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.”

Comments

Misleading Freezing Statement

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Misleading Freezing Statement

[buddyglass]

Students always had the option of buying books online through Amazon.

Not when I was in school we didn't. That said, yes, it's been an option for some time now. On the other hand, there's no guarantee every textbook will be available. Perhaps this agreement guarantees that any textbook assigned to a Purdue student will be carried. The university may also have negotiated a group discount.

Re:Misleading Freezing Statement

[oh_my_080980980]

Really douche bag? Most college textbooks are only available through the campus bookstore. They even try and cut down on the used book market with courses requiring students to purchase new editions. Take your head out of your ass. This is a good thing.

Re:Misleading Freezing Statement

[matbury]

I don't think Amazon, as evil as they are, are the real culprit in this scenario. Educational publishing has always been used as a way to fleece learners for extra cash. I doubt Purdue are any exception. In contrast, non-profit, egalitarian educational publishing is quite different, e.g. a course text book, authored by one of the leading researchers in his field, is free to download and print as the whole book or chapter by chapter: http://www.aupress.ca/index.ph... It's Creative Commons licensed so learners can do whatever they like with it within the generous terms of the licence: http://creativecommons.org/lic... They can also buy a professionally printed and bound copy of it for $39.95 CAD. All the publications from Athabasca University Press are like this. So why is Purdue charging $100s per student for text books? And why do we have to have new editions every year or so when undergraduate studies are mostly on topics and subject matter that are well-established and don't change very much?

All I can see here is Amazon trying to get a bigger foothold in the market for this cash cow.

Well

[Mashiki]

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.

Re:Well

[Obfuscant]

Unless they're going to buy the books back, student bookstores aren't going anywhere.

Around here the buyback is done by folks who set tents up on the streetcorners, not the bookstore.

Re:Well

[Albanach]

The US textbook market is crazy.

An easy example is Campbell's Biology Plus MasteringBiology - a pretty standard 1st year Biology textbook. Amazon UK price $87.56. Price for the US equivalent is $190.40.

Re:Well

[thieh]

At least it is better than Aspen where you pay them money and you have to return the case book at the end of the term

Re:Well

[Anonymous Coward]

It helps to make apples to apples comparisons - you are comparing a text alone to a text with online support suite, something that costs around $75-125 without buying the physical book.

Here's the probability text I'll be teaching out of this fall:
http://www.amazon.com/First-Course-Probability-9th/dp/032179477X/ $145.79
http://www.amazon.co.uk/First-Course-Probability-Sheldon-Ross/dp/032179477X/ $191.80

Similarly, here's the most popular 3-semester calculus text:
http://www.amazon.com/Calculus-James-Stewart/dp/0538497815/ $223.41
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Calculus-James-Stewart/dp/0538497815/ $270.53

Re:Well

[wiredlogic]

It costs extra to have editors redact all the bits about evolution.

Re:Well

[hazem]

Amazon already buys a lot of textbooks back, and for about the same crummy price the school bookstore gives you. If you look over at the right side, there's often a "trade in your item" with a proposed price.

Re:Well

[ArmoredDragon]

Actually Amazon usually gave me WAY better buyback rates than that eFollett shit store that holds a monopoly on most campuses. Granted Amazon's buybacks were in the form of Amazon gift cards, it wasn't a bad deal at all considering that you just reinvest that money into new books on Amazon, which were always cheaper anyways. And even if you didn't do that, I can't think of any one product I'd use that I can't find on Amazon, who usually ends up being cheaper than B&M stores anyways.

(Oh, and that eFollett company claims rather boldly that their book prices are low priced, when in reality they're perhaps the most expensive book store that exists. What's shitty is they're almost always the exclusive seller of those one off books that your professor may have written himself, and they sometimes won't even buy them back, or if they do it's at a stupidly low price.)

Re:Well

[Albanach]

I believe I linked to both copies that included the MasteringBiology. The only difference seemed to be that US one might have a copy of the text as an e-book. I doubt making an encrypted PDF or equivalent merits the huge price difference.

Still your comment about the probability book is interesting. I wonder if this is particular to mathematics?

Here' s another example from Chemistry: Organic Chemistry by Bruice. In the US it's hardcover, in the UK paperback.

Amazon UK price $99.96
Amazon US price $240.60

it's possible that the difference is the publisher. Coincidentally, the two books I list are published by Pearson who are headquartered in the UK. It may be they price their books for the independent markets, whereas US publishers are more likely to stick to one price? That's pure speculation though and we'd need quite a few more data points to figure that one out.

Re:Well

[drinkypoo]

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.

If your student bookstore will buy the book back, Amazon probably will too. The bookstore won't even always take the books, e.g. if they don't think they can sell them. Meanwhile, you are free to list your book on Amazon yourself, and Amazon will help you sell it to another student.

