This works perfectly with my plans anyway. I would rather save up my money for Christmas gifts now and splurge the income tax refund check then (nothing better than having the US taxpayers subsidise my gaming habit). Too, I suspect there'll be more backwards compatibility issues dealt with by then. (Yes, I know; why whine about BC when I have an xbox already? Because my xbox has suffered mightily at my hands these last few years [not to mention my damn roommate's cat fur floating up all over the place] and is very much so going on the fritz very soon, soon enough that I went ahead and bought a cheap $30 dvd player to get me through till x360 funds come in.)
So really, by the time I get ready to buy, there'll be more nextgen games, probably better BC, and maybe even a price drop (because really, I'm looking more at next summer than next spring).
I would almost agree with your anonymous self, except the guy posted a very poorly written (as in: my 16 year old kid could write better, and she basically flunked 9th grade) answer saying how smart he was by buying international texts for college. Is there no standard for getting in college anymore? Do they just take everyone that comes along with the bucks now?
No, what's even more infuriating is your horrible spelling and the fact that you are apparently a college student. I hope you don't go to a state funded school in Virginia, because I'd hate to think my tax dollars are subsidising your "education".
C'mon: to, intermediat, funy, listy & dense, explination, dollers (omfg)...
Did you buy the international edition of the freakin' English book, too?
No, I'm pretty sure it's you who doesn't see the point. Having worked this business for a year longer than most people are in undergrad, I have found that people who hustle their books to other students instead of selling it back to the store tend to end up with a bunch of books they didn't sell to students. Without fail, every June I see some new graduate show up with a tub full of books that are absolutely obsolete. You are also not taking into account the concept that people drop classes, making that textbook worthless to them. If you buy it from the bookstore, you can return it; if you buy it from shady guy on the corner, you've got a big paperweight. Granted, our return policy is pretty liberal (you have till the last day to drop classes, provided it is with your reciept and the book is in the same condition it left the store in -- roughly 6 weeks); but considering how many people make that course change I think our students are smart enough to know that saving a mighty $3.75 is not as good as being able to get all of your cash back for the other book you need.
As for selling the book back before exam being a bad idea, if you have to have the text right up until the day of the exam, then you probably haven't learned anything at all. I find that people who come in up to two weeks before the exam get the most money, and the curve decreases and falls off a cliff the day of the exam (because that's when everyone comes and sells back, and we've already bought enough other used copies to stop giving the good prices).
And when you say "a lot of students", considering our company rakes in about $8million a year and there's still another bookstore in town doing around $3million, I'd have to say -- your "a lot" isn't all that much in the larger scheme of things.
... and you'd be right, except on these custom publications the bookstore usually loses money because there are only 10% returns rate on these books (as opposed to a regular textbook from Wiley or Pearson, where you can get 100% of your cost back provided you return the book within 365 days from the invoice date). Too, that's an $18 cost. Apply a 25% markup (standard for the new text markup) and then add a few more points on top of that because you aren't going to be able to return everything. Add to that the factor that these books rarely are reused from semester to semester, to say nothing about using them from year to year and you've just killed off the used book market for this item (no buyback value because it's obsolete the semester after it's adopted). So, one of these custom books could cost the student about $25 with a probable $0 buyback value. Winner: publisher.
Now, let's look at an alternate scenario: the professor picks a book that is about 1-2 years old and costs new $100. That book will sell used for $75. The student (with proper dilligence and timing, see my comments elsewhere in this thread about selling books back on the day of the exam) will get back $50 in buyback. Net cost to the student: $25. Winner: student & bookstore.
Ah yes, the old microthink method. The difference is that through your example there are only a certain number of students that will get exposed to your advertising, be it through posters or one of the internet board swaps. By selling it to your bookstore, you are selling it to not just the students in your area, but students across the country as well. Most bookstores buy a certain number for their shelves and the rest are bought for a third party used bookseller. In some cases, those same books get bought back by the bookstore from the 3rd party, but more often than not those books get sent somewhere else in the region to be used by an institution there.
And again, I assure you: $20 is the "hi, you're stupid" offer price. Take your books to the bookstore even a week before the final. If that book has been adopted for the next term, you will get at least 50% of new (even if your book was bought used) for buyback. This isn't something just my store does; this is a college bookstore standard. The trick is to go early and be lucky enough to have professors who adopt the same text every semester.
