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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.
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.
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.
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!
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.
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.