the free market at work I guess.
To the hell with online textbooks!
Totally bogus. This is just an attempt to kill the used book market. As it is, textbook revisions are introduced at a rate far higher than actual changes in content; all in order to make older used books obsolete. The entire textbook publishing industry is a sham. Look at so-called "international" editions - these are often identical to the US version, except maybe for physical differences (lighter paper for lower freight cost, or b&w instead of color to make it cheaper to print) or perhaps minor changes in language due to localization. Yet these books are not meant for domestic consumption even though they are perfectly capable of doing the job at a fraction (often 1/4 to 1/2) of the cost of an official US edition.
I had one year where I went to college and my books cost more (1200$) than my tuition (900$).
Students get swindled by booksellers, particularly campus ones. The markup is outrageous. Coming up with a new "version" of a book is all about screwing the used book market. eBooks is just another way to screw students for more money.
If the government wanted to reduce education costs, and make university/college more available to people, they should take a long hard look at some of the common practices that are pretty criminal. Just like controlling health care costs start at looking at what pharmaceutical companies charge for drugs. If people are forced to make purchasing decisions, its not really market driven anymore.
You know you're getting screwed. They know they're screwing you. The people who would be in a position to provide oversight knows screwing is taking place. But nobody does a goddamn thing to stop it! It's just taken to be a natural part of the order of the world like death and taxes.
Education is this beautiful thing that's been corrupted into nothing more than a giant fucking con. And it never ends. Just more fresh meat cycled through the grifter's paradise.
Kwisatz Haderach
Sell the spice to CHOAM
This Mahdi took Shaddam's Throne
If it's good enough for MIT, ought to be good enough for everyone.
http://ocw.mit.edu/about/
http://www.opensourcetext.org/
(and many other references)
...requiring students to "buy" online books? What the crap? You don't buy the book, you license it (which this video explains in a hilarious way). Students would have to use "approved" book readers to read these books. Students couldn't lend their books to other students. Students couldn't save money by buying used books. Students can't read these books without looking at a screen, and much less without a working computer (power outage, anyone?). This is by no means a good idea; maybe it would be for the book authors/publishers, but nobody else.
"Our country is not nearly so overrun with the bigoted as it is overrun with the broadminded." -Archbishop Fulton Sheen
The one thing that always bothered me about students selling their textbooks after completing the course it that this action basically says "I took this class because the degree required it, and I will never have the need to recall this information for the rest of my days." Is this a cynical view, or just the practical reality? How many out there kept their textbooks and every once in awhile reference them or give them a good skim to refresh their knowledge?
In reference to e-textbooks I fear that DRM and/or format obsolescence will take away the option to hold onto the information, if that's what the student wants.
.
Prisencolinensinainciusol. Ol Rait!
This would be fantastic. I'll just start renting my textbooks. And by "start renting" I mean "keep torrenting".
Raters gon' rate.
A bigger issue is that you lose the right to retain your textbooks. Given rapid edition changes, the right to resell was often of limited value and theoretical anyway; OTOH, most of the people I know kept many of their textbooks and occasionally reference them even a decade or more after leaving school; during high school, one of the ways I learned things outside of school was from my fathers old college texts.
As my wife says, "calculus has not changed much in the last 6 years, but my textbook has gone through 3 revisions in that time!"
I don't think basic calculus has changed in a few centuries.
Try reading the translated Principia Mathematica. (I won't ask you to go read the Latin)
http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/pm-notation/
The math itself hasn't changed. The way we write it has. It's like Shakespearian English vs. Modern English with all the variants in between.
These posts express my own personal views, not those of my employer
For a time I ran the ACM chapter at San Francisco State. We collected used textbooks from students and kept them in a library in the CS lab, and would lend them out to members as needed.
With an e-book system, that type of system probably wouldn't be possible.
There's no -1 for "I don't get it."
Yeah, bribe the prof, UNiv president, whoever, screw the students..
I know about these digital packs. Material you can get from various journals etc are included ina 'digital course pack'. You can read only by loggin into the site, cannot save, but only print etc. Nice move indeed. OTOH, you can print them out (on paper only).
No more used books.
Make USA expensive for everyone folks, make it so that ppl need to make 100K just to pay off those loans, and wonder WHY it's cheaper to outsource.
Start with regulations on academic and doctors salaries and you can mke this place bearable again.
"OK, guys. The material hasn't changed much this year, just the activation codes."