And just to stay consistant, at my store the $125 new text would cost $93.75 used, and we'd pay between $62.50 and $37.50 (depending on when you came in and demand) in buyback. If there was a glut of used copies on the market, chances are we would lower our price to down around $70 for used.
That is an interesting study, to be sure. However, the apparent proposed solution to the problems (online texts with updates every so often) isn't quite the soothing balm the author intends it to be. Certainly, etexts would reduce immediate costs, but the cynic in me says that eventually those etexts would be running the price of a real book. Publishers are all about getting as much money for the product as possible (and that makes sense, in a free market sort of way). But don't ever kid yourself; those educational publishers aren't in the biz because of some highminded sense of "we're doing the right thing for the kids, and people like me, by golly" -- to them books are nothing more than "white bricks". They don't care what is in them, so long as it sells, and the more the better.
There is also a law of supply and demand at work here. Stephen King's latest hardbound book sells for $25 because 1. they have millions of them floating around and 2. the book is not as high a quality as a textbook. Now granted, textbooks don't need to be bulletproof and able to withstand an atomic assault, but they are going to get used more than the King book, so they need to be a little more resiliant. What really bothers me about this line of thinking are the $100 softbound books -- but then you're paying for the content, right?
There's no easy solution, short of those professors who know their subject matter to write their own texts (still expensive but more of the information presented will actually be covered in class, and typically not as expensive as traditionally printed texts) or those who know their subject and use public domain works for texts (or better yet, CopyLeft/GPL their own materials).
Sucks for you then, because pretty soon 1. Congress will pretty much force the publishers to sell international editions at the same markup as our versions 2. the publishers are already offering etexts at about a 45% of new book cost. Why is 2 bad? Because you can't sell back your license. As for getting back only $20, blame your professor(s) for not adopting the same text semester after semester, and blame yourself for (most likely) going to sell back on the day of the exam. Most buybacks buy a certain number of known adopted books for around half of new book price. So, basically, you could always buy used books for about 75% of new, sell it back for 50% of new and only ever pay 25% of new book price for any text.
How do I know this?
I manage a textbook department responsible for a $3million piece of our company-wide $8million dollar company pie.
Oh, I'm with you on the outrageous prices and how horrible it is, but I suggest you do more research and put the blame where it goes: the publishers and your professors.
$50-100/ per hour for recording time? Maybe in your cousin's basement. Try about $500-1000 per hour for a fair recording studio and that's before you add in the engineer (aka the guy who makes you sound better than you are).
Then how come in five years of faithful daily m2 I've never once m2'd an over or under? Hm?
I understand the m2 system well enough to know that I get one frickin time to get m2'd adversely and never again get mod points. To me,/. is an entertaining newsite with a game: get excellent karma and regular mod points. Well, I got the excellent karma but never ever ever the mod points after someone couldn't figure out why I thought something was funny.
I love how you say these things and don't bother to back them up in any way. If I "clearly don't" then please enlighten me, oh wise AC. I'm dying to know.
I've been reading/. for five years now, and I don't think I've ever seen one post with two sentances full of more shit than yours.
Congratulations, here's your kewpie doll.
I've been using computers on a personal productive goal basis since 1992 (I know, a very short time in comparison with some of you), and I absolutely think that the "average user" should be taken out back and shot in the head. Twice.
When someone turned me on to mp3s back in the day, I thought "how wonderful, I never have to change my cds out of the computer again." Then someone pointed out Napster, and I thought "Fuck. Now every AOL idiot capable of pointing and clicking will be doing this, word will spread, and the whole thing will go to shit." I was half-right: today we have Digital Audio Players thanks to those Napsterbots of Yesteryear, but we also have bullshit DRM and **AA awareness of what used to be a rather inside geeky thing.
Even my grandmother knows what an mp3 is nowdays.
What the hell do you want out of a media player ready to go out of the box beyond the ability to play mp3s & cds? XMMS does a great job of this and is standard on every ready built distro I've used (FC and DamnSmallLinux).
Ok, not bad, nothing terribly groundbreaking (what is, anymore?). I like it, if that means anything (but I've always been a big house/trance fan). I suggest you do your ID3 tags though.
It's news because this is a band with not only a major label contract, but also because they had a song in heavy rotation in the late 90s, as well as the fact that the same song was featured in a few movies, duh.
I'll check yours out too, anyway, but get a sense of yourself. (And wow, yeah, you guys have some slow links.)
My first mod points were given to me when I was still in my early days of/.... I had just crossed the threshold from 0 natural post to 1 natural post. So, I think that hurt more than your example of being rated up there already and _then_ getting M2'd badly.