Re:Well

[rgbscan]

I always buy a used book from Amazon. Anyone paying full sticker at the campus book store is getting robbed. Last years edition is almost always fine (unless the instructor is using the accompanying courseware - but generally my school has stayed away from that). The ebooks especially are a bad deal since you just rent them and can't re-sell them.

For my statistics class this fall the text is: Statistical Techniques in Business and Economics 16th Edition, ISBN 0078020522. $292 at the campus bookstore, $248 new at Amazon, $227 used at Amazon. Previous edition (15e - approved by Instructor) used at Amazon? $44 bucks.

I've done this through all 4 years of school and am about to graduate. Only twice did I have instructors require the on-line courseware. At $100 bucks a pop, it was still cheaper just to buy the code by itself and go with the older edition book.

Re:Well

[oh_my_080980980]

Everywhere else, it's done by the bookstore.

Beware?

[Obfuscant]

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.

Where's the money?

[Nate the greatest]

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/...

Re:Where's the money?

[Anonymous Coward]

You are comparing revenues to profits. $140k in commissions looks a lot nicer than $0 in commissions for those that buy from Amazon and at 2 percent commission, the revenues through this portal amounted to $7 million, or about 1/3 of the amount sold directly.

Re:Where's the money?

[drew870mitchell]

Do you have a vendetta against Amazon? I was about to call you out for mixing semiannual and annual, and profits and revenues, but then I recognized your name from your front page submission "Why the Public Library Beats Amazon."

Re:Where's the money?

[Nate the greatest]

A vendetta? Not at all. I just thought that was an interesting detail which might interest slashdotters. If it came out badly phrased then it was because I was distracted by other things.

Burn in hell

[Anonymous Coward]

Every university bookstore and publisher of college textbooks.

Burn in bloody fucking hell.

Re:Burn in hell

[phantomfive]

Dude just get a student loan. $500 a semester for books won't kill you (yeah, it truly is a ripoff, but it's not worth getting emotional about).

Re:Burn in hell

[phantomfive]

I wish I had taken welding.

Hachete

[goombah99]

Will they allow professor's to assign Hachette textbooks? Can student's order Hachette study guides?

Re:Hachete

[Anonymous Coward]

Never mind that, will they stock Eats, Shoots & Leaves and other guides to avoiding the use of the Grocer's Apostrophe?

Retard.

why the fuck cant purdue

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:why the fuck cant purdue

[Joe_Dragon]

they get kickbacks and some professors write there own books and force you to buy new ones each year or you fail the class.

Re:why the fuck cant purdue

[digsbo]

You're kidding, right? Don't you know there are gentlemen's agreements between doctoral programs and publishers and schools to require the "newest" edition of the book each year just so the publisher and PhD can charge for new books which have changed only to change pagination? You think they'd actually want to save kids money? Do you also believe that universities want to educate students to help them think critically and independently?

Re:why the fuck cant purdue

[hazem]

I suspect because Purdue is in the business of selling education services and not being a book vendor. They'd have to hire people to be experts in the business of book sales. It's the same way that most universities don't grow their own food or grow their own forests to build the desks and tables. Sure they could do that, but it's typically more efficient to leave it someone who specializes in that particular thing.

As a book vendor, Amazon has so much more clout than a single university. Maybe a university has 500 students needing to buy a calculus book. Amazon maybe has a market of 500,000 students to sell a calculus book to. They have a lot more leverage than a single university does.

Re:why the fuck cant purdue

[digsbo]

They adopt new editions because they cannot ensure that students have access to older editions.

Baloney. I was in college long enough to see MULTIPLE examples of books with swapped chapters 2-3 every edition. 2 editions old was identical to current. And there's NO REASON to swap the chapters except to cause pagination confusion, and require the new edition. Most of the books for math and science had answer keys in the back. Texts for majors are revised more infrequently because there's not as much profit to be made in books that only 4% of the students will buy, so resources are put toward the general ed and widely used texts.

$4-15K/year

[NotQuiteReal]

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?)

Re:$4-15K/year

[93 Escort Wagon]

Another shady practice is faculty writing their own textbook and then requiring it be used when they teach related courses, when it appears there's a well-accepted standard text in use by 90% of other schools where the particular subject is taught.

Re:$4-15K/year

[anarcobra]

When I was doing Electrical Engineering we needed about 10 to 15 books per year on average I think. Each book was between 100 and 200 Euros on average. Of course there were the usual texts by the professor or whatever, but those weren't that expensive usually. As you can imagine, by the second year most students didn't bother buying all the books anymore. Usually all you needed was the slides and maybe a couple of pages of the book that you could copy from somewhere. If during the classes you noticed that the book really would be useful, that's when you'd buy it.

Re:$4-15K/year

[AthanasiusKircher]

Another shady practice is faculty writing their own textbook and then requiring it be used when they teach related courses, when it appears there's a well-accepted standard text in use by 90% of other schools where the particular subject is taught.

