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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."
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.
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.
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 $80,000 for just 1 year of books, in one subject, only freshmen level, at one university.
So obviously it's millions per year per subject nationwide. Don't you think for a couple million we could get someone to write a free textbook, and then we can save millions year after year.
It's almost as insane as paying so much for journal subscriptions, instead of switching to open publications.
Absolutely serious when I say this, my college Fraternity used pledges to do just that (probably still do).
All the guys taking a given class would throw in a few bucks for one copy of the text, then as if by magic we would receive an electronic version.
Terrible copyright infringement, pyramid scheming, slavery, hazing, and all that. But it was so convenient.
For a few years (as a grad student) I taught at a community college to augment my pathetic stipend. I was given a remarkable amount of control over the courses. Initially I made it a point to not assign readings out of an overpriced book, the first semester I'd say that a third of my readings came from online articles. Almost as soon as the other faculty discovered what I was doing I was threatened with termination and a letter was sent to my committee chair at the university (where it was promptly thrown away). Ostensibly I was hurting the students by not forcing them to read material that the other entry level courses were. Realistically I was threatening their profit margin by not using the most up-to-date edition of a 50 year old text.
"Never let your sense of morals prevent you from doing what is right" - Salvor Hardin
My college professor for the GE philosophy course I had to take was also the department chair and union president. He said that the other professors were all scumbags and that there is nothing we need in a 150$ textbook that isn't available in a cheap book that may be many years old for the bulk of GE type courses. He also said that charging students for things like Scantron sheets is just another way to punish the students despite all the fees they already pay. To back it up, the only required book was 15$ at Borders(and 0.50 used online) and tests were done on lined paper(for essay) or on an old fashioned circle your answer multiple-choice. Because of his status, no one could threaten him with termination and he'd probably spit in their face if someone tried to. I wish there were more people like him in the college teaching ranks