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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!"
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.
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.
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.
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.
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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.
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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.
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.
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.
Is that something that is taught in an undergraduate Calculus sequence? You know Calc 1-3? Nope.
An undergraduate Calculus sequence can be taught quite well with a Dover classic for $20 and it'd probably be superior at that to today's overpriced crap that does nothing but put extra money in the pocket of some academic.
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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
Yet the professors are told that they need to use the new material and they force it down on the students ...
I'm not interested in forcing a new textbook on my students, and I'm quite happy to allow them to use an older edition. The problem is that those older editions become harder and harder to find as time passes. After a semester or two it doesn't matter if I force the students to use the newest edition, because only the newest edition is available.
As many others have suggested, profs could be providing their own reading as pdfs. Which I plan to do, eventually, when I have the time. But since this kind of activity isn't recognized as scholarly work unless it actually gets published by an actual publishing company, I can't afford the time, at least until I get tenure.