Pearson Ditches Print Textbooks For College Students in Digital-First Strategy (cbsnews.com) 154
Texbook publishing giant Pearson will soon be publishing a lot fewer textbooks. It said this week it's ending regular revisions of all print textbooks in its higher-education category. As Pearson faces mounting pressure from the resale market, the move signals a growing shift in the publishing industry to a "digital-first" model. From a report: Instead of revising all 1,500 of its active titles every three years according to the print schedule, the British education publisher said it will focus on updating its digital products more frequently, offering artificial intelligence capabilities, data analytics and research. Pearson is billing the decision as a way to help drive down college costs for students. But the company and the education publishing industry as a whole have been criticized for years for the rising prices of textbooks. That has pushed a majority of students into secondhand textbook markets like Chegg or spurred them to forego buying class materials altogether. The average cost of college textbooks rose about four times faster than the rate of inflation over the last decade. "Our digital first model lowers prices for students and, over time, increases our revenues," Fallon said in a statement. "By providing better value to students, they have less reason to turn to the secondary market. Pearson's e-books can cost about $40 on average and go up to $79 for additional learning tools like homework assistance. That compares to prices that can go as high as $200 or $300 for a print textbook, according to Pearson CEO John Fallon, though students can still rent one for $60 on average.
I see the plan. (Score:5, Insightful)
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Instead of revising all 1,500 of its active titles every three years
to kill any possible second-hand book market
the British education publisher said it will focus on updating its digital products more frequently, offering
DRM-encrusted crap that kills the second-hand eBook market while also killing the second-hand printed book market. Genius!
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Well, yes, of course. The point is to kill off the second hand market - full stop. The publisher makes no money from second-hand sales and loses first-hand sales to them, so of course they want to plug that revenue leak.
I don't think I brought more than one first-hand text book in my time in college. Why would you?
DRM'd eBook text books? They'll get cracked if they're any good, and not used if they'r
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Re:I see the plan. (Score:5, Funny)
Fortunately for Pearson, it's much harder and more expensive to copy a digital book than a paper book.
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Just wait for the draconian DRM that'll be cracked in a few days.
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and then you can't do the homework with the non DRM copy.
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I want to see the source code for that included file...
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They will also sell addons that are "optional" which are homework modules. Access to each addon will be charged on a per-chapter basis which the professor will required.
Further you can submit the digital homework at an additional cost per-submission basis which the professor will require because they don't want to take the time to grade the homework they are requiring the students to do.
As a bonus there will be loot crates that you can purchase that will give you the answers* to the homework. However there
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Per chapter? They'll charge for all of the homework and to hell with students that aren't required to use all of the chapters.
This is an example of an industry that is badly in need of antitrust enforcement action. There used to be more major publisher, these days, it's fewer than a half dozen that cover most of the books in use at major universities. When James Stewart died a few years ago, he had a $35m house. Granted, he had been writing books for years and they were widely used. He probably also got mon
Re: I see the plan. (Score:1)
The underlying problem is: people can afford the books via student loans. Publishers know this. This needs to stop. Both for schools and materials. They can charge whatever they want, âoejust put it on my tabâ.
There should be strict allotments for books/materials. It should be half of what it is not to start. Then sales will drop. Then prices will drop. Then it is realistic again. This of course is in your economics textbook.
Itâ(TM)s the same with health care. And other âput it on m
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Not only can you not resell your book, but they can happily charge you $300 for each copy. Not sure what he was smoking but once you get out of general ed requirements engineering textbooks were running for $150-$500, and not always exactly hard bound. My linear systems course was just a paperback text filled with nothing but graphs, equations and derivations. The only prose were things like "lagrangian" or "eigenvalue", often without any (non mathematical) context..
I sold that one, there's no way such a th
Re: I see the plan. (Score:1)
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Not only that, but ebooks cost very little to publish, unlike that icky ink and paper! Double score! (What's that? Charge less because it costs less to make? Oh, you are a funny guy!)
Re:I see the plan. (Score:4, Interesting)
The cost of an ebook isn't much less than the cost of printing/warehousing/shipping the print version, actually. The process is quite efficient because we've been doing it so long.
