Ad-supported Textbooks Are Here 192
prostoalex writes "Talk to any student about the price of the college textbooks, and you're likely to hear similar complaints about the cost of the textbooks, the rip-off buyout prices at local college bookstores and insidious publishers who keep changing editions every few years just to change the page numbers and kill off the used books market. Freeload Press, says the New York Times, will distribute ad-supported electronic textbooks to students of 38 universities. However, it seems that neither professors neither New York Times are impressed with the quality of titles so far: 'The reading difficulty is created by Freeload's use of PDF images, which retain the printed page's layout without reformatting. Navigating around a single superwide, supertall page requires lots of clicking and zooming and patience. The company will soon use improved software that can automatically adjust the text so it is more legible, said Tom Duran, a founder of Freeload Press and its chief executive.'"
lazy professors (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:lazy professors (Score:5, Funny)
"...due to a pounding headache, General Washington couldn't think well enough to keep his troops in line. Luckily, a medic delivered to him new TYLENOL FAST ACTING GEL CAPLETS, the soothing action of which cleared his head in just minutes, letting him order his troops properly, and ensuring the victory for the Americans.
Tylenol: Fast acting strength, protecting America from the British since 1776"
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Re:lazy professors - bad books (Score:2)
Evolution - Fact or Fiction?
Genes - RNA vs. DNA Where do they fit in?
Cloning - Is it right for you?
And then you have to flip through the book seeing ads as you go because there is no page number associated with the sensational headline.
great! (Score:5, Interesting)
Does it also automatically adjust the text to reflect new information received from the Ministry of Truth?
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The text is true. The text has always been true.
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This doesn't solve the original problem (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:This doesn't solve the original problem (Score:5, Interesting)
I work for a (UK) textbook publisher which also sells its textbooks in the US.
Here's why US textbooks are so expensive:
In the US, textbooks are frequently published in hardback format. While a hardback costs very little more to actually produce (about $3 dollars more than a paperback), you can sell them for almost twice the cost of a paperback version because the market allows it.
In the UK, textbooks are almost always paperback (we sell a few hardback copies as well in the UK, but mainly to professors who will be using the book extensively for several years, and so want something very durable).
So why don't US textbook publishers publish in paperback? The traditional way (in both the US and the UK) to get a textbook adopted by a professor teaching a course (and hence secure sales from all of his/her students - sometimes up to 500 individuals - and these adoptions frequently last for 2-3 years-worth of students because professors, like all humans, are allergic to change) is to have a Sales Rep visit every single professor teaching a relevant course and try to convince them to buy it. In the UK that's not too expensive - the UK is fairly small and urban centres (and hence universities) aren't too far apart, so few Reps are needed and travel costs are low. The US is huge and urban centres (and hence universities) are separated by huge distances. Lots of Reps are needed and travel costs are higher becuase of the larger distances.
The upshot is that US textbook publishers mainly publish in hardback format (usually about twice the price of a paperback, but for a very small increase in production costs) in order to claw back some of the costs of these Sales Reps. In the UK, the market wouldn't stand for that - paperback textbooks at paperback prices are the norm, and besides the Sales Rep costs that need to be paid for are much much smaller, as mentioned above.
When the company I work for started selling one of our latest (paperback) textbooks in the US, we were slaughtering the (hardback) opposition on price (and our textbook is much better, natch!). We weren't using the expensive Sales-Reps-travelling-the-country method to get adoptions, we were using other much cheaper (and obviously not-to-be-disclosed-here) methods to promote the book. The professors loved the book for the quality of its content, and the students love the price.
I'm sure US textbook publishers will wise up at some point soon (some probably already are - I only really know about the academic discipline that the company I work for publishes in) but until then we'll keep getting those valuable adoptions.
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You mean like mailing a copy and then calling them?