A downside to expensive books, renting textbooks, long textbooks, and now DRM ebooks is that students will just return them or not even have access to them after finishing a class. This is VERY BAD for education. For one, students should keep their calculus book throughout their college time. Otherwise you can't look up things you'll need later. Courses are not independent islands. You need what you've learned previously, and unless you are a genius and memorized everything ...
We need to push for either free open source non DRM textbooks (in my view the NC clause is permissible) or at least very cheap paper textbooks. Now if students didn't complain about their textbooks lacking color and being an old edition then it would be easier to just use a cheap Dover printed textbook. So the students are to blame for some of this as well.
Jiri
Going to college has become a giant, legal racket for a lot of people. Professors make a lot of money for "teaching," publishers make tons of money on huge markups and edition changes that may only change a word or two or change the chapter order, and finally the Sallie Mae's of the world make huge money on brokering student loans. Personally, I am sick of it - I went to college and it did precisely dick for me. I got good grades and I am no further ahead than a colleague who did not go at all. In fact, my colleague makes nearly 40K a year more than me. Fuck the publishing companies! Fuck the money-making racket!
Optimally you won't mind that, everything could end up much cheaper and much more convenient. At my highschool we had sort of similar scheme (though with analogue books obviously) - pay yearly what was at most 1/6th (probably less) the cost of full new set, get all needed books from the library, during the first week / first lesson of each subject (and of course return them at the year end; it was still a better deal than own set & resales). Sure, most of those books was around one decade old, but also for most of them it didn't matter - especially if the whole thing was organized by the school.
Optimally...
One that hath name thou can not otter
Profs will then just put together a set of "notes" and sell it as an e-text book directly to the students. The institution will take a cut and more $$ to the core and less for the publishers.
All the publishers ever added was printing and distribution. That is not needed for e-books.
I went to school years and years ago with a transfer student from Spain. He didn't have textbooks over there. They just took notes and the professor actually had to create problem sets that they then went over in the next class.
RIP America
July 4, 1776 - September 11, 2001
I could be wrong but:
Starvin' students + electronic media format = piracy
Open textbooks for freshmen level classes should be possible
There are free/open textbooks in mathematics, at least at the fresher level. Here are a few:
http://www.lightandmatter.com/calc/calc.pdf some physics books are at the same site
ftp://joshua.smcvt.edu/pub/hefferon/book/book.pdf
http://www.math.uiowa.edu/~stroyan/InfsmlCalculus/FoundInfsmlCalc.pdf
http://www.mecmath.net/calc3book.pdf
http://www.opensourcemath.org/books/mauch-applied_math/applied_math.pdf
LaTeX source is available for some of them. These books mostly bridge from high school calculus to first year college vector calculus (the last one goes a bit further), but may not be aligned with a particular professor's path through the topics. There are various others at high school level, and quite a few in specialized/advanced areas, but not so many at the undergrad level. It's worth browsing through the categories at http://planetmath.org/?op=mscbrowse&from=books for slightly more advanced topics.
Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities. - Voltaire
I get the feeling that I'm the only student in here that's even a little concerned about the environment. Everyone seems to be whining about the book companies and professors making money, I'm excited that I won't have to drag around a massive pile of books. It's so much easier to have all my books on a small portable device then giant paper back tomes. A quick comparison on amazon will show you that ebooks tend to be ~25% cheaper then dead trees. This is a very good thing. Not to mention the stunning volume of trees that get killed for a book most people aren't going to read.
-1 overrated isn't the same thing as "I disagree".
Accessibility for us disabled folks will be an artificial extra cost, to satisfy the imaginary property brigade who think text-to-speech isn't a right.
It is a right. Even U.S. imaginary property law appears to preserve this right.
Will the e-textbooks be harder to read? Can I change the font to comic sans? I think my retention of knowledge will improve.
Book prices will still remain close to $100
With no used paper book market to compete with new copies? Book prices will go up.
My older siblings took calculus. Each of them had their own book. I took it in college, and the book changed during the year, so I have two. I tutor calculus these days, and I was horrified to see that a rather awful presentation of the subject was run off on tissue paper, weighed twice what my own tomes weigh, and cost $165 ea. Used books were frequently underlined and highlighted by the less-than-4.0 students, so those were more of distractions than assistance. A science-oriented freshman in the local college where I live can expect to pay nearly $1000 in books a year. I still don't see ebooks as having the ability to finger flip to relevant portions of a book as quickly as those in print; sadly, the technology in an ebook becomes an impediment to efficient teaching. Even homework is assigned and answered online, so there's little room for "showing your work." Don't get me wrong. I like ebooks...for novels, the occasional read, but not for serious study. They lack color, and the ability to provide tactile indexing to the subject, e.g. I feel / open the book 3/4 of the way through it, and I kinda know where I am in it. A bit harder with an ebook.