The added cost for a traditional novel to make it in paper form over electronic is around... $1. That's all. Textbooks with their fancier gloss paper and such maybe adds a couple of bucks, though you save a bit since the distribution network is smaller (basically publisher ships pallets to university bookstores and the like, rather than publishers to distributors to retailer warehouses to retailers).
Most of the cost goes into the authorship/editing/proofreading/typesetting process, and of course, profit.
Going digital is nothing about reducing the printing costs. It's all about killing the secondhand market and keeping the lucrative money to themselves. The other bonus is they don't have to update it yearly anymore, so they don't have to pay the author to make a new edition - just keep paying the royalties.
You already couldn't do that (Score:3)
Free market never worked for textbooks (Score:2)
The free market failed years (decades) ago.
The free market model has never worked for textbooks. The professor is the one deciding on the textbook but it is the student who purchases it. As a result, price is not a strong influence on whether a textbook is adopted which is why publishers can get away with charging outrageous prices. While some of us faculty are getting more aware of this and factoring in price to our decisions often there is very little difference. This is increasingly leading some of us to write our own material which is trivially
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You could use regulation. Or, the students could start asking the professors why the textbook is needed. I'm still amazed at the number of textbooks that were superfluous in college.
Textbook extortion ring (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Textbook extortion ring (Score:4, Interesting)
The book was expensive because the company needed to market it because there were already dozens of other textbooks on the topic on the market (and the subject wasn't exactly one that changed a lot) and they had to spend a load of money for that, just on top of the costs for the editor, printing and distribution, and then because there weren't a lot of orders they had to increase the cost, then the college bookstores need a piece of the pie as well. Student's didn't have as many options for getting cheaper copies outside of buying from someone else who had finished the class and cutting out the bookstore. No one is really making obscene amounts of money, but everyone is skimming a little bit.
I think that the way to go now as far as college text books go would be to just release one using something akin to an open source model. Just let students have the contents of the book for free as a digital copy or even pay to have someone print and bind a physical copy if they want. Then set up a paypal account, patreon, etc. and just let people donate whatever amount they feel like. I expect that most professors would wind up making more money that way because the one that I spoke to said that it wasn't even close to worth doing from a financial perspective and that the only reason he made occasional updates to the book was that it was more of a passion project for him.
Re:Textbook extortion ring (Score:4, Interesting)
I'm not quite sure it's just the textbook manufacturers, but a case of there just being so many middlemen in the pipeline that everyone gets squeezed. I had a professor in college that was the author of the book he used in his class, and it was a fairly expensive book, but the campus bookstore had plenty of used copies at least. I asked him about it just because I was kind of curious myself and the explanation was kind of interesting.
The book was expensive because the company needed to market it because there were already dozens of other textbooks on the topic on the market (and the subject wasn't exactly one that changed a lot) and they had to spend a load of money for that, just on top of the costs for the editor, printing and distribution, and then because there weren't a lot of orders they had to increase the cost, then the college bookstores need a piece of the pie as well. Student's didn't have as many options for getting cheaper copies outside of buying from someone else who had finished the class and cutting out the bookstore. No one is really making obscene amounts of money, but everyone is skimming a little bit. ....... the one that I spoke to said that it wasn't even close to worth doing from a financial perspective and that the only reason he made occasional updates to the book was that it was more of a passion project for him.
If writing and publishing the book was just a passion project for him, then why didn't he offer non-bound, synopsis, or excerpted copies of his book to his students at reduced or no cost? To me it is almost always suspect when a teacher requires their own book for a class, both in an ethical sense, but also in an intellectual sense. The teacher is essentially forcing the students to pay them money for one thing. But more importantly, you lose out on the breadth of perspective that you would otherwise get from seeing multiple interpretations or presentations.
Instead of writing their own material, I would rather have a teacher teach off other material (providing that author's prospective or interpretation) and then supplement that by either expounding on topics that are in their opinion inadequately or insufficiently expressed or where they have a differing interpretation.