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No kidding I often buy my text books from ebay because usally you can get the India version (which say not to be sold in the US) for about 1/20 of the price granted its a paperback and printed on newspaper like paper but hell,
Re:This doesn't solve the original problem (Score:4, Interesting)
In the UK, the market wouldn't stand for that - paperback textbooks at paperback prices are the norm
Can I just say, this makes porting the books around a hekuva lot eaiser too because they are lighter. The Chinese do it even one better. They break up their course books into seperate booklets, all in paperback so you are not carrying around an entire years worth of material with each book! This can make your backback about ten times lighter. Now, of course, a decent eletronic format could solve the rest of the weight problem. But it doesn't look like this is it.
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I do that too, it just involves some scissors and duct tape.
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I'm headed back to school in another two weeks. The technical institution where I'll be studying has another solution to the problem of expensive textbooks: the instructors roll their own.
I'm taking a one-year, condensed program, with about two dozen individual courses, and I have to buy half a dozen textbooks, total cost to me: under $1000. For the rest, the instructors have compiled course notes based on their own training and experience. (All of the instructors in this program are currently employed
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What makes that even worse is when publishers release new editions of a textbook with no real change--except, of course, a greatly modified page number layout. The instructors insist that the students all have the current edition so they can assign chapter questions and readings based on page number, without having to account for multiple editions. At the end
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1) The marginal production cost of the product is a few dollars for paperback, several for hardback.
2) The base production cost varies - books on
Re:This doesn't solve the original problem (Score:4, Insightful)
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Well, "sez you"
>they are high because they can be.
I *think* you are agreeing with me. Prices CAN'T be high in a free market because a competing author and publisher will produce a book of equal quality and be happy with a 10% profit instead of 200%. So the only way for "because they can be" to be true would imply market failure.
If the educators forcing you to use the product
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The reason for this is simple. Professors don't look at the price. They are given free copies by the publisher. They don't have to pay for the book, so they don't care what it costs. Likewise, they d
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That's not exactly the whole story. Textbook publishers don't ship old editions of the textbook, so professors have to choose the most recent version of the book or students
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You know the sick part is, one year while I was in college we were required to buy some obscenely expensive book for one of my engineering courses. When I went to sell it back at the end of the year to try to recoup some of the nearly $200 spent on the book, I was told they couldn't buy it back because a new revision had been released.
The only difference between the new revision and the old one? One person's name had be
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I used to borrow a textbook and spend an hour at the photocopier. Copy it double sided for best effect; if the type is large reduce it. Then visited an office that had a binding machine and I had my personalised edition.
If it comes in PDF files that are ad supported, I'm all for that.
As long as they're not locked down with DRM. Some otherwise useful texts have even selecting text disabled, so you can't copy and paste notes. That
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Education is something that is actually advancing, be it slowly. It's important to have access to new books, for example something that integrates new insight into the material, or is based on new knowledge on how students can learn better. I, for example, learned mechanics from a book that said in the introduction that 'the SI system will probably not be very popular'. So our class ended up to spend
don't know whether to laugh or cry (Score:5, Insightful)
The world is in serious need of open textbooks to put an end to the ripping off of students. This problem existed 30 years ago and so far nothing has been done to prevent the publishers making education more expensive than it need be.
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Saving $$$ on college textbooks isn't hard (Score:5, Interesting)
A word of caution, old editions are a bitch in the rare case that your teacher is a stickler for "homework" problems and collects them (this is more in the lower college classes and a problem if old edition pages don't match up just right and they tend to jumble problems around) and your school library doesn't lend out the new version of the book. It's best to attend the first couple days of class and determine if buying a book at all is necessary (some professors essentially ignore the book for all pratical purpose and test you on their lectures). I can't tell how many times I went to class just to find out that the book is a big waste of money. Especially true if the class is a requirement and you don't give two shits about it.
I even used completely different texts (titles) in Math course where I just find that I prefer one author over another without problems.