So, if we demand our student lug these voluminous compendia around a campus, can't we at least give them better quality, more precise content, and a cheaper cost? At least something to offset the price of the truss they're gonna need!
If the professors wish to change out books mid topic, fine, just give the students a massive discount for those affected by the change. Bolting on resource courses, and using opt-outs, etc, makes going to college feel more like buying insurance, what with all subtle disclaimers and fine print when you register for a simple course. Eventually, even basket weaving will require a waiver, because, "Caution: This Class Introduces Students to Potentially Harmful Reed. Contents May Be Sharp."
At least give the students something back for their "taxes," before an ebook tea party is started.
Dude, come on. What that actually says is "I'm not freaking made of money and I need to sell my old textbooks to scrape up at least some of the money needed to buy next semester's". At least, that's what it said when I was doing it back in the day.
Not everyone can afford to keep thousands of dollars tied up in old college textbooks, particularly when a lot of the material really WON'T be needed in the future. Yes, I sold my freshman chemistry texts. No, I have never, ever wished I still had them to refresh my memory about chemistry.
I had a few classes where we didn't have a textbook, but rather the professor had us buy a packet of note slides as the textbook replacement. It still cost us $15 a book, yet was essentially 50 pages of double-side copy paper put into a plastic ring binding and paper-card cover. The only reason for charging $15 a book was because that's how much kinkos charged to bind the pages together.
Publishers charge a 'decent' fee to print, bind, and ship textbooks. That's why they cost so damn much, especially when it's a specialized class with a limited print pushed through. They got equipment to pay off and executive under salary. And everyone wants a profit from each slice of the process. But $140 a book is a total scam.
I wish all my classes gave me the option of printing my books at kinkos for $15.
Forced into doing something I don't like...yup, sounds like democracy all right.
So a professor can then write his own book, publish it as an ebook, charging $50 per e-copy. The university buys a copy for each of the students. All the profits go straight to the professor. Thanks to the fee, students have no say in the manner. In short, Professors can write their own pay raise.
So pessimistic. On the contrary, I predict that it will soon be possible to download 90% of your textbooks for free, instead of the current 50%.
Because textbooks can be great outside of the classroom, or supplement the instructors incompetence. Not every instructor is really capable of teaching. Plus, I've used several of my text books well after college. Sometimes as a tool to relearn what I once knew (it's much quicker with material I learned from the first time), sometimes as a tool to teach others with. I've also bought textbooks for classes I never attended, but wanted to learn the information. No, I think textbooks are nice. An e-book would be nice too (provided I could put notes in the margins). The only disadvantage of a textbook is the cost, and the silly rev updates to force students to buy a new copy.
Just as some people can't stand 3D movies because it gives them a migraine (no really, it does), some people can't read using e-readers. This would be terribly short-sighted.
It would be interesting for the school to charge directly for it. For tax purposes you are allowed to include costs for tuition but not for books. If it is a fee charged by the school it could then be allowed for taxes. If you are going to get raped over the prices of books it would be nice if they were deductible.
and then release the finished textbooks under a Creative Commons license (by-sa-nc for example).
Drop the -nc, and you can get Wikimedia Foundation to provide space for your textbook collaboration on Wikibooks.org.
Well .. you should do your part marketing free alternatives. Tell your professors about free (or reasonably priced) textbooks. It might be that they do not know about them! Good places to start:
http://homepages.nyu.edu/~jmg336/html/mathematics.html
http://www.ebyte.it/library/refs/Refs_Math_Books.html
http://people.math.gatech.edu/~cain/textbooks/onlinebooks.html
I'll also again plug my own two free textbooks :) http://www.jirka.org/ra/ and http://www.jirka.org/diffyqs/
Jiri
The million dollar question is: what portion of the price of a book is shipping?