While in some cases this may actually be "shady," if a professor writes a book that actually gets published by reputable publisher, then you may be getting something that's more relevant and tailored to the class you're actually taking, rather than some generic textbook. (Only once, in grad school, did I ever purchase a book authored by the professor that I thought was completely useless -- we only used it for about a week of the class. But that also was not a textbook -- it was a monograph, and I now know the royalty rates for books like that, which are pretty darn minimal for academic books. This professor wasn't exactly making a lot of money off of having the 8 students in her grad seminar buy the book.)

As an undergrad, I don't remember so much of that, though. (My profs who actually wrote textbooks were mostly respected leaders in their fields and thus were actually the primary authors of the "well-accepted standard text," but that has to do with where I went to undergrad.) I do remember quite a few times when a professor would require a "coursepack" that was printed at the campus bookstore or some nearby printshop which was often a small fraction of the price that an actual textbook would be. Sometimes it was a collection of readings, and sometimes it was just the professor's notes. But I was generally glad to shell out less money for that than for an actual textbook.

I would also note that I've taught at the university level, and I've been involved in preparing coursepacks and have used them myself. In that case, I can assure you that even though you're getting a printout of my notes and handouts, etc., and maybe some exercises I've designed, I'm making NO profit whatsoever from it. The cost of the coursepack is almost always determined by the printing and binding cost, along with any rights secured by the printshop to reproduce selected readings, articles, etc. Maybe some professors get some kickback from it, but I certainly don't, and I'm not sure I could even request that at the printshop without doing something sketchy.

Perhaps you had some professors who were actually making extra money by publishing through a "vanity press" and then forcing you to buy their book -- if so, I do think that's a bit shady.

Re:$4-15K/year

[AthanasiusKircher]

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?

I know some people who have written standard textbooks in a couple different fields. The general impression I've gotten from them is that they are usually NOT in favor of creating new editions all the time. Generally there are some kinks to work out in the first edition, but definitely by the second or third edition, things should be pretty set. The authors I've talked to have mentioned they are often under pressure from publishers to make changes to justify new editions. And, in fact, that's often why you see books start to accumulate new authors after a few editions -- it used to be "Intro to X by A" and now it's "Intro to X by A and B, 4th ed." and then a few years later it's "Intro to X by A, B, and C, 9th ed." Sometimes the old authors just think the book is fine, and they finally say no to doing anything new, so the book gets handed off to someone else to "revise" and bring in some new ideas or exercises.

People often overestimate the profits that professors earn from textbooks. Sure, those who write the really standard books in very popular fields (like the standard intro calc or bio textbooks or whatever) are probably making a lot of royalties. But once you get beyond those intro classes or get into more obscure fields, the number of copies sold may not be that big, particularly if there is competition among textbooks (which there usually is, even in smaller fields).

I'm not saying they aren't making money. But I've heard from multiple textbook authors (smaller markets) that they aren't making enough money to justify doing new editions and revisions as much as publishers would like them to. And keep in mind that most academics see their jobs as primarily research, not textbook writing, so they'd rather be doing something for real in their field rather than coming up with another set of stupid exercise questions for an intro book.

So, I'd say publishers are definitely in favor of creating artificial obsolescence. Authors? Maybe sometimes, but not as often as you might think.

Re:$4-15K/year

[AthanasiusKircher]

By the way, after I wrote my comment, I did some searching. Until now, I was not aware of how "customized textbook editions" for specific universities has apparently become a thing in some places.

Needless to say, I'm appalled by this if it involves professors getting a kickback for including a chapter of their own in the "customized" edition. In my field, to my knowledge the standard intro textbooks have never come in any sort of "customized edition," so I didn't even know this was possible.

I could possibly see the justification for customizing a book to suit a particular syllabus, and as I could see how that might be useful. But if my department were getting a kickback for that, I'd feel very weird about that. And I probably wouldn't do that myself, because I have actually been rather sensitive to book prices in my classes and wouldn't want to prevent students from buying a used copy or selling theirs if they wanted to. (I'd rather prepare my own supplements anyway.)

Also, I do know there was a federal law passed a few years ago that required disclosure of textbook requirements from colleges ahead of time, so students would know what is actually required and there could be better monitoring of textbook abuses... I just had no idea things were this crazy.

Re:$4-15K/year

[necro81]

As a counter-annecdote: when I was taking a course in Fourier theory, the professor teaching the course was in the process of writing his own textbook on the subject. Each week or so we got a printed copy of the appropriate chapter. He had been working on it for a while, and it was more or less complete: with huge numbers of embedded mathematics (including lengthy derivations), graphs produced in Matlab, all properly typeset using LaTeX. It was a fantastic "text" (although not exactly in book form), and better than the actual assigned text. It cost us, the students, nothing (other than the costs of being a grad student, monetary and otherwise).