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In the end, it's best to hold off until after the first class (or week if possible) and see what type of teacher you are getting and what type of work is assigned by the syllabus. For instance, my first programming class (C language), our teacher assigned to us K&R classic but assi
E-books are not ideal for degree level study (Score:5, Insightful)
I've never been able to replicate this "system" using electronic means and I tend not to try any more. However, my students never seem to try to use books in this way. If they want to find out about something, they type a phrase into Google and then start picking through the thousands of hits they inevitably get (I teach computing). Typically they will give up quickly because the amount of information coming back is overwhelming, but even if they do find something, I'm sure they struggle because it's very hard to take in a lot of information when you're reading it off a screen (I believe that this is less true if you already know something about a topic). Ironically, the only complaint we regularly get about our classes is that the library is not helpful, even though we have bought literally hundreds of titles in the last couple of years. We now believe that most of our new students have never used a library before they come to the university, so we're going to actually show them how we go about learning new things using books. Not sure how we're going to do that!
I think I've rambled off the topic a bit here; I think my point is that I would discourage my students from buying electronic books in general. As a university lecturer, I think it's my responsibility to: (a) Recommend the minimum possible number of books for purchase (usually one per module); (b) Ensure that there is a good variety of relevant books in the library; (c) Encourage my students to actually use the library when their Googling fails them.
Re:E-books are not ideal for degree level study (Score:4, Insightful)
However, younger folks seem far more at comfortable with reading from a screen. Don't assume that the media will necessarily be an issue for most new students. The issue is primarily one of format.
If an electronic resource is presented in such a way as to be easily navigated, then it is superior to it's printed counterpart in may ways. Being able to search an entire book with a click is invaluable.
I have PDF and print versions of many technically references. The PDFs get opened first at which point the paper is usually only for browsing.
Re:E-books are not ideal for degree level study (Score:4, Insightful)
I'm 43 and I recognize that I have grown up with books and that I am comfortable using them. However, I've been playing around with computers for more than half of my life and I've been on the web since the start, so I'm used to reading stuff off a screen. My views on paper vs screen are based somewhat on the sheer shallowness of my students' approach to learning. I can't help feeling that they don't concentrate enough when they are trying to get information from a screen. It's unusual to see a student spend a significant time staring at a document on a screen, for instance. They tend to search for something else before they will scroll through the document they have already opened. On the other hand of course, they have no idea how to get information from a book.
I'm aware that much of what I'm saying is impressionistic - I've certainly never measured any of this stuff - but introducing my students to another source (ie books) must be better than what they are doing now.
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Ah! This I understand, and agree. I don't see that the media of presentation will have any real impact on these practices. You're dealing with behaviors deeply ingrained, fed by many factors. Personally, I blame cell phones...
Of course, being forced to thoroughly read information in an electronic format could help develop that concentration. Ok, wishful thinking, but still.
I'm 37, btw. I do
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Agreed, but as you mentioned, there's nothing like the heft and feel of a real paper hardback (with included post-it notes, highlighting, bookmarks and scribbling of course). People that truly know the contents and subject matter of a particular reference book usually can flip to the appropriate page in
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One thing to keep in mind with respect to PDF...since it is an electronic format, there are means available to enforce certain licensing restrictions...up to and including "phoning home" whenever the document is opened/read/whatever. I don't say this to deride the PDF format, because it has proven very useful. People should be aware, however, of the various ways that
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True, but shoulder-replacement surgery might come close... ouch... Now I know I'm too old to have gone back to school.
Calc II - 15 lbs.
Discrete Math I - 20 lbs.
Object Oriented Programming #1- 9 lbs
Object Oriented Programming #2- 6 lbs
Notebooks, calculators, etc... - 5 lbs.
Walking with a tilt the rest of your bloody natural life: priceless.
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We now believe that most of our new students have never used a library before they come to the university, so we're going to actually show them how we go about learning new things using books. Not sure how we're going to do that!
Perhaps you can get some inspiration from Adler and Van Doren's _How To Read a Book_? I read it after finishing my master's, and believe that it would have helped to read parts of it at the beginning instead.
