Colleges May Start Forcing Switch To eTextbooks

An anonymous reader writes "Here's the new approach under consideration by college leaders and textbook manufacturers: 'Colleges require students to pay a course-materials fee, which would be used to buy e-books for all of them (whatever text the professor recommends, just as in the old model).' That may be 'the best way to control skyrocketing costs and may actually save the textbook industry from digital piracy,' proponents claim."

A more reasonable proposition

[Anonymous Coward]

Universities collaborate to produce textbooks (pay the author, an editor, possibly some layout/graphics staff) and then release the finished textbooks under a Creative Commons license (by-sa-nc for example).

You know, to provide better service and education for their students and society as a whole.

Save the textbook industry?

[Monkeedude1212]

Is that why the prices are gargantuan compared to other books?

You know what the difference usually is between the fourth and fifth edition of a textbook is? A little bit of reformatting, and a couple extra anecdotes. Yet the professors are told that they need to use the new material and they force it down on the students so that someone who wrote a book 5 years ago gets some income for the next 10 years, or maybe its the publishers, I don't know.

Point is - they set up the used book stores in colleges for a reason, so you could re-use text books. In some fields this has worked well, but in other fields, authors have just started to rehash their books to make money.

In all honesty - education material should not be privatized, their shouldn't be an issue with digital piracy because it should all be made publicly available. Wanting to LEARN shouldn't come with a cost. When I pay money to a college or university its for the professor's time, who is an expert in the field and can answer any questions the textbooks can't. It also covers the upkeep of the infrastructure. The only cost incurred with a textbook should be the ones manufacturing the book.

Education as a money making industry sickens me a little.

DRM ebooks I can't loan out or sell back, awesome!

[Americium]

Or perhaps maybe give out a grant to write a textbook. Open textbooks for freshmen level classes should be possible, and is being worked on. It's ridiculous making freshmen pay $200 for a physics textbook, that IMHO is worse than the one I paid $80 for 10 years ago.

There are about 400 students in the 100 level physics classes at my school. That's $80,000 for just 1 year of books, in one subject, only freshmen level, at one university.

So obviously it's millions per year per subject nationwide. Don't you think for a couple million we could get someone to write a free textbook, and then we can save millions year after year.

It's almost as insane as paying so much for journal subscriptions, instead of switching to open publications.

Re:Victom of eTextbook

[FooAtWFU]

I wasn't really incensed about textbooks until the bookstore tried to sell our class what looked like a marginally-more-professional version of "photocopy the whole book" (cheap paper - including the cover, pages rotated 90 degrees, that stupid plastic binding) for $90 when you can get the hardcover for $45 on Amazon [amazon.com].

I mean, come on.

Colleges are such masters of cost control

[Attila Dimedici]

Considering that college tuition (something that the college has even greater control over) is one of the few things to increase in price faster than textbooks, I see this as being a really great idea.
Actually, I think this is in part that the colleges are upset that the money that goes to textbooks doesn't go to them. They obviously don't care about how much the cost goes up, just look at tuition. What the college administrators care about is that the parents and students see this steady increase. If they can move this into a fee that is paid right along with tuition, they can hide this cost and get rid of one of the sources of complaint.

Re:Students will complain

[RevWaldo]

Photocopying? How 20th century. I've taken snapshots of textbook pages with my Droid that were quite readable, both on the Droid and pulled up onto my laptop. It'd take some doing to do this for an entire textbook, but it'd hardly be rocket surgery to rig up a stand to hold the smartphone/camera.

.

Re:Why are costs skyrocketing?

[themightythor]

I don't know about paper, but I'd guess that shipping prices are highly correlated to the price of diesel. And, as you can see here [eia.gov], it's about triple what it was 10 years ago. That cost isn't just factored in to getting the book from the distributor to the store where you buy it, but in every step of the manufacturing process where something has to be moved from one place to another. And it's not like business to just eat those costs, so they pass them on to you.

Now imagine if the entire process of making a book were electronic. There's no reams of paper to ship to print it on, no sending the book from the distributor to the consumer. All of those shipping costs are now nil. The million dollar question is: what portion of the price of a book is shipping?

Re:Students will complain

[tophermeyer]

Absolutely serious when I say this, my college Fraternity used pledges to do just that (probably still do).

All the guys taking a given class would throw in a few bucks for one copy of the text, then as if by magic we would receive an electronic version.

Terrible copyright infringement, pyramid scheming, slavery, hazing, and all that. But it was so convenient.

Re:Textbooks are a total scam

[Archangel Michael]

The reason they do this, is to get around academic fraud/cheating.

Which is why textbooks shouldn't have any "work" problems, they should be created and handed out by the Professor/Teacher, as handouts. Perhaps even have several sets that are handed out and updated each semester by the publisher. Texts remain the same, but there is a complimentary handout/workbook that contains all the problems.

That would be too easy.

Re:Bullshit...

[Darinbob]

Here's some interesting notes that kids may not realize yet:

- When the batteries are dead and the local bookstore is closed, paper books can still be read.
- You don't have to wait for the publisher to remove the bugs in your textbooks, you can just use Raid.
- If you spill bear on your book you can let it dry out and it will still be readable.
- Ten or twenty years from now your ebooks will be unreadable, but you'll still be able to pull an old textbook off the shelf to look something up.

Re:eBooks vs. Used Books

[Bruce Perens]

I know about the new editions every year, with such minor changes that it's clearly a scam. One would think that with the internet you could arrange a direct sale of your textbook to a student on the same campus. Who needs bookstores?

Re:Students will complain

[Mordok-DestroyerOfWo]

For a few years (as a grad student) I taught at a community college to augment my pathetic stipend. I was given a remarkable amount of control over the courses. Initially I made it a point to not assign readings out of an overpriced book, the first semester I'd say that a third of my readings came from online articles. Almost as soon as the other faculty discovered what I was doing I was threatened with termination and a letter was sent to my committee chair at the university (where it was promptly thrown away). Ostensibly I was hurting the students by not forcing them to read material that the other entry level courses were. Realistically I was threatening their profit margin by not using the most up-to-date edition of a 50 year old text.

Re:Farewell to Ownership

[Tordre]

You cannot sell your paper notes it is the intellectual property of your professor who made up the course material... haha according to some of the profs here at my school

Re:Students will complain

[bhcompy]

My college professor for the GE philosophy course I had to take was also the department chair and union president. He said that the other professors were all scumbags and that there is nothing we need in a 150$ textbook that isn't available in a cheap book that may be many years old for the bulk of GE type courses. He also said that charging students for things like Scantron sheets is just another way to punish the students despite all the fees they already pay. To back it up, the only required book was 15$ at Borders(and 0.50 used online) and tests were done on lined paper(for essay) or on an old fashioned circle your answer multiple-choice. Because of his status, no one could threaten him with termination and he'd probably spit in their face if someone tried to. I wish there were more people like him in the college teaching ranks

Re:Just a way to kill the used book market...

[gstoddart]

Sure it has. Undergrad calculus has gotten a lot simpler in the past 50 years.

In what way? Not being flippant, I'm genuinely unsure as to what about calculus has changed in the last 50 years.

I'm betting my books from 20 years ago still have the exact same stuff in it -- hell, I bet they're still using an edition of Stewart in some places.

Re:Students will complain

[HungryHobo]

For anything in computer science which changes fast it generally changes fast enough that by the time a books has been written,published and distributed it's already out of date.
For the vast majority of material it changes so slowly it doesn't matter.

I was lucky enough to go to a major university where the professors weren't as corrupt as fuck and didn't have any arrangements with their friends to require each others books and this was pretty much exactly the view a number of them espoused.

Poor typesetting?
really?
You're grasping at straws now.
There's no shortage of spelling mistakes in modern books and wasn't there an article a few days ago about how people learn better from harder to read text.
It's trivial either way.

Your comment about Paul Erdos would be more convincing if "The Book" he was referring to was real rather than a completely fictional book in which God wrote the particularly beautiful proofs for all theorems.
He wasn't talking about checking the textbook, he was simply telling them to find a better proof.

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[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Fees

[memnock]

you want to talk about fees?

NON-RES GRAD TUIT-FALL
STUDENT ACTIVITY FEES
ADVISING AND ASSESSMENT FEE
ACADEMIC EXCELLENCE FEE
ACADEMIC FACILITIES FEE
AG SCI TECHNOLOGY FEE
ASNR FAC/EQUIP FEE
UNIV TECH/INFRASTRUCTURE MAINT
ENERGY FEE
TRANSIT/PARKING SVC FEE
STUDENT ACTIVITY FEES
HEALTH SERVICE FEES
STUDENT FACILITY FEE
STUDENT DEVELOPMENT FEE
RECORDS MAINTENANCE FEE
LIBRARY AUTOMATION/TECH FEE

one of these fees already could probably cover that stupid course materials fee. fucking fees...

what with the idiots in the state of TX eviscerating science texts in their ignorant endeavor to eliminate evolution and thus setting text standards, why would i want to be forced to pay a fee for a science text that has no real science in it. bloody ludicrous.

Re:Students will complain

[pieisgood]

I am currently using Rudins' intro to real analysis paper back for my three quarter real analysis course. This book hasn't seen a revision since 1963, it is a MONSTER! This is a book that hates you and hates visual intuition. It also only cost me seven dollars new. Yes, the material hasn't changed and yes the book is the definitive Real Analysis intro book, but I'd be cautious of books that haven't been revised in 50+ years.... That means they're comprehensive, and most likely very DIFFICULT!

Fun course though!

Publishers are the worst

[Anonymous Coward]

Having taught calc I II and II for several years as faculty, I loathe the textbook market.

We, the profs, get incentives from the publishers to use the most recent books. Often this is by being given several free copies of the book, which we can then sell back.

And I hate the new editions every year, I'd always tried to find problems that were in both old and new versions, or if not I'd recommend that the students photocopied the relevant pages from the new edition.

In the last couple of years, my course switched to using the online MIT courseware. Gilbert Strang's calculus book is downloadable as a pdf, and I assigned all problems from that. (The downside as a teacher is that the teachers guide is also downloadable for free too ;) ). It's not the greatest book out there, but it's good and the price is just right.

Even as an ebook fan

[Joe Tie.]

I think I'd be annoyed by this. I prefer ebooks for the most part. To the point where I'll often simply pass on reading a book if there's no digital version available. But only if it's a work of fiction. For something that's going to be used as study material, I really can't imagine using them at this point. Ebook readers, whether stand alone units on or a computer, are great for going one page forward or one page back. But just terrible for the kind of rapid skimming and flipping that I usually do with textbooks.

What about keeping the books?

[cervo]

From what I have seen, many of these schemes result in keeping the books for the semester and then losing access at the end. Or you access the book using their proprietary software and then pay a lot more (even more than a print book sometimes) to get permanent access using their proprietary software. And once they abandon that platform you are screwed. I still have all my undergrad textbooks from 10 years ago in computer science/mathematics (except for duplicate ones, ie I tossed the 7th edition of calculus when I got the 8th edition....). And I kept a few of the more interesting general education courses (ie Psychology 101's book). Now, if I was on some proprietary system, I would not have access to those texts anymore. And in some cases, ie one of my grad classes used Introduction to Algorithms by Corman, I would have had to buy the book again while now I didn't. Now Corman has a new edition....but really it is not that different except for a few changes regarding parallel algorithms....

Basically this is a way to kill the used book market. Make sure you have to rent your book every semester. And make sure if years later you go back to school, you will need to buy the book again aka Zune style.

I wonder if I caused this

[bamwham]

A book rep stopping by my office last month was asking why I'm not using their textbook for my course like the other instructors at the school. I told him that I looked up what they were charging at our bookstore and decided that that was at least $100 more than the useful value to the students. Then I said I was unimpressed that a professor of the caliber that Stewart is supposed to be took upwards of 7 iterations to apparently get Calculus right, I mentioned that if anything the last four editions should have been at least half the cost of the first 3.

He asked what book I was using and I said "none". He was floored. I explained that I write detailed notes to the class and put them on a wiki page I maintain for the course. Students then go in and can even edit the notes (if they find a typo) and maintain their own pages worth of examples which they maintain in groups of four. Overall the students have a textbook that is: an ebook, covers class, freely links to other material, includes videos relevant to the class, includes program files and examples, includes links to what the other students in the class are doing. And the total cost to the students is free, the cost to the department is just the 10 year old computer I rescued from a storage closet to host the wiki on.

Best part is next time I teach the course the wiki notes will be largely done and I'll just be able to focus on adding to them. Plus I'll have all the old students pages worth of notes and examples to include as needed.

He was stunned and just quietly slipped out of my office while I was showing him all the pages I had written.

Re:Students will complain

[mehrotra.akash]

Are books really so expensive in the western world, or is most of what is posted online just an exaggeration?? I'm doing my engineering at a university in India, and can get an entire semesters books for less than the equivalent of $100(If all are bought new). With some shopping around, borrowing from the library and reselling the books after the semester, the cost goes down to less than $20-$30. The cheapest way is just to photocopy the chapters you need(cost less than $10) The books are just low price editions for the international edition(Only difference is a slightly lower page thickness and a less fancy cover) (And this is for one of our most expensive universities,in the cheaper universities you normally pay much less for the course material)