Ask the US Post Office, which advertises flat-rate boxes as "a simpler way to shit" out your overpriced, error-filled changes to the exercises every other year. Say your textbook is an inch thick; a stack of five of them costs $10.70 to ship anywhere in the United States.
http://counsel.cua.edu/res/docs/ada/reed-college.pdf
I guarantee every college and university has at least one lawyer who is familiar with this and the similar settlements the DoJ concluded last year. Charging an extra cost to access text-to-speech would fail the "must not be provided different or separate accomodations" test and contrary to the current case with non-etext books would not fall under the exception for "unless doing so is ncessary to ensure access to goods and services that is equally as effective as that provided to others". (28 C.F.R. 36.202(c))
The inability to stop charging an extra cost to visually disabled folks is a dis-incentive for textbook makers.
Buy a Opticbook 3600 (http://plustek.com/product/book3600.asp) and then buy the needed textbooks. Spend 2 to 3 incredibly tedious hours scanning per book, justify it by dividing the price of the book by how long it took you to scan it and realize that its totally worth it, and then get Adobe Acrobat from the Pirate Bay and use the new Clearscan feature that not only performs very accurate OCR but can replace the image of the font with a custom generated vector font and in the process saves a ton of space. A 1000 page book is only 65 megs. Then take the book back in time for a full refund.
Alternatively, get everyone in the class to chip in for one book, saw the binding off with a bandsaw, and then use a sheet fed scanner.
Which is exactly what publishers want.
Never say never. Ah!! I did it again!
Now, I readily admit that Ebooks can have features more impressive or educational than the standard book. Interactive displays, video segments, superior indexing and searching.
But there is no way on God's green earth that I would trade in a reliable textbook purely for an electronic version. I don't have to worry about battery life, I don't have to worry as much about eye-strain, I find books easier to interact with (flipping pages back and forth, highlighting, etc) and bookmark, and I wouldn't have to be concerned with account numbers or corrupted harddrives.
"I'm sorry professor, I couldn't finish studying because my copy of the textbook got corrupted..."
Give me a good, solid textbook anyday. I prefer ones with CDs as there are times (such as in class) where being able to do a quick reference is handy, but give me that solid hunk of paper.
Not to mention you can resell textbooks, and while you may have to worry about updated editions, you'll NEVER have to worry about the file format becoming unreadable.
(Trust me, I once did a 10 page paper on how books were superior to computers)
I expect this:
Book prices will rise to something close to $1000.
You'll have to buy patches for $50 mid-term and just before exams.
Customer support will also be an a pay-per-incident basis.
There will be specially-produced editions for the disabled, at an additional fee, but they will be out of sync with the mainstream edition.
I'm a prof.
My students are compelled to pay for the ebook, costing half as much as a new paper copy. They have to buy it, it's part of their bill. It is, of course, DRMed; can't even print more than 1/3rd of it. The software is obscure, transfer to USB etc is possible but fraught with risks and hassles and downtime, and of poor UI quality. No path to Kindle, Nook, or Ipad is available. Every path to making it usable is, of course, illegal per DCMA etc. If ownership does not expire deliberately, it will become obsolete soon. Students signing up late have problems with activation. They are welcome to buy a paper copy - up to tripling their expenditure.
Irony is, in the end its such a pain to use that I just ignore it. I was moving away from the assigned thousand page tomes (changing every semester for no good reason and taking far too much to get across simple ideas), but this clinched it.
Once the growing pains pass, and every student is assumed to have a tablet, it will become the norm and few will complain. We will all love Big Brother.
they'd probably sell more. After my first semester I stopped buying textbooks and just photocopied the exercises as needed. Most textbooks were rubbish compared to the lectures and resources on the internet, so I didn't see the point.
I was also helped by most of my lecturers who thought the whole textbook market was a scam and just assigned their own exercises. We need more lecturers and professors like that.
--sitharus
but when the professor just reads from the book and makes you show up just to get that? how many people will want to kill that time?
As others have mentioned, this is nothing but the latest attempt to kill off the used books market. The textbook industry is just a big racket.
Curiously, the obvious solution of using widely available free online textbooks is ignored (see e.g. http://theassayer.org/ for a directory). Oh yeah, can't do that because we "need to save the textbook industry".
Of course, free online textbooks aren't the answer to everything, say for some grad-level specialized course the selection of appropriate textbooks might be quite limited, if available at all. But for all those massive "XXX 101" courses, surely the free online resources are plentiful, and some even very good quality. Or maybe even better, as a free online textbook writer has no incentive to bulk up the book with useless fluff, which just wastes student time when reading.
...provided the textbooks are provided to me in un-DRM'd PDFs, or something similar.
Try to foist some "e-reader format" on me, or force me to use Windows or OS X to read them, and I'll find another university.
