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Student Bookstores Beware, Amazon Comes To Purdue Campus
First time accepted submitter Kilroy1218 writes After freezing tuition past their original deadline Purdue University announced a partnership with Amazon today which aside from greatly competitive book pricing "will bring staffed customer order pickup and drop-off locations to Purdue's campus, as well as expedited shipping benefits phased in over the course of the 2014-2015 academic year." “This relationship is another step in Purdue’s efforts to make a college education more affordable for our students,” said President Mitch Daniels. “With the pressure on college campuses to reduce costs, this new way of doing business has the potential to change the book-buying landscape for students and their families.”
They didn't change the tuition after a certain deadline, they extended the time within which their tuition won't change.
In addition, this doesn't do anything to change the book-buying landscape for students. Students always had the option of buying books online through Amazon.
How long before Amazon stops selling books to the Purdue students (and Amazon's contract with Purdue prevents anyone else from selling books to the Purdue students) because Amazon thinks the book prices are too high?
Unless they're going to buy the books back, student bookstores aren't going anywhere. Gotta do something with those $4-15k/yearly in books after you're done using them...and getting $250 back.
Om, nomnomnom...
College bookstores have already become "fan gear" outlets instead of "book" stores due to online retailers. At least at our local university, which used to have a really good trade book section, and now has nothing other than texts, with a limited number of those. Amazon won this battle a long time ago, the bookstores just haven't quite figured out they are dead yet. Except when they change to become licensed sales outlets for branded fan items.
I just visited http://purdue.amazon.com/ and they're offering way more than just books.
Like look at those designer hipster shoes! That's EXACTLY what a cash-strapped college student should be spending his student loans on. Those shoes will really make him ironically stand out, while emphasizing the tolerance and uniqueness he embodies.
And look at those trendy designer notepads! That's EXACTLY what a cash-strapped college student should be spending her student loans on. Those pink, purple and light blue notepads will really enhance her ability to record lectures, and will surely boost her studying capacity and efficiency.
Then there's the gold Playstation controller. It's just sweeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeet!
Here's an interesting detail not in the original post. According to what the bookstore director told me, the UC Davis bookstore only earned around $140 thousand in affiliate commissions in the first 6 months. Considering that the bookstore had revenues of around 20 million dollars last fiscal year (July to June 2014), the partnership doesn't look like it is worth anything to the bookstore. http://the-digital-reader.com/...
Every university bookstore and publisher of college textbooks.
Burn in bloody fucking hell.
...bitch!
Came close to ruining Indiana (not that much was there to ruin) and now his crab-pinchers are choking Purdue to death... Happy I'm not a Boilermaker.
Will they allow professor's to assign Hachette textbooks? Can student's order Hachette study guides?
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
do this themselves... negotiate best prices possible for the books, even better than amazon or anyone else.. i mean, *they* are the ones generating the revenue for the publishers.. how is it even possible for amazon to get lower prices? if one publisher dont play ball, you fire them and go with someone else that's cheaper for similar material. easy peasy. fuck amazon. keep commercial shit like that off campus, please.
Holy Cow! What is your course of study where the books are that much?
I don't know what the books cost - my kid handles it himself, but I haven't heard the outcry I would expect for a 2nd year Mechanical Engineering major to be screaming if it were anywhere near that.
At any rate, I do know that he buys his books "online" (Amazon and others) and may or may not sell them at the end of the term, since the online purchases were so much cheaper to start with vs list price at the campus book store.
(Not to mention the nasty habit of "revisions" happening all the time. I do remember one $200-ish AP Chem book for HS we got online for quite a bit less... had the same material, but the pg numbers were off and the exercises were a bit different... obvious changes to make the book "obsolete". I wonder how much is the Author and how much is the Publisher making these minor tweaks to create artificial obsolescence?)
This issue is a bit more complicated than you think.
My only reaction to this piece is: why is Amazon investing and 're-inventing' 19th-century technology? Why do major universities of the world even have paper textbooks? Their professors' course material should all be online, and in many cases it already is. That way it is accessible to everyone who needs it and pays for it. (no back orders!) The other benefit is that the author can update the text to reflect new information, and everyone has the new version instantaneously. And no more rapacious profits for publishing companies who push new, trivially updated editions of standard textbooks upon academic departments which then force students to buy them.
Or you can pay $15-$20 more for a hard copy that you own and can resell and never gets locked out.