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Instead of writing their own material, I would rather have a teacher teach off other material (providing that author's prospective or interpretation) and then supplement that by either expounding on topics that are in their opinion inadequately or insufficiently expressed or where they have a differing interpretation.
That works for some fields, and might even be better to draw on multiple sources. I had a history class in college that was like this where we had three different books, all c
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I'm guessing that whatever contract he signed with the publisher may have prevented him from doing that. I wouldn't be surprised if the textbook industry is a lot like the music industry. Get some naive idealists who are really excited about their creations and then get your lawyers to mercilessly buttfuck 'em with an onerous contract.
I know I had some teachers in grad school that provided excerpts from some of their published works, but you are right they could have had a clause that allowed it (or just said screw it)
Instead of writing their own material, I would rather have a teacher teach off other material (providing that author's prospective or interpretation) and then supplement that by either expounding on topics that are in their opinion inadequately or insufficiently expressed or where they have a differing interpretation.
That works for some fields, and might even be better to draw on multiple sources. I had a history class in college that was like this where we had three different books, all cheap paperbacks that came in well below the cost of actual textbooks, but they all covered one specific topic. The professor lectured about other things in the course as well, but course was structured around a giant term paper on reading and interpreting the different books to construct your own perspective.
The problem with the example I've used is that it was a math class. I'm sure that there are an infinite number of interpretations of 2 + 2, but most of them will be useless and wrong.
I had the same thing, with classes-particularly history since that was my major-that required multiple books, usually in the $20-30 range. As for math, well, as you say, how many correct interpretations can there be of 2+2? So why write another book and force your students to use that one (and thereby force them to pay fo
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I had the same thing, with classes-particularly history since that was my major-that required multiple books, usually in the $20-30 range. As for math, well, as you say, how many correct interpretations can there be of 2+2? So why write another book and force your students to use that one (and thereby force them to pay for the additional marketing, etc) unless it's about money or ego?
The particular class was a specialty for that professor and he'd been teaching it for close to 30 years at that point, so he really knew he stuff. I expect part of the reason was that he just wasn't satisfied with the way other textbooks were arranged or how they went about describing the material. I would imagine that the thought process behind it went something like this: https://xkcd.com/927/ [xkcd.com]. For some professors it may be ego, but in the case I'm referring to I'd be surprised given the personality of th
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Improvements in technology as well as the internet have probably made the old model obsolete, but no one has really realized it yet. There are probably still college professors that use old slide projectors and other ancient technology instead of PowerPoint and things like that. They're not going to change the way they do things, and it takes a while for new ideas and ways to come in, and some of those are really no better for a variety of reasons.
Personally, I always preferred if my professors used chalk/whiteboards or overheads vs power points. It always made the lectures feel more fluid, and if the class either wasn't understanding something or someone raised and interesting point/topic, the teacher could shift and cover that a little more without being stuck doing just what was on the powerpoint slide. It feels a little more personal. Plus it helps with pacing with regards to note taking, writing down diagrams/figures, etc.
custom school textbooks are also out there (Score:2)
custom school textbooks are also out there
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This is it. I had a prof that would just give the textbook as online PDFs, students could choose to download, print or just read them online. However, once his book was published the publisher REQUIRED him to make students buy it and was not even allowed to send out the PDFs of his rough draft he had before he had finished the book. He was not a fan of it but the book wasn't a crazy expensive one
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Persasons is a publicly traded company so their financial statements are available: https://finance.yahoo.com/quot... [yahoo.com]
From what I can see, sales and general administration takes a huge chunk of their gross profit, supporting what you say in your first paragraph.
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Executive salaries fall under "general administration" by the way.
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If student loans had bankruptcy then the banks (Score:3)
If student loans had bankruptcy then the banks and the schools will have skin in the game that can be used to force this to change.
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Broadly, this is the same problem America has with health care: too many middlemen who don't do the actual work, but feel entitled to a cut. It's not as bad with textbooks for several reasons; you won't die if you don't buy the book, and there is something of a
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Completely agree, they have lost sight of their mission. It is clearly not to help students learn. Studies show most learners retain more from printed materials. They are prioritizing locking out the secondary market over actually providing the best learning materials possible.