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
Did you tell anyone you were naming the file realanal before publishing it? :) Probably just my perverse mind at work...
LRN 2 SWM
I only had to pay a hundred and twenty-five bucks for a Trigonometry e-book which I get to keep it and read as much as I want for the next four months!
Why the hell would I buy a textbook for something between 50-100€ and then only read it for a few months, when any well-stocked college library would carry it?
Eventually things will go paperless. It is unavoidable. I accept that. I even can accept being forced to pay for an E-Book with a class tuition (as long as it costs a LOT less than paper books, since I would not be able to resell it).
What I CANNOT accept is being forced to pay for a text that I cannot read on the platform of my choice. I do not and will not accept limitations on what devices, operating systems, etc, I must use/purchase/maintain to read such texts. I will not accept DRM and proprietary software or formats.
Give me an open-standards, DRM-Free based text that I can read on any device (Linux, MS-Windows, MacOS, Kindle, Sony reader, Android, iPad, etc), and can install on more than one device at a time, then it might work. Afterall, why place restrictions on "books" that you HAVE to pay for? They will have no value to anyone else as pirated material.
a good example is http://book.ivo-welch.com, an introductory corporate finance textbook that cost $200/book from Prentice Hall in September 2010, and now costs $0 in October 2010. only possible because the author kept most of the rights...
I'm going to Daytona State College right now (mentioned in the post). I'm actually looking forward to this. From what I am to understand, the ebooks must be platform neutral and cost students $20 per class. No rentals, no DRM, if I understand it right.
Heres another link to what DSC is planning.
http://www.ecampusnews.com/technologies/florida-college-looks-to-become-ebook-pioneer/
you want to talk about fees?
NON-RES GRAD TUIT-FALL
STUDENT ACTIVITY FEES
ADVISING AND ASSESSMENT FEE
ACADEMIC EXCELLENCE FEE
ACADEMIC FACILITIES FEE
AG SCI TECHNOLOGY FEE
ASNR FAC/EQUIP FEE
UNIV TECH/INFRASTRUCTURE MAINT
ENERGY FEE
TRANSIT/PARKING SVC FEE
STUDENT ACTIVITY FEES
HEALTH SERVICE FEES
STUDENT FACILITY FEE
STUDENT DEVELOPMENT FEE
RECORDS MAINTENANCE FEE
LIBRARY AUTOMATION/TECH FEE
one of these fees already could probably cover that stupid course materials fee. fucking fees...
what with the idiots in the state of TX eviscerating science texts in their ignorant endeavor to eliminate evolution and thus setting text standards, why would i want to be forced to pay a fee for a science text that has no real science in it. bloody ludicrous.
"To stop the terrorists."
Book prices will still remain close to $100.
Not even close. What's being proposed is similar to how journals now work: The library subscribes to electronic versions of journals, providing all students with access as part of their tuition. This was originally sold as a way to keep costs down, because it's cheaper to provide electronic access than physical access, right?
The problem is that, because there's no physical item, in order for the library to provide access to the materials, the library has to pay for the journal subscriptions FOREVER. So what once cost a few thousand dollars as a one-time purchase can cost an infinite amount over an infinite time period.
On top of that, journals are generally provided to the libraries by aggregators who license tons of content and then re-license that to the libraries, so the library ends up paying for loads of journals they don't need in order to get the ones they DO need.
And on top of THAT, these aggregators raise their rates an average of 15% per year, for the past 10 years! Obviously, this isn't remotely sustainable, but libraries -- who need to provide this content in order for their students and faculty to perform research -- have no choice but to pay it. Students and faculty could probably protest and put an end to the practice, but first they'd have to know about it, and then they'd have to care. That's not going to happen until it reaches a tipping point.
(Yes, I'm a librarian. Yes, I'm pissed about this.)
I recently took a course that listed both the traditional book and the ebook as choices for the class. I looked at the license for the ebook (yes, I know, something no one ever bothers to do). I was astounded that the license forbade reading the ebook aloud. Before opting for the, less expensive, ebook it might be worthwhile to read the licensing restrictions.
Having taught calc I II and II for several years as faculty, I loathe the textbook market.
We, the profs, get incentives from the publishers to use the most recent books. Often this is by being given several free copies of the book, which we can then sell back.
And I hate the new editions every year, I'd always tried to find problems that were in both old and new versions, or if not I'd recommend that the students photocopied the relevant pages from the new edition.