Do the student bookstores have anything to do with setting the price? Is it not the publishers setting a large % of the price? Amazon can just beat them over the head with its purchasing power until the price per unit becomes acceptable. Why not re-jig these student bookstores to be the 'staffed customer order pickup and drop-off locations' for Amazon, instead of what sounds like replacing them with a new storefront?
Perhaps because the students are far more likely to actually open a paper textbook than the DRM encumbered eBooks. If the professor is building the course from scratch, then putting his or her notes online makes sense, but a textbook is not just notes, it is (or should be) a valuable reference to complement what is covered in class. It would also be silly to continually reinvent the wheel by having all professors write their own textbooks. If they don't write their own, they must reward the peer who wrote it, else everyone will play the "not it" game and it won't be written. My hope is that the transition to online homework systems may remove the main impetus for rapid revision - refreshing the problem sets in introductory courses as their keys leak.
You know what else is going to happen...Amazon will temporarily save the students money, the prices will go down by cutting out the bookstore overhead, and the publishers will jack up (or off) their overpriced books so that they cost from Amazon what they did from ye olde bricke ande mortare store. And plenty of people will lose their jobs to the Amazon robots just as before.
In my experience ebooks are great for things like novels, where it's mostly paragraph after paragraph of text. But for textbooks that have a lot of images, tables, diagrams, mathematical formulae, source code snippets, etc. the formatting doesn't always come out looking nice.
I think the epub format is basically zip'd html, and the kindle format is not that different. Text gets resized and reflowed according to the reader's screen size, and this means that things move around and don't look the way the author or publisher intended them to. I imagine this would be a problem for a lot of university textbooks, especially in fields like science.
This was posted over an hour ago, and there are no comments yet. Let's see if posting works...
How about you really help students save by encouraging your faculty to develop and use open source text books?
Their professors' course material should all be online, and in many cases it already is. That way it is accessible to everyone who needs it and pays for it.
For the life of the course. If, Chthulu forbid! you actually intended to learn something from the course, and wanted to go back and review material after the term ended, often your online resources have been terminated.
I've got books from courses taken years ago, since I tended not to sell back. They aren't even remotely related to my career or daily life. But occasionally I'll take one off the shelf and page through one. They're a lot more entertaining now that I'm not under pressure to use them for class.
Anally rape you harder than the student bookstores do? I doubt it. College was a couple decades ago for me and my ass still hurts.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
You think right. HTML is a content markup language, not a format-preserving one. And when you're dealing with varying display sizes, that can be an advantage, although there's also an option to make PDF documents reflow.
The main problems come from graphics, which typically either get butchered or displayed at unreadable sizes.
If the book's graphics were designed with smaller screen sizes in mind, it's possible to make them more readable, but of course, there are limits.
"The book-buying landscape for students and their families" has already been changed, by torrents and usenet.
When I was in college I had to pay every single cent of the school fees / book / a roof over my head / food, everything by myself
I had no parents to foot the bill for me nor any church or any charitable organization for I was a refugee from China freshly landed in America, and I was paying the "International Student" tuition fee which was 10X the school fee the "local students" were paying
Other than working 3 different jobs while studying full time, I had to find ways to skim on expenses, and one of the ways was on books
A lot of professors earn their side incomes by forcing students to get the latest edition of school text --- for example, Version 14 of an economic book
What I did was I went to old book stores and search for previous versions of the same book (by the same author), and bought version 5 of the same book (couples of years old, of course), and went back to the school, borrow the newest edition from my classmate and started a chapter by chapter (sometimes page by page) comparison.
Most often the difference between the old edition and the newest version was an additional chapter and/or some revisions of some other chapters, for those I simply xerox the pages from the new edition and clipped them onto the old edition that I bought
The difference in price however, was staggering. The latest edition might cost upwards to $150 or so, per book, while the old edition which I got from old book store may cost me only $12
Another method is to "borrow" the book from the school library and then "forget" to return that book for the entire semester
Those were amongst the many tricks I used to get by my college days
Retail moves to national chain ... news at 11!
They would be supporting, collaborating on, and using freely available textbooks.
[Efforts such as http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Main_Page]
Unfortunately students are usually new to the political game and aren't adept at bringing political pressure to bear. The cynical me wants to say it is part of the process of recieving an 'education'.
You really don't understand how the textbook publishing business work do you. Go do some research then come back and post. 19th century technology, really, try the internal combustion engine....moron....