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You know, I can't quite put my finger on it, but something about a book called "How to Read a book" just makes me want to laugh my ass off...
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My first stop when learning a new subject (Score:2)
ebooks have their place (Score:2)
The importance of education (Score:3, Informative)
Still. Be happy. The world is happy to continue loaning you the money needed to buy their products. Don't you worry yourself about paying it back.
used texts increase the price of new texts (Score:4, Insightful)
There's two different people selling books:
Publisher ---> College Book Store
College Book Store ---> Student
If the publisher is losing sales to used books, the book store could easily absorb any publisher price hike, considering that the book store is selling the used texts and is part of the publisher's problem.
My guess is that being in the textbook business is like being a utility company. You get to ignore normal market dynamics and act as if your minimum profit margin is enshrined in law.
There's really no incentive for anyone other than the student to act in a rational manner.
Textbooks are pretty much a scam anyway... (Score:5, Interesting)
Oh, right, because the problems that are assigned out of the book get shuffled every printing by magical pixies. Literally shuffled; in one of my recent classes, the professor would assign the (optional) homework out of the seventh edition of the text, but also had a list of where the exact same problems were in the sixth and fifth. I checked with one of the older editions in the library, and aside from the color scheme this was the only change. The explanations were all the same, which is a good thing since I'd hate to think our fundamental understanding of the principles of vector calculus had changed so quickly.
I've actually had a couple professors talk about this; apparently, such decisions are usually made by the department heads, and the people teaching the class just go with it - not that it's just the higher-ups getting kickbacks. Publishers drop old editions like hot potatos; in another of my classes, the professor refused to move on to the sixth edition and taught out of the fifth, because apparently they'd swapped some of the chapters around and he didn't want to deal with it. Even though the sixth edition had been released that same year, people had so much trouble finding copies of it he eventually gave up and published an equivalence guide. This was in a course where the material didn't quite need to be taught in order, which is probably why they didn't just stop at the homework problems.
Anyway, in order to keep this 3:00 am post from being completely offtopic: there is absolutely no reason at all for anyone to charge money for textbooks in the first place, much less put ads in them. The basic principles have been known for longer than anyone currently in college has been alive; all that really needs to happen is for some philanthropist to fund writers who are good at writing teaching texts, and then release that into the public domain - and don't talk about those open textbooks, I doubt any professor will teach out of something without officious credentials.
Now I'm hallucinating bugs crawling on my legs. Or at least I hope I'm hallucinating. Either way, it's time for sleep.
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free textbooks (Score:3, Informative)
Here is a recent USA Today article [usatoday.com] that talks about something similar to what you're referring to. Free textbooks aren't hypothetical, they already exist. A sugar-daddy philanthropist isn't required; professors are already doing it for the same reason they've always written textbooks. (Hint: they've never expected to make any significant amount of money on the typical textbook.) Some good starting points:
I'm currently working on a CD [libertytextbooks.org] that's meant to convince profes
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"Calculus" by Larson, Hostetler, and Edwards, by any chance?
I can see it already... (Score:2)
It depends on the subject - and the students (Score:5, Insightful)
Talk to any student about the price of the college textbooks, and you're likely to hear similar complaints
I wonder if the person who wrote that has talked to enough students.
On my desk is the 3rd edition of "Classical Electrodynamics", by J. D. Jackson. This title has been the standard text for advanced classical electromagnetism for about 40 years. The 2nd edition came out in 1974, and the 3rd edition (the latest) in 1998.
The book is a sturdy hardback, designed for decades of use. I still use it occasionally, and I have a PhD in Physics. It's priced at $97 direct from Amazon, or "Used and new from $55" from Amazon's resellers. This is cheap for such a book.
Any student who thinks he/she can afford an iPod, but not a book like this, has got seriously screwed-up priorities.
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You do if you keep trying to flush them down airplane toilets!