In the last couple of years, my course switched to using the online MIT courseware. Gilbert Strang's calculus book is downloadable as a pdf, and I assigned all problems from that. (The downside as a teacher is that the teachers guide is also downloadable for free too ;) ). It's not the greatest book out there, but it's good and the price is just right.
I think I'd be annoyed by this. I prefer ebooks for the most part. To the point where I'll often simply pass on reading a book if there's no digital version available. But only if it's a work of fiction. For something that's going to be used as study material, I really can't imagine using them at this point. Ebook readers, whether stand alone units on or a computer, are great for going one page forward or one page back. But just terrible for the kind of rapid skimming and flipping that I usually do with textbooks.
Everything will be taken away from you.
That may be 'the best way to control skyrocketing costs
seems like a big leap of faith that these same textbook publishers that are sucking students (and there parents) dry are going to let the e-version of a textbook go for cheaper.
I took one philosophy elective wherein the professor did something very much like that - copied the relevant sections from books that were translations of the relevant philosophical works. The material there *really* hasn't changed. :)
I listen to both RIAA and non-RIAA stuff if I like the music, tangential business/politics nonwithstanding.
http://www.bookmaid.com/ is set up to do exactly that for RIT students. Thing is, it often doesn't have anyone who's listed the book you need. Good idea though.
I listen to both RIAA and non-RIAA stuff if I like the music, tangential business/politics nonwithstanding.
Whoa, did I write that out loud? What I MEANT was, what Stallman said.
Luke, help me take this mask off
Book prices will still remain close to $100. You'll lose your right to resell your old books. Accessibility for us disabled folks will be an artificial extra cost, to satisfy the imaginary property brigade who think text-to-speech isn't a right.
If text-to-speech is a right, then not being crippled in the first place is a right.
Or worse, your textbooks will expire at the end of the semester due to DRM. You won't be able to reference them after taking the course, and god forbid you fail the course and have to re-purchase a "license" for your textbook.
Also, where have you been getting your cheap $100 textbooks? Most of the ones I had to buy were nearly $200...
From what I have seen, many of these schemes result in keeping the books for the semester and then losing access at the end. Or you access the book using their proprietary software and then pay a lot more (even more than a print book sometimes) to get permanent access using their proprietary software. And once they abandon that platform you are screwed. I still have all my undergrad textbooks from 10 years ago in computer science/mathematics (except for duplicate ones, ie I tossed the 7th edition of calculus when I got the 8th edition....). And I kept a few of the more interesting general education courses (ie Psychology 101's book). Now, if I was on some proprietary system, I would not have access to those texts anymore. And in some cases, ie one of my grad classes used Introduction to Algorithms by Corman, I would have had to buy the book again while now I didn't. Now Corman has a new edition....but really it is not that different except for a few changes regarding parallel algorithms....
Basically this is a way to kill the used book market. Make sure you have to rent your book every semester. And make sure if years later you go back to school, you will need to buy the book again aka Zune style.
A book rep stopping by my office last month was asking why I'm not using their textbook for my course like the other instructors at the school. I told him that I looked up what they were charging at our bookstore and decided that that was at least $100 more than the useful value to the students. Then I said I was unimpressed that a professor of the caliber that Stewart is supposed to be took upwards of 7 iterations to apparently get Calculus right, I mentioned that if anything the last four editions should have been at least half the cost of the first 3.
He asked what book I was using and I said "none". He was floored. I explained that I write detailed notes to the class and put them on a wiki page I maintain for the course. Students then go in and can even edit the notes (if they find a typo) and maintain their own pages worth of examples which they maintain in groups of four. Overall the students have a textbook that is: an ebook, covers class, freely links to other material, includes videos relevant to the class, includes program files and examples, includes links to what the other students in the class are doing. And the total cost to the students is free, the cost to the department is just the 10 year old computer I rescued from a storage closet to host the wiki on.
Best part is next time I teach the course the wiki notes will be largely done and I'll just be able to focus on adding to them. Plus I'll have all the old students pages worth of notes and examples to include as needed.
He was stunned and just quietly slipped out of my office while I was showing him all the pages I had written.
I have not read any of the replies to this, but I would like to put in my two cents. My mother went back to school when I was 15 to get her nursing degree. During that time, we had to pinch every penny and sometimes wonder how we were going to make rent because she needed books for school. It appeared that every time she started a new course the books just changed so she was having to buy new. I currently am working and attending college online. I am glad that I have this opportunity and the books are all e-books. The books come in PDF format enabling me to find the information I need without having to read the entire section to find it. I am also able to work more efficiently when having quizzes and exams because the information is right there on the same screen if I need a refresher. The cost of the books are included in the tuition for the class and is not an astronomical amount to be able to download it for personal use. The books are password protected so if you are not enrolled you can not access them to be able to "pirate" them for other uses. I have to say that this might be a really good way to go for the collegiate community. I know it will do a lot of good for the students who are attending these classes.