Ok, I'll draw you a picture. I have an mp3 player that supports USBotG. You have an mp3 player that supports USBotG. We connect and I give you some of my mp3s, then we reconnect and you give me some of yours.
Hey wait, there was no iTunes involved there! Oh no!
Which is cool and all, except on the other side of the pond (ie: not America) they've had this thing called USB-on-the-go for some time now. Quite simply, you plug in any camera that is USB Mass Storage Device compliant (the ones that you plug into your computer and it just sees a drive, or if you prefer - a decent camera as opposed to a cheap crappy one that requires some sort of manufacturer's application to retrieve the photos) into a USBotG device and the USBotG device is suddenly a host for the camera (or any other USBotG device, like say - another mp3 player) and poof, you've got a 1:1 connection going on.
So, I can take my iRiver H300 series mp3 player, hook it up to your iRiver H300 series player, and we can do sneakernet p2p all day long.
Why would you think Apple would restrict it to just cameras, hmm?
I think they keep us in the dark about such things because, being this is slashdot and all, if such knowledge was made commonplace someone would exploit it. Out of curiousity, were you ever modded unfair in M2? I think that you get one shot at getting unfair moderation and that's that. One workaround I have figured out is that the over/under-rated mods arent M2'd. I've stopped posting AC for offtopic because (like you) I'm karmacapped and I figure I'll never get mod points again anyway, and so where the "goal of the slashdot game" used to be for me to get mod points and max karma, it's now to burn this account to the ground and deactivate it.
Slashdot Mirror
This works perfectly with my plans anyway. I would rather save up my money for Christmas gifts now and splurge the income tax refund check then (nothing better than having the US taxpayers subsidise my gaming habit). Too, I suspect there'll be more backwards compatibility issues dealt with by then. (Yes, I know; why whine about BC when I have an xbox already? Because my xbox has suffered mightily at my hands these last few years [not to mention my damn roommate's cat fur floating up all over the place] and is very much so going on the fritz very soon, soon enough that I went ahead and bought a cheap $30 dvd player to get me through till x360 funds come in.)
So really, by the time I get ready to buy, there'll be more nextgen games, probably better BC, and maybe even a price drop (because really, I'm looking more at next summer than next spring).
I would almost agree with your anonymous self, except the guy posted a very poorly written (as in: my 16 year old kid could write better, and she basically flunked 9th grade) answer saying how smart he was by buying international texts for college. Is there no standard for getting in college anymore? Do they just take everyone that comes along with the bucks now?
Nice try.
No, what's even more infuriating is your horrible spelling and the fact that you are apparently a college student. I hope you don't go to a state funded school in Virginia, because I'd hate to think my tax dollars are subsidising your "education".
C'mon: to, intermediat, funy, listy & dense, explination, dollers (omfg)...
Did you buy the international edition of the freakin' English book, too?
No, I'm pretty sure it's you who doesn't see the point. Having worked this business for a year longer than most people are in undergrad, I have found that people who hustle their books to other students instead of selling it back to the store tend to end up with a bunch of books they didn't sell to students. Without fail, every June I see some new graduate show up with a tub full of books that are absolutely obsolete. You are also not taking into account the concept that people drop classes, making that textbook worthless to them. If you buy it from the bookstore, you can return it; if you buy it from shady guy on the corner, you've got a big paperweight. Granted, our return policy is pretty liberal (you have till the last day to drop classes, provided it is with your reciept and the book is in the same condition it left the store in -- roughly 6 weeks); but considering how many people make that course change I think our students are smart enough to know that saving a mighty $3.75 is not as good as being able to get all of your cash back for the other book you need.
As for selling the book back before exam being a bad idea, if you have to have the text right up until the day of the exam, then you probably haven't learned anything at all. I find that people who come in up to two weeks before the exam get the most money, and the curve decreases and falls off a cliff the day of the exam (because that's when everyone comes and sells back, and we've already bought enough other used copies to stop giving the good prices).
And when you say "a lot of students", considering our company rakes in about $8million a year and there's still another bookstore in town doing around $3million, I'd have to say -- your "a lot" isn't all that much in the larger scheme of things.
Sorry to break your optimistic bubble.