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I dont mind paying for good books, but I mind paying for a scam.
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My B.S. CompSci program is quite math-heavy (so much so that it's an automatic minor), so I figured, what the hell. I'm going to use this Calculator for the whole time, and get into some heavy crap, so I might as well get the TI-89 (I admit, the drooly-geek factor played a part in this decision). Turns out, Calc won't let me use it because of its "advanced" functions. Now I've got to use a 10-year-old TI-85, or do it all by hand, sinc
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Agreed, there are few textbooks with the authority or staying power of Jackson (or Goldstein for mechanics, or Golub for matrix computation). However, while your evaluation of values is fine as far as it goes, when purchasing 4 books (or more) each semester, your model breaks. Should the point of higher education be "how much $$$ can we squeeze from our students this semester?"
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No complaints about the price of Jackson or any of my physics textbooks. I buy the hardback ones used from Amazon or Abebooks. I'm keeping all of them and I want them to last. I atually buy some Indian textbooks for friends when I go back home every other year but they tend to fall apart at the seams during the semester. I wish all of them were hardback - Misner, Thorne, Wheeler isn't and its like Jackson for GR.
The point about the low v
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I just finished up a computer engineering degree, and all of my books but a few were badly written, from general chemistry on up to device electronics. Thankfully i was able to sell most of them back, and keep the couple I wanted to use as reference.
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Well, obviously there are subjects where a new addition every year or two is appropiate.
New edition, or new addition? Or new textbook?
Obviously, technology changes fast enough that it might be that a new textbook (that is, a book on a different subject) is required. For example, my school recently replaced C++ with Java for their programming courses. If a new technology takes off today, it may be that in two or three years that the class might change focus and need a new book altogether.
But I'm no
i don't know (Score:2)
So no, i wouldn't mind an actual ad every here and then.
so long as there is choice (Score:2)
Illegal in Belgium (Score:5, Insightful)
This is part of the very broad consensus in our country that education is a public good. Messing with that is guaranteed to get all kinds of people really angry.
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I, for one, agree wholeheartedly with this law.
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In that case, you may want to watch this http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pfRUMmTs0ZA [youtube.com]
(20/20's comparison of American education with Belgium education)
Seems to me that they are doing it right over in Belgium. Kudos to them, seems their laws/system aren't hampering their education system much, not like ours here in the US.
SB
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Welcome to America where children get ad-supported text books and advert-news from Channel One [wikipedia.org].
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When I was in school we had a morning television broadcast, but it was produced entirely by students in-school. It was kind of stupid much of the time, but it had its moments, and at the very least was locally relevany and ad-free. Plus, teachers were by no means required to show it.
But I'm glad to know about this...if I ever have kids I'll want to make sure not to send them to a school where this kind of crap is going on.
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SB
Its not so bad (Score:2, Insightful)
The conundrum of business and price... (Score:2)
The advert idea popping up all over: my local grocery now has little ad placards in the aisles (that have nothing to do with any of the products in the store, like wireless companies); I daresay most of us have seen the non-movie adverts in movies (b
Imagine the implications... (Score:2, Interesting)
I'm crying (Score:3, Insightful)
It's already hard enough to motivate kids to study. Now they'll have ads bothering them? I really fear for the future.
Any smart professors would just change their teaching style to avoid text books as much as possible [hint: there are usually other books on any given topic outside the mainstream academia].
Tom
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Meh (Score:2)
Of course, it helps that the bound copy of this particular book is under $20 at Amazon. If this were one of the $
I'd use this service... (Score:2)
Why do we still lack electronic books? (Score:2)
where's my nice e-paper reader? (Score:2)
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Except that the money you'd be taking 10% of comes out of the manufacturer's pockets.
Now, if you were to take 20% of the money spent on stupid "OMG! Video games are t3h EVIL!!!" legislation and lawsuits, you'd be in the same spot.