I'll play devil's advocate, to some degree at least. I work in the technology department of a college bookstore, so I have tremendous first-hand experience with the entire process. The college as a whole is a money-losing operation, with the bookstore being one of only two programs that actually generate a profit (the other being food services). Both programs use their revenue to cover their overhead, then the rest of the money goes directly to the college. Our average profit margin on a textbook is 18%, and roughly 10% on technology products. Pretty small margins compared to a traditional retail operation. Publishers are the ones making a killing on the materials, yet the misconception is that the bookstore is making all the money. I've argued that the instructors should be writing more of their own materials, fuck the publishers, print them ourselves, and sell them at cost + minor royalties + 15% (which some instructors are already doing). We're selling their books for about $20 a shot, which gives us the same margin as a $200 text written by some schmuck in bed with the publishers. Granted, we don't net as much money on the whole process as we do with the $200 book, but it's enough to keep us in business. I didn't really have a point, I'm just sick of being accused of fucking students when all I'm trying to do is make a living like everyone else. Also, e-books are fucking terrible for students. No resale, DRM'd (often expiring) to shit, and unrealistically high-priced, given the cost of production, etc. etc. etc. I cannot see myself ever advocating e-books for students; both the bookstore and the students lose, while the publishers make even more money. Bleh.
I took two years of calculus in high school. I had to buy the same book twice. The publisher apparently was releasing a new version each year, and convincing teachers to use the new one. AFAICT high school calculus is not a rapidly changing field, and the identical chapters in the book bore this out. However, what did change were the numbered problems at the end of each chapter. Homework was along the lines of "Chapter 12, problems 1-4, 6 and 10-13". If you did not have that year's version of the book, you wouldn't do the right problems. $60 (20+ years ago), spent twice. I presume the school bookstore took a cut via normal markup.
All the research on the subject points to this being an idea that isn't anywhere near ready for the prime time. Even if you use high-quality PDFs and assume people are reading on a laptop rather than a dedicated reader (to get around technical issues that reduce usability like lack of color, small size, lack of diagram support, etc.)...you still have one giant learning-related problem which no one has really done anything to solve yet.
When you study in a textbook, you unconsciously form a cognitive map of the material both in terms of where it is in the book and in terms of where it falls in relation to other topics and in relation to your study experience over the term.
When you study from an ebook, all of that goes away.
My problem is that eTextbooks suck. Sure, I like the idea of paying less, not printing as much, carrying around less paper. But the eTextbooks that I've used are poor translations of paper.
Last year, I tried a Coursesmart online textbook. Flipping from page to page has a significant delay that reminds me of e-paper. Even worse, the page was formatted like a paper book scan. Reading the thing on my laptop involved separate actions to scroll down the page and then go to the next page. Or I could flip my laptop monitor to portrait mode and read with my laptop on its side. Zooming in was not an option, because I would have had to scroll horizontally on every line. No wonder Coursesmart has such a low market share.
This year, I saw some elementary school kids using Pearson online textbooks. The user experience there is even worse. Each page is like a scan, again, but you see the page only in a small frame. When you resize your browser window, the frame doesn't resize to fill it. However, the kids have learned not to read texts (both San Francisco Unified School District and Catholic schools), so the usability problems don't bother them. Besides, they use the textbooks mainly for the questions at the end of the chapter.
Then I tried piracy. I can't find all the books that I need, but the ones that I find are, at worst, better than the legal version. For example, the PDF versions can be opened in any PDF reader, which have vastly better scrolling than the online texts. The better pirated texts use OCR, and can be opened in a program that reflows text depending on zoom and window size.
Given this track record, I don't expect the textbook publishers to create compelling eTextbooks.
Have a nice time.
Really? Save them? Do they not realize that pirates aren't actually taking anything? All they're doing is copying data. The only argument they seem to have is that artists/businesses 'lose out' on "potential profit," which doesn't make any sense. For one, it is likely impossible to steal profit that only exists in the future of an alternate dimension where the artist/business made more money. Second of all, doing so much as exercising your right as a consumer to not buy a product means that you're stealing profit that the artist/business could potentially have had. Therefore, competition between businesses and consumer choice must be eliminated because when people are allowed to choose where to shop and what to buy, profit that others could, potentially, have had is stolen.