Just for the heck of it, I did some searching to see if he ever got it published. It's available for pre-order now (more than a decade since I took the course). I guess it'll be the required text now, and retails north of $100, but at least it will be good.

Re:$4-15K/year

[wwphx]

I was taking a refresher algebra course at NMSU, not advanced stuff. Used copies of the text were in the campus bookstore at over $100 a pop. Looking up the ISBN on Amazon? Nothing. Turns out that NMSU provided about 10 pages of additional questions at the end of the book, making it unique.

Rat bastards, all of 'em.

Newsflash! Amazon to Provide Discount Buggy Whips

[MAurelius]

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.

Re:Newsflash! Amazon to Provide Discount Buggy Whi

[Joe_Dragon]

Or you can pay $15-$20 more for a hard copy that you own and can resell and never gets locked out.

Why is this 'Student Bookstores Beware'?

[zennling]

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?

Misleading Freezing Statement

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Newsflash! Amazon to Provide Discount Buggy Whi

[afgam28]

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.

Hey Purdue!

[ZipK]

How about you really help students save by encouraging your faculty to develop and use open source text books?

Re:Hey Purdue!

[RabidReindeer]

I recently was affronted by a "modern" Spanish-language course. The actual books were awful, the course itself was online - a very bad idea, I think for a subject where the ultimate test in mastery is how well you can converse with teachers and fellow students. And this particular abomination is the almost universal text for colleges in about 5 states. Oh, and this is one of those courses where half your learning materials disappear in a puff of smoke at the end of the term.

Spanish is a living language and is used in the contexts of changing cultures, so its textbooks do need updating occasionally. However, the fundamentals remain the same and there's no reason why an open-source, even crowd-sourced text couldn't be adopted. Certainly no reason for it to require a multi-decade mortgage to buy.

The same can be said for a lot of mathematics.

Other subjects are more volatile and it makes sense to have specialized, continually-updated texts. And to have to pay for it. But give us a break on the basics!

Re:Newsflash! Amazon to Provide Discount Buggy Whi

[RabidReindeer]

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.

And They'll Do What?

[Greyfox]

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.

Re:Newsflash! Amazon to Provide Discount Buggy Whi

[RabidReindeer]

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.

College students smarter than this

[musth]

"The book-buying landscape for students and their families" has already been changed, by torrents and usenet.

Re:College students smarter than this

[oh_my_080980980]

Yeah 'cuz all your textbooks are available via torrents....*eye roll*

Lesson from a poor student

[Anonymous Coward]

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

Re:Lesson from a poor student

[david_thornley]

That's not a felony. To be a felony, he'd have to distribute them to somebody else, among other things. That's copyright infringement, and the textbook publishers could sue and win, but it isn't criminal copyright infringement.

Re:Lesson from a poor student

[zeroduck]

This. Entirely.

Another few ideas from when I was in school:

• Make friends. Split the cost of the book between two (or more) people. Or borrow it from someone who already took the class. Buy them a beer.
• Amazon, eBay, or other online sellers are ALWAYS much cheaper than the bookstore. With the small caveat that if you're required to buy some online access code, you're fucked.
• International editions are often much cheaper, and the covers in a foreign language are a good conversation starter.
• Don't buy the book right away because sometimes the Prof doesn't even mention it in the class. It helps if you know someone who has already taken the class.
• Sometimes there are better (free) resources available online (and this depends on how closely the prof follows the book).

Obviously, not all those apply if you want to keep the book. But, for the love of the FSM, don't shop at the campus bookstore unless you have no other option.

Re:How long before Amazon...

[Richard_at_work]

If you are referring to the Hachette spat, you might want to reexamine your understanding of the situation - no Hachette books have been removed from sale, you can still buy every Hachette book that you could before. What Amazon did do is remove pre-orders from unreleased Hachette books - you can still buy them when they are released, they just aren't allowing you to preorder - they are under no obligation to allow preorders on books either.

Retail moves to national chain ...

[cascadingstylesheet]

Retail moves to national chain ... news at 11!

Re:Newsflash! Amazon to Provide Discount Buggy Whi

[oh_my_080980980]

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....

You want cheaper textbooks?

[davidwr]

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.

Root Cause

[Orio6284]

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.

UT Austin outsourced bookstore to Barnes&Noble

[peter303]

I presume others had too. UT made there old bookstore a giant souvenor/brand-wear shop.

Re:Newsflash! Amazon to Provide Discount Buggy Whi

[MAurelius]

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.

Sending in my application today

[websta]

Wasn't planning on trying to go there, but I am now.

Re:Newsflash! Amazon to Provide Discount Buggy Whi

[david_thornley]

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.

Re:Newsflash! Amazon to Provide Discount Buggy Whi

[david_thornley]

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.