... and you'd be right, except on these custom publications the bookstore usually loses money because there are only 10% returns rate on these books (as opposed to a regular textbook from Wiley or Pearson, where you can get 100% of your cost back provided you return the book within 365 days from the invoice date). Too, that's an $18 cost. Apply a 25% markup (standard for the new text markup) and then add a few more points on top of that because you aren't going to be able to return everything. Add to that the factor that these books rarely are reused from semester to semester, to say nothing about using them from year to year and you've just killed off the used book market for this item (no buyback value because it's obsolete the semester after it's adopted). So, one of these custom books could cost the student about $25 with a probable $0 buyback value. Winner: publisher.
Now, let's look at an alternate scenario: the professor picks a book that is about 1-2 years old and costs new $100. That book will sell used for $75. The student (with proper dilligence and timing, see my comments elsewhere in this thread about selling books back on the day of the exam) will get back $50 in buyback. Net cost to the student: $25. Winner: student & bookstore.
1. Your professor(s) suck(ed).
2. You are wasting your (opt: parents') money. Drop out now.
Ah yes, the old microthink method. The difference is that through your example there are only a certain number of students that will get exposed to your advertising, be it through posters or one of the internet board swaps. By selling it to your bookstore, you are selling it to not just the students in your area, but students across the country as well. Most bookstores buy a certain number for their shelves and the rest are bought for a third party used bookseller. In some cases, those same books get bought back by the bookstore from the 3rd party, but more often than not those books get sent somewhere else in the region to be used by an institution there.
And again, I assure you: $20 is the "hi, you're stupid" offer price. Take your books to the bookstore even a week before the final. If that book has been adopted for the next term, you will get at least 50% of new (even if your book was bought used) for buyback. This isn't something just my store does; this is a college bookstore standard. The trick is to go early and be lucky enough to have professors who adopt the same text every semester.
And just to stay consistant, at my store the $125 new text would cost $93.75 used, and we'd pay between $62.50 and $37.50 (depending on when you came in and demand) in buyback. If there was a glut of used copies on the market, chances are we would lower our price to down around $70 for used.
YMMV.
That is an interesting study, to be sure. However, the apparent proposed solution to the problems (online texts with updates every so often) isn't quite the soothing balm the author intends it to be. Certainly, etexts would reduce immediate costs, but the cynic in me says that eventually those etexts would be running the price of a real book. Publishers are all about getting as much money for the product as possible (and that makes sense, in a free market sort of way). But don't ever kid yourself; those educational publishers aren't in the biz because of some highminded sense of "we're doing the right thing for the kids, and people like me, by golly" -- to them books are nothing more than "white bricks". They don't care what is in them, so long as it sells, and the more the better.
There is also a law of supply and demand at work here. Stephen King's latest hardbound book sells for $25 because 1. they have millions of them floating around and 2. the book is not as high a quality as a textbook. Now granted, textbooks don't need to be bulletproof and able to withstand an atomic assault, but they are going to get used more than the King book, so they need to be a little more resiliant. What really bothers me about this line of thinking are the $100 softbound books -- but then you're paying for the content, right?
There's no easy solution, short of those professors who know their subject matter to write their own texts (still expensive but more of the information presented will actually be covered in class, and typically not as expensive as traditionally printed texts) or those who know their subject and use public domain works for texts (or better yet, CopyLeft/GPL their own materials).
Sucks for you then, because pretty soon 1. Congress will pretty much force the publishers to sell international editions at the same markup as our versions 2. the publishers are already offering etexts at about a 45% of new book cost. Why is 2 bad? Because you can't sell back your license. As for getting back only $20, blame your professor(s) for not adopting the same text semester after semester, and blame yourself for (most likely) going to sell back on the day of the exam. Most buybacks buy a certain number of known adopted books for around half of new book price. So, basically, you could always buy used books for about 75% of new, sell it back for 50% of new and only ever pay 25% of new book price for any text.
How do I know this?
I manage a textbook department responsible for a $3million piece of our company-wide $8million dollar company pie.
Oh, I'm with you on the outrageous prices and how horrible it is, but I suggest you do more research and put the blame where it goes: the publishers and your professors.
Bah, Coren ... ;).
You don't play MUDs anymore; heck you didn't play then! Sitting in the cairn complaining about how you can't leave isn't playing
*grins, sweeps, blasts, laughs*
$50-100/ per hour for recording time?
Maybe in your cousin's basement.
Try about $500-1000 per hour for a fair recording studio and that's before you add in the engineer (aka the guy who makes you sound better than you are).
Sure! Instead of having them molested by families, let's just have them molested by strangers!
Wait, I have a better idea...
WHY DON'T GROWNUPS JUST FUCK GROWNUPS?
