We Rent Movies, So Why Not Textbooks? 398
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by
Soulskill
from the or-food dept.
from the or-food dept.
Hugh Pickens writes "Using Netflix as a business model, Osman Rashid and Aayush Phumbhra founded Chegg, shorthand for 'chicken and egg,' to gather books from sellers at the end of a semester and renting — or sometimes selling — them to other students at the start of a new one. Chegg began renting books in 2007, before it owned any, so when an order came in, its employees would surf the Web to find a cheap copy. They would buy the book using Rashid's American Express card and have it shipped to the student. Eventually, Chegg automated the system. 'People thought we were crazy,' Rashid said. Now, as Chegg prepares for its third academic year in the textbook rental business, the business is growing rapidly. Jim Safka, a former chief executive of Match.com and Ask.com who was recently recruited to run Chegg, said the company's revenue in 2008 was more than $10 million, and this year, Chegg surpassed that in January alone."
Already been done, and for free (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Why the latest edition? (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Already been done, and for free (Score:5, Informative)
While your idea is fine, that only works for the 2-3 copies available. And some libraries only allows you to renew twice before you have to hand it in and wait for a period of time.
Re:2nd Hand book stores (Score:1, Informative)
There are plenty of second hand book stores, except not many that stock textbooks reliably. The only place you'll find the specialty editions for your school is the school bookstore, or maybe 1 off campus bookstore, but only if your professor notified them which book they needed. Only the official school bookstore gets the special editions (with enhanced resources in the appendices!) while the off campus bookstore has to sell the full version for a higher cost or wait until the books are used for a semester to sell them.
Re:You mean racketeering (Score:5, Informative)
The "mandatory" part doesn't make a lot of sense. You can't force authors to write books for free. And although a lot of free textbooks do exist already (see my sig), you can't guarantee that for a particular subject, the best book will always be a free book rather than a non-free.
But other than that, what you're suggesting seems similar to something California is doing now. Motivated by the California state budget crisis, Governor Schwarzenegger has announced a Free Digital Textbook Initiative [clrn.org], which has gathered a list of free, online high school math and science textbooks that are aligned with state content standards. The intention is to have the books used in classrooms in fall 2009. This [arstechnica.com] article has some useful background, but it mistakenly suggests that the arduous state adoption process will be an obstacle to the FDTI; statewide adoption only applies to K-8, but FDTI is doing high-school books. There was a previous, unsuccessful effort called COSTP [opensourcetext.org], which tried to produce a history textbook using Wikibooks [wikibooks.org]. Here [bbc.co.uk] is a BBC article about the present effort, and here [mercurynews.com] is a newspaper opinion piece by the Governor. This [ca.gov] is a transcript of a speech by the Governor, with some interesting Q&A at the end. Twenty books were submitted (press release [ca.gov], links [edublogs.org]). The four books from traditional publisher Pearson are consumable workbooks, not actual textbooks.
Re:Editions (Score:5, Informative)
Why can't you support editions that you have prepared for in the past? Because it takes more effort?
Good question. There's more than one reason.
Working from an edition that doesn't have some of the material leaves those students out of discussion. The best intentioned of them comes unprepared. Our time and their money mean too much for me to waste it with me reading the missing parts to them. If I did do it for those with some parts missing, why not for all?
For online students, I have so far only been allowed to provide one test bank to be incorporated into any class. It can put together as many different versions of the test that it wants to from that bank, but only from that bank. The test bank comes with a given edition of the book. I can add questions as much as I like, but they'll only go into that one test bank, and I can tell it to pull them up at random, but not according to who has what book. This is, of course, an artifact of using publisher's materials and geared towards keeping them all using the most recent. Note too that the distance learning stuff is done via software designed for that, like Blackboard, and is administered by a distance learning component of the university IT. Neither of us can alter the software. Were I even allowed to design, write and administer my own software for distance learning that would be another half to full time job piled on top of what's covered next.
For a more direct answer, yes. It takes more effort, and therefore time. Typically I'm expected to do a full time job of teaching plus incidentals (committees, counseling, etc.), in addition part to full time work in research and related professional incidentals (presentations, manuscript reviewing, etc.). That's 1.5 to 2 jobs worth of stuff. The former gets arranged in time according to the whims of the university scheduling system, committee chairs' ability to schedule as conveniently as possibly (hopefully for others rather than themselves) and so forth. The latter has to get fit in around the former, despite the fact that it is difficult if not impossible to carve some of those things up to fit (ie. if I'm running a subject in an experiment and they run over time, do I trash the data for that run, or do I make my students wait?). And I have to do these two jobs without burning out and so making myself less able to do either of them as well as I should. Luckily I love the work and my field so much that I don't miss not having much life outside. I am, after all, a professional -- that is, this is what I profess to be, rather than just something I do. As such I try to work with my students as much as possible. That's why I let them choose what version to use. But they have to work with me too. There's two factors, flexibility for them, ease of administration for me, to consider. I ask they meet me half way, and I try to help them do so.
I have done one rather outlandish thing in trying to make things fair to all and leaving room for other editions and such, while requiring enough to satisfy the regulations. I give both on site and distance classes the same test, comprised of the entire test bank, typically 150-300 multiple choice questions. In the name of wanting to find out what it is they've learned, rather than what they haven't, they are allowed to answer whatever questions they wish. They can answer up to 50 questions and get 2 points for each right answer. If they answer wrong they lose half a point, making it against their interest to guess; they'd do better answering fewer. The ones they don't answer don't count. It works well for them. Not so much for me. Both dot readers and automated testing software such as comes with Blackboard don't allow for a difference between 'no answer given' and 'wrong', so I have to grade them all by hand on paper using a printed test key. This typically takes an entire weekend (12 to 24 hours work), four times a semester. I think that's plenty fair for my part of meeting them halfway, and is more than sufficient response to the question of "too much effort".
Problem with that - Teacher's Editions (Score:4, Informative)
there's no evidence that open source textbooks are impossible.
That was my first thought too - why not have open source textbooks? Solves the problem completely.
But then I remembered "teacher's editions".
Each textbook has a teacher's edition that has all the answers in it. Any open source book would logically have to have the same, if it as a product is to provide the same utility. And if it's available to the teacher, by the definition of open source it would be available to the students as well. Suddenly you'd see a lot of people getting 100% on their homework - they'd just copy it out of the teacher's edition.
I'm trying to figure out a way around this but I think that textbooks may be in that rare class of problems that open source and full disclosure doesn't solve.
Re:Problem with that - Teacher's Editions (Score:4, Informative)
If the teacher needs the answer handed to them they shouldn't be teaching the class...
That might work for some subjects, but there are plenty out there that a teacher would appreciate a sanity check. Especially, the teachers who haven't taught the course before, or TA's that come up with solutions but aren't really that confident that they aren't 90% solutions.