Also, it sickens me how they put down methods that allow people without money to obtain textbooks for free (without taking anything) that, in turn, allow those people to continue with their education.
Filthy, filthy copyrapists!
The AWESOME thing about having open freshmen level textbooks is that currently the big sales of these textbooks subsidize the more obscure textbooks used in later years. So by killing the freshmen market - fewer less profitable more specialized titles will be funded!
Some people here are not thinking through what this really means. Universities are not run by school boards, and professors are not told what books to use (at real universities, at least). In condensed matter physics, for example, there are only a handful of acceptable modern textbooks. They cost a lot to buy, right now, but I doubt anyone makes serious profit on them as there's almost no market. One of the most modern and up to date books was written and edited using funds from the US government (as no one else was going to pay someone to write a graduate level textbook on the subject). The price of the book is essentially the cost and profit of the publisher (authors make no money beyond a small NSF grant, but gain major academic brownie points). Take away the publisher and let the NSF distribute this online and... you have (for the students) free textbooks.
This could result in the end of the textbook cartels. If we can get a system like this started with something publishers don't really care about, like graduate level physics textbooks, the rest will follow eventually. This is what is already happening with academic journals: physicists started a free online archive and set a precedent that publishers did not have a right to prevent free access to our (non-journal formatted) work.
I'm fine with this. I'm in a law class right now that has a printed text and a free PDF copy. I bought the printed text because I figured I'd like reading it better. I haven't even cracked the binding.
09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0
They'll have to rent a textbook which will expire at the end of the semester. And if for some reason you have to retake a class, you'll be forced to re-rent the book. College textbooks has always been a racket and publishers will use the new technology to extort as much money from the students as they can.
"You'll get nothing, and you'll like it!"
Nice try, Springer-Verlag.
Why bother with textbooks at all? Wikipedia is a far better source of knowledge.
But first, what we need is a CK12.org equivalent at the college level with a decent range of works relating to diverse fields of study.
BTW, CK12.org itself does have a few decent eBooks that seem to be at college prep or introductory undergraduate level. Not a bad start, but perhaps with some more sponsorship and discussion with the right people - there could be a spin-off with even more advanced materials. There's no reason why there couldn't be. (Definitely not an issue of quality. When I helped tutor a family friend's kid, the CK12 materials I saw relating to algebra had better presentation and writing than the books the school was using. That and a little bit of Khan Academy videos should give the kid a head start.) I think the hard part would be finding institutions that could be convinced to use free books. Tenured professors and college directors are likely just as bad if not worse with kick-backs from commercial book publishers than school boards dealing with K-12 textbooks.
and, for some godforsaken reason, ebook prices are immune to price hikes, cartelization, private interest manipulation and domination ?
these are inherent issues of capitalist systems. they wont go away by switching technologies. through bought laws and lockdowns, the private interests controlling the academia publishing now will control the ebook platform and hike up prices there too.
the only way to prevent it is to change the system.
Having used an eTextbook (after my school decided to stop mailing textbooks) for two semesters, I wouldn't wish that evil on my worse enemy.
I'd rather purchase the international edition, as its (1) generally costs far less money than the domestic version and (2) I have a physical textbook I can add to my library or sell if I want. Perhaps if they stop trying to ass-rape students with insane prices or foist eTextbooks (which unless they have interactive applications, are patently not worth the effort) on students, they might get a better reception.
Regards,
MBC1977,
A local collage here, Seton Hill, has gone completely electronic. Everyone "gets" a Mac and an iPad (http://www.setonhill.edu/techadvantage/index.cfm). The campus has changed from students walking and talking to each other to a bunch of blind mice scurrying around campus.
I especially like the part where someone actually thinks they will be able to force tenured faculty to only use books available from whatever broker they hire to supply the electronic textbooks. Or that faculty would actually get their book orders in early enough for said broker to license content that it doesn't already. It's difficult enough with the traditional model to get the faculty to order the books early enough to actually have the books shipped in from the publisher or distributor before classes begin. I can only imagine the argument between a professor and the broker representative when the professor demands on the Friday before classes that they have the book available to the students by Monday. The book from a publisher that the broker doesn't currently license content from and may not be able to get, at all, much less by Monday.
So now we can increase overall cost and force students to buy books that they wouldn't buy normally.