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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.
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/...
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.
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.
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.
#DeleteChrome
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
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.
It costs extra to have editors redact all the bits about evolution.
I am becoming gerund, destroyer of verbs.
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.
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