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All college is a racket. The get away with charging so much because of guaranteed student loans. Loans that, short of death, you can't get out of. I'm not even sure about death. Colleges can charge what they want and that rolls down hill to book sellers. You have to have the book for that course, so they can charge you $300 to $500 a book.
Tucker Carlson nailed it right about colleges. It is a unlimited cash cow with no regulation, an no way out for the sucker. Student loans are one of the major d
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Most schools give zero fucks. They exist to turn a profit and Pearson make that easy and convenient. Ditching dead tree books is even more convenient because all the school need provide is computer access.
My CAD instructor wrote a CAD textbook with a Creative Commons license which worked a treat for his students, but never, ever forget most of academia are lazy slugs serving time until retirement teaching unenthused students who are there for the credential.
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Better than blind faith in your Washingtonian overlords.
If only (Score:3)
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They overcharge students hundreds of dollars for books and create kick-back schemes with professors to make sure these books are purchased.
I'm a mathematics professor, and I can guarantee that we don't receive kickbacks for using textbooks. Oftentimes, the textbook is determined by the math department's administration, and we don't have a choice in the decision. Other times, the department may give us a small number of textbook choices. And sometimes (especially with high-level classes for upperclassmen), we are free to choose whichever textbook we wish.
Nevertheless, it is possible that the department administration may be receiving kickbac
We need an dual education system in the usa (Score:2)
We need an dual education system in the usa.
Things have gotten way to much on the us must go college side that even trade schools that did not really make an big deal that we have "college degrees" where forced to comply with rules that are needed to be able to offer "degrees"
They get an Bad Reputations but at least some of that comes from the non core "college degrees" part that you really don't get from an pure trade school.
Also not all skills need 2-4 years of class room or at very least 2-4 years up fro
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Just curious, what's your native language?
You seem to be using "an" in a lot of places that you should use "a", so it's a pretty safe bet you're either not a native English-speaker or you're semi-literate....
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I would be very interested to see an analysis that does *not* ask, "How are lifetimes earnings compared between people who have a BS degree and those who do not," and instead analyze, "How are lifetime earnings compared between people who have a BS degree by attending a 4-year college and people who have a fake BS degree and didn't get caught."
Still not an interesting comparison. The reason being that college graduates are a self-selecting group, with the upper-middle class, motivated, and highly intelligence being heavily over-represented. When you're comparing "those that worked hard in high school and had social connections" to "penniless juvenile delinquents" you are going to get exactly the numbers that the schools are looking for. You'd have to correct for these factors for them to mean anything at all.
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I don't hate 'em or being greedy. Everybody is greedy. Even the socialist wanting us to pay them for not working.
I blame the schools and students for letting them get away with it.
Retention (Score:1)
It's (just) my opinion, but I believe that reading things digitally instead of on a printed page leads to a lower retention rate. Digital books are fine - so long as students then print them out to read :-)
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We get it, publishers are trying to maximize profits, but damn this is so bad for students.
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That's just a perception. In general audiobooks are just as good for remembering things from as regular books. And digital books themselves come with the ability to do full text search and easily store a long list of bookmarks that usually indicate what section they're in. You interact with them differently, so you need to adjust your reading strategy, but there's no basis for text on a screen being worse than text in a book.
With a physical book, I may remember in what part of a book it was in, and even in some cases can remember exactly where on the page it was, but cannot remember the exact wording of that text, only the general information. In cases like this it is much easier for me to pick up the book and flip through it than it is for me to search in an ebook. Especially since search functions look for exact words and not general ideas or concepts.
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Freshmen calculus is the same thing Newton invented in the 1600's. You can as well say this about many other subjects. Foreign languages. History.
I would say languages and history have changed and evolved at least a little since the 1600s. Unless of course your schooling consisted of learning of the recent formation of the Dutch East India Company and the lectures were conducted in Early Modern English.
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Most history taught in high schools and for non-history majors at universities is the same now as it was 50 years ago, because the time period in question was many hundreds or thousands of years ago. There is no need to change the books every single year.
I would disagree there, as there are always discoveries that change our interpretation of history, especially ancient history. Find a new settlