Student Bookstores Beware, Amazon Comes To Purdue Campus 95
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.”
Lesson from a poor student (Score:4, Interesting)
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
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That's not a felony. To be a felony, he'd have to distribute them to somebody else, among other things. That's copyright infringement, and the textbook publishers could sue and win, but it isn't criminal copyright infringement.
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This. Entirely.
Another few ideas from when I was in school:
Misleading Freezing Statement (Score:3, Informative)
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.
Misleading Freezing Statement (Score:2, Insightful)
You know what else is going to happen...Amazon will temporarily save the students money, the prices will go down by cutting out the bookstore overhead, and the publishers will jack up (or off) their overpriced books so that they cost from Amazon what they did from ye olde bricke ande mortare store. And plenty of people will lose their jobs to the Amazon robots just as before.
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Not when I was in school we didn't. That said, yes, it's been an option for some time now. On the other hand, there's no guarantee every textbook will be available. Perhaps this agreement guarantees that any textbook assigned to a Purdue student will be carried. The university may also have negotiated a group discount.
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How long before Amazon... (Score:1)
Hachete (Score:4, Interesting)
Will they allow professor's to assign Hachette textbooks? Can student's order Hachette study guides?
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Never mind that, will they stock Eats, Shoots & Leaves [wikipedia.org] and other guides to avoiding the use of the Grocer's Apostrophe [blogspot.com]?
Retard.
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If you are referring to the Hachette spat, you might want to reexamine your understanding of the situation - no Hachette books have been removed from sale, you can still buy every Hachette book that you could before. What Amazon did do is remove pre-orders from unreleased Hachette books - you can still buy them when they are released, they just aren't allowing you to preorder - they are under no obligation to allow preorders on books either.
Well (Score:3)
Unless they're going to buy the books back, student bookstores aren't going anywhere. Gotta do something with those $4-15k/yearly in books after you're done using them...and getting $250 back.
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Unless they're going to buy the books back, student bookstores aren't going anywhere.
Around here the buyback is done by folks who set tents up on the streetcorners, not the bookstore.
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Re:Well (Score:5, Informative)
The US textbook market is crazy.
An easy example is Campbell's Biology Plus MasteringBiology - a pretty standard 1st year Biology textbook. Amazon UK [amazon.co.uk] price $87.56. Price for the US equivalent [amazon.com] is $190.40.
Re:Well (Score:4, Interesting)
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
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I believe I linked to both copies that included the MasteringBiology. The only difference seemed to be that US one might have a copy of the text as an e-book. I doubt making an encrypted PDF or equivalent merits the huge price difference.
Still your comment about the probability book is interesting. I wonder if this is particular to mathematics?
Here' s another example from Chemistry: Organic Chemistry by Bruice. In the US it's hardcover, in the UK paperback.
Amazon UK [amazon.co.uk] price $99.96
Amazon US [amazon.com] price $240.60
it's
Re:Well (Score:5, Funny)
It costs extra to have editors redact all the bits about evolution.
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I always buy a used book from Amazon. Anyone paying full sticker at the campus book store is getting robbed. Last years edition is almost always fine (unless the instructor is using the accompanying courseware - but generally my school has stayed away from that). The ebooks especially are a bad deal since you just rent them and can't re-sell them.
For my statistics class this fall the text is: Statistical Techniques in Business and Economics 16th Edition, ISBN 0078020522. $292 at the campus bookstore, $248 n
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$4-15K/year (Score:3)
I don't know what the books cost - my kid handles it himself, but I haven't heard the outcry I would expect for a 2nd year Mechanical Engineering major to be screaming if it were anywhere near that.
At any rate, I do know that he buys his books "online" (Amazon and others) and may or may not sell them at the end of the term, since the online purchases were so much cheaper to start with vs list price at the campus book store.
(Not to
Re:$4-15K/year (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
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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.
While in some cases this may actually be "shady," if a professor writes a book that actually gets published by reputable publisher, then you may be getting something that's more relevant and tailored to the class you're actually taking, rather than some generic textbook. (Only once, in grad school, did I ever purchase a book authored by the professor that I thought was completely useless -- we only used it for about a week of the class. But that also was not a textbook -- it was a monograph, and I now kno
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By the way, after I wrote my comment, I did some searching. Until now, I was not aware of how "customized textbook editions" for specific universities has apparently become a thing [wsj.com] in some places.
Needless to say, I'm appalled by this if it involves professors getting a kickback for including a chapter of their own in the "customized" edition. In my field, to my knowledge the standard intro textbooks have never come in any sort of "customized edition," so I didn't even know this was possible.
I could po
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Rat bastards, all of 'em.
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Re:$4-15K/year (Score:4, Informative)
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Not to mention the nasty habit of "revisions" happening all the time. I do remember one $200-ish AP Chem book for HS we got online for quite a bit less... had the same material, but the pg numbers were off and the exercises were a bit different... obvious changes to make the book "obsolete". I wonder how much is the Author and how much is the Publisher making these minor tweaks to create artificial obsolescence?
I know some people who have written standard textbooks in a couple different fields. The general impression I've gotten from them is that they are usually NOT in favor of creating new editions all the time. Generally there are some kinks to work out in the first edition, but definitely by the second or third edition, things should be pretty set. The authors I've talked to have mentioned they are often under pressure from publishers to make changes to justify new editions. And, in fact, that's often why
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Amazon already buys a lot of textbooks back, and for about the same crummy price the school bookstore gives you. If you look over at the right side, there's often a "trade in your item" with a proposed price.
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Actually Amazon usually gave me WAY better buyback rates than that eFollett shit store that holds a monopoly on most campuses. Granted Amazon's buybacks were in the form of Amazon gift cards, it wasn't a bad deal at all considering that you just reinvest that money into new books on Amazon, which were always cheaper anyways. And even if you didn't do that, I can't think of any one product I'd use that I can't find on Amazon, who usually ends up being cheaper than B&M stores anyways.
(Oh, and that eFollet
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Unless they're going to buy the books back, student bookstores aren't going anywhere. Gotta do something with those $4-15k/yearly in books after you're done using them...and getting $250 back.
If your student bookstore will buy the book back, Amazon probably will too. The bookstore won't even always take the books, e.g. if they don't think they can sell them. Meanwhile, you are free to list your book on Amazon yourself, and Amazon will help you sell it to another student.
Beware? (Score:2)
Where's the money? (Score:4, Informative)
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You are comparing revenues to profits. $140k in commissions looks a lot nicer than $0 in commissions for those that buy from Amazon and at 2 percent commission, the revenues through this portal amounted to $7 million, or about 1/3 of the amount sold directly.
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Do you have a vendetta against Amazon? I was about to call you out for mixing semiannual and annual, and profits and revenues, but then I recognized your name from your front page submission "Why the Public Library Beats Amazon."
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Burn in hell (Score:1)
Every university bookstore and publisher of college textbooks.
Burn in bloody fucking hell.
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why the fuck cant purdue (Score:1)
do this themselves... negotiate best prices possible for the books, even better than amazon or anyone else.. i mean, *they* are the ones generating the revenue for the publishers.. how is it even possible for amazon to get lower prices? if one publisher dont play ball, you fire them and go with someone else that's cheaper for similar material. easy peasy. fuck amazon. keep commercial shit like that off campus, please.
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they get kickbacks and some professors write there own books and force you to buy new ones each year or you fail the class.
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They adopt new editions because they cannot ensure that students have access to older editions.
Baloney. I was in college long enough to see MULTIPLE examples of books with swapped chapters 2-3 every edition. 2 editions old was identical to current. And there's NO REASON to swap the chapters except to cause pagination confusion, and require the new edition. Most of the books for math and science had answer keys in the back. Texts for majors are revised more infrequently because there's not as much profit to be made in books that only 4% of the students will buy, so resources are put toward the general
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I suspect because Purdue is in the business of selling education services and not being a book vendor. They'd have to hire people to be experts in the business of book sales. It's the same way that most universities don't grow their own food or grow their own forests to build the desks and tables. Sure they could do that, but it's typically more efficient to leave it someone who specializes in that particular thing.
As a book vendor, Amazon has so much more clout than a single university. Maybe a univers
Newsflash! Amazon to Provide Discount Buggy Whips (Score:1)
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Or you can pay $15-$20 more for a hard copy that you own and can resell and never gets locked out.
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In my experience ebooks are great for things like novels, where it's mostly paragraph after paragraph of text. But for textbooks that have a lot of images, tables, diagrams, mathematical formulae, source code snippets, etc. the formatting doesn't always come out looking nice.
I think the epub format is basically zip'd html, and the kindle format is not that different. Text gets resized and reflowed according to the reader's screen size, and this means that things move around and don't look the way the author
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You think right. HTML is a content markup language, not a format-preserving one. And when you're dealing with varying display sizes, that can be an advantage, although there's also an option to make PDF documents reflow.
The main problems come from graphics, which typically either get butchered or displayed at unreadable sizes.
If the book's graphics were designed with smaller screen sizes in mind, it's possible to make them more readable, but of course, there are limits.
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Also, it's real easy to go to the next or previous page on my Nook. It's hard to jump around, like I tend to do for technical books. I much prefer those to be paper.
Re:Newsflash! Amazon to Provide Discount Buggy Whi (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
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Actually, with 21st-century technology, a book like that isn't all that expensive to produce, even in relatively small quantities. Providing a textbook in electronic form really isn't going to save the publisher much money. Therefore, it isn't going to change textbook prices much, since the difference in costs is trivial compared to what they charge.
The issue is that students are effectively forced to buy stuff at monopoly prices.
Why is this 'Student Bookstores Beware'? (Score:1)
Hey Purdue! (Score:2)
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I recently was affronted by a "modern" Spanish-language course. The actual books were awful, the course itself was online - a very bad idea, I think for a subject where the ultimate test in mastery is how well you can converse with teachers and fellow students. And this particular abomination is the almost universal text for colleges in about 5 states. Oh, and this is one of those courses where half your learning materials disappear in a puff of smoke at the end of the term.
Spanish is a living language and
And They'll Do What? (Score:2)
College students smarter than this (Score:1)
"The book-buying landscape for students and their families" has already been changed, by torrents and usenet.
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Retail moves to national chain ... (Score:2)
You want cheaper textbooks? (Score:1)
Except for rapidly-evolving subjects, encourage professors to use "old" textbooks or, whatever the subject matter, encourage professors to use "open source" textbooks when they are available.
If publishers balk at reprinting old textbooks at "old prices," lobby Congress to allow colleges to reprint old textbooks and pay a royalty based on the lowest published price during the book's lifetime.
Under this kind of "book market" most Freshman and Sophomores won't have more than 1 or 2 classes where they have to b
Root Cause (Score:1)
UT Austin outsourced bookstore to Barnes&Noble (Score:2)
Sending in my application today (Score:1)