That's not the only things they do. (Score:5, Interesting)
I'm a high school teacher who just had a marvelous time over the summer trying to order our next set of pre-calc books for our district. I needed to phone the company to find out the price of the textbooks in order to draft a price quote for the district before they would approve the order. I was trying to find out from the salesperson what the price of the pre-calc books were, using the ISBN from the sample book they had sent us. The problem I was having was that the ISBN of the sample book I had was different from the ISBN of the book that they were selling on the website, and both were different from the ISBN of the textbook that the salesman gave me over the phone. It took another 30 minute call to find out why.
Apparently, the ISBN of the book on the website was the wrong website. The pre-calc book I was searching for was published by Pearson Education, which owns a whole slew of subsidiary publishers, including Prentice Hall, Scott Foresman, Addison Wesley... I found the book I was looking for on Addison Wesley's website, though the book I wanted was apparently on Prentice Hall's website. But here's the kicker...The salesperson from the original inquiry gave me the ISBN for the college bound edition, instead of the High School bound edition. When I asked what the difference was (they were priced the same), she explained that the high school binding is much stronger and is meant to last for a good seven-eight years of abuse, while the college binding is only designed to last for two years before it starts to fall apart. I was surprised, and I asked the salesperson why the college kids get the poorer binding. She explained that the college bookstores (though I'm sure the publishers love this as well) don't profit as well of used book sales, so they want books to have a short lifespan. It's easier when the book is falling apart for them to refuse buyback.
And it makes perfect sense. I remember a whole bunch of my textbooks that would really fall apart in a year's time back in college, and I always wondered why my high school books could take so much more abuse and still come out alright. My prob-stat book in particular was shedding pages faster than a balding man would shed hair. Just another way publishers are trying to screw students in the long run.
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She explained that the college bookstores (though I'm sure the publishers love this as well) don't profit as well of used book sales, so they want books to have a short lifespan. It's easier when the book is falling apart for them to refuse buyback.
Heeeee hee hee -- I love it, what a self-serving, ridiculous argument. OK, most college bookstores are nonprofit. The standard markup nationwide is about 36%. That may sound high to someone who's never run a business, but it has to cover rent, employees, and m
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I'm allergic to books (Score:2)
That said, the college textbook requirements have always been a scam perpetrated by the uni
Problem is the publisher (Score:2)
Much Ado About Nothing (Score:2)
At a public university, such as Rutgers, tuition and fees comes to $9,958 (about $10,000). So, you have to spend a 10% premium to get your books. Shitty, b
Screw This (Score:2)
When I was in college back in the Seventies, I asked a friend who had one of those big grey Kodak microfilm cameras like they had in libraries to microfilm all my textbooks. Sold them back to the bookstore, bought a handheld microfiche reader and used that. Teacher gave me funny looks when he told the class to open their books to page so-and-so and I whip out a little plastic gadget and some plastic sheets and start peering through a len
Why is a Calc book $100? (Score:2, Insightful)
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Introduction to [sponsors] sponsored Relativity (Score:2)
What a FUCKING AWFUL idea. Oh no this won't be abused at all. When you read a damned textbook you need to focus on what you're learning not a bunch of ads. This move i
warez textbooks (Score:2)
Has anyone else heard of this?
This will cost more, not less (Score:2)
Re:CHM versus PDF no comparison - I have thousands (Score:2)
The purpose of PDF is PORTABLE. How do you know your platform has the right [and exact] copies of the font(s) required to render that document?
At least with a PS or PDF output I know I'm set. PDF documents can have text, as in literal strings not bitmaps, and in Adobe they CAN reflow [I've done it on a PocketPC for instance].
Tom
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Properly made PDFs are quite good - but it actually takes a fair bit of effort to make a bad chm.
Most of the stuff in that group is PDF, btw. Which I suppose is the "democratic" way of looking at it.
Reflow never worked worth a da
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Most ebooks are images because yeah they print driver them or they're done that way on purpose to avoid piracy [e.g. copy/pasting].
Reflow
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