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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.
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.
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.
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
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
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!
...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
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.
RIP America
July 4, 1776 - September 11, 2001
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
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
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.
You cannot sell your paper notes it is the intellectual property of your professor who made up the course material... haha according to some of the profs here at my school
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
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."
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.
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.
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.