Sheesh.
Then how come in five years of faithful daily m2 I've never once m2'd an over or under? Hm?
/. is an entertaining newsite with a game: get excellent karma and regular mod points. Well, I got the excellent karma but never ever ever the mod points after someone couldn't figure out why I thought something was funny.
I understand the m2 system well enough to know that I get one frickin time to get m2'd adversely and never again get mod points. To me,
I love how you say these things and don't bother to back them up in any way. If I "clearly don't" then please enlighten me, oh wise AC. I'm dying to know.
... and moderaters are stupid who bother at all, and don't use "overrated" and "underrated" ... because you don't m2 over & unders.
/. is broken to hell and back.
Go ahead, waste your mod points on me: I'm trashing this account down from excellent karma to nothing so I can restart.
Oh, and I m2 everything negative as well. The moderation system on
I've been reading /. for five years now, and I don't think I've ever seen one post with two sentances full of more shit than yours.
Congratulations, here's your kewpie doll.
I've been using computers on a personal productive goal basis since 1992 (I know, a very short time in comparison with some of you), and I absolutely think that the "average user" should be taken out back and shot in the head. Twice.
When someone turned me on to mp3s back in the day, I thought "how wonderful, I never have to change my cds out of the computer again." Then someone pointed out Napster, and I thought "Fuck. Now every AOL idiot capable of pointing and clicking will be doing this, word will spread, and the whole thing will go to shit." I was half-right: today we have Digital Audio Players thanks to those Napsterbots of Yesteryear, but we also have bullshit DRM and **AA awareness of what used to be a rather inside geeky thing.
Even my grandmother knows what an mp3 is nowdays.
What the hell do you want out of a media player ready to go out of the box beyond the ability to play mp3s & cds? XMMS does a great job of this and is standard on every ready built distro I've used (FC and DamnSmallLinux).
Or maybe I've just been trolled.
Ok, not bad, nothing terribly groundbreaking (what is, anymore?). I like it, if that means anything (but I've always been a big house/trance fan). I suggest you do your ID3 tags though.
It's news because this is a band with not only a major label contract, but also because they had a song in heavy rotation in the late 90s, as well as the fact that the same song was featured in a few movies, duh.
I'll check yours out too, anyway, but get a sense of yourself. (And wow, yeah, you guys have some slow links.)
Why the hell did you even post then? If not the one band with the flyer, any of the other bands?
You stole 3 seconds of my life with your post and I want them back.
Well, depends on who your signifigant other is ;).
My first mod points were given to me when I was still in my early days of /. ... I had just crossed the threshold from 0 natural post to 1 natural post. So, I think that hurt more than your example of being rated up there already and _then_ getting M2'd badly.
Ok, I'll draw you a picture.
I have an mp3 player that supports USBotG.
You have an mp3 player that supports USBotG.
We connect and I give you some of my mp3s, then we reconnect and you give me some of yours.
Hey wait, there was no iTunes involved there! Oh no!
Better now?
Duh.
Mr Garrison: Come on, Mr. Slave; let's get back to the flippity-floppity-floo.
Chef: Aw no! Don't say flippity-floppity-floo!
Which is cool and all, except on the other side of the pond (ie: not America) they've had this thing called USB-on-the-go for some time now. Quite simply, you plug in any camera that is USB Mass Storage Device compliant (the ones that you plug into your computer and it just sees a drive, or if you prefer - a decent camera as opposed to a cheap crappy one that requires some sort of manufacturer's application to retrieve the photos) into a USBotG device and the USBotG device is suddenly a host for the camera (or any other USBotG device, like say - another mp3 player) and poof, you've got a 1:1 connection going on.
So, I can take my iRiver H300 series mp3 player, hook it up to your iRiver H300 series player, and we can do sneakernet p2p all day long.
Why would you think Apple would restrict it to just cameras, hmm?
I think they keep us in the dark about such things because, being this is slashdot and all, if such knowledge was made commonplace someone would exploit it. Out of curiousity, were you ever modded unfair in M2? I think that you get one shot at getting unfair moderation and that's that. One workaround I have figured out is that the over/under-rated mods arent M2'd. I've stopped posting AC for offtopic because (like you) I'm karmacapped and I figure I'll never get mod points again anyway, and so where the "goal of the slashdot game" used to be for me to get mod points and max karma, it's now to burn this account to the ground and deactivate it.
You totally didn't read the article, did you? Sadly, your post will probably get modded up to insightful.