At least Amazon, as a competitor, has a motivation to lower prices. The incumbent publishers have been raping Americans for half a century. Why does the 7th edition of stewart's calculus cost $201? Well, we picked the book because it's the best (we don't have to buy it; the department buys my copy) and I'm pretty sure Dr. Stewart isn't making most of that $200.
Purdue hasn't had a winning Big 10 record since 2006, when they went 5-3.
Except for rapidly-evolving subjects, encourage professors to use "old" textbooks or, whatever the subject matter, encourage professors to use "open source" textbooks when they are available.
If publishers balk at reprinting old textbooks at "old prices," lobby Congress to allow colleges to reprint old textbooks and pay a royalty based on the lowest published price during the book's lifetime.
Under this kind of "book market" most Freshman and Sophomores won't have more than 1 or 2 classes where they have to buy expensive textbooks.
As for the interactive software that increasingly accompanies college textbooks and in many cases is part of the reason they are so expensive - college professors need to decide if the software is cost-effective before recommending it. In some cases, it might be cost-effective but in most cases outside of specialized situations or advanced coursework, it won't be.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
This doesn't fix the root cause of the problem. Why are text books so expensive? You can purchase textbooks from over seas with the nice logo above the UPC code that says "NOT FOR SALE IN THE UNITED STATES". Text books over seas are drastically lower in price. The information on the pages are exactly the same as the book you would buy in the US. Why can the publisher charge more for the same information? Why not find cheaper ways for producing the books? Change the paper, ink, revisions, etc. All this does is change the vendor and reduce the amount of overhead for the textbook. The college is doing what it can to reduce the cost. But if the colleges put pressure on the publishers things might change.
I presume others had too. UT made there old bookstore a giant souvenor/brand-wear shop.
Before you spout such stupid bullshit, it would help to look things up (Stewart is the best? Gimme a break, I teach calculus, too, by the way). And Stewart made about $30M on his worthless creation. Maybe he does not make all $200 on it but he sure makes enough. It would also help if Stewart was at least familiar with th material he is trying to teach in his ... book. There are a number of wrong proofs and silly arguments in it (say the proof of the second derivative test for functions of two variables).
Hey University Bookstore? Remember when you successfully lobbied to shut down the low-cost seller of Purdue merc that set up shop next to you in '06?
Pretty nasty precedent you set.
I never bought/sold a single book to/from the college bookstore. What a rip off, both ways.
Amazon and EBay (had some off-shoot media site, not the main auction site). Paid far less for my books and sold them for at least twice as much as the bookstore would have given.
Used to tell lots of people but sadly, most did not care - lets face it - most of them were spending other peoples money anyway.
I much prefer the thoughtful posts prior to yours that helped me understand the limitation of current e-book technology such as formatting problems and other limitations, such as expiration of access to the electronic textbook. You chose to call me a moron. That really doesn't advance the discussion. As far as "19-century technology," I am talking about the modern idea of mass-produced textbooks for use in schools, with machine-made bindings, pages of paper, not velum or papyrus, along with layouts, graphics, tables of contents, indices, that we would recognize. I'm not talking about Gutenberg's Bible. If you're such an expert on the textbook publishing business, please enlighten us with your gift of knowledge. I do know this: textbooks as currently conceived are an anachronism and will be largely supplanted by electronic media in some form in the next 50 years. Anachronism. That's a big word. You might want to look it up. Unless you work for a big publishing house, in which case you don't want to know what that means, because you have a vested interest in ass-raping a few more generations of college students. Amazon may have it's disadvantages, but watching it eat the lunch of self-serving dicks like you is quite satisfying.
Wasn't planning on trying to go there, but I am now.
Also, it's real easy to go to the next or previous page on my Nook. It's hard to jump around, like I tend to do for technical books. I much prefer those to be paper.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
Actually, with 21st-century technology, a book like that isn't all that expensive to produce, even in relatively small quantities. Providing a textbook in electronic form really isn't going to save the publisher much money. Therefore, it isn't going to change textbook prices much, since the difference in costs is trivial compared to what they charge.
The issue is that students are effectively forced to buy stuff at monopoly prices.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
Hmmm, wasn't it Mitch Daniels who worked a deal with Amazon to collect sales tax on Indiana sales?
Wonder what incentives the deal included...
So, does this mean no books from Hachette (or whatever publisher Amazon is currently battling) will be able to be included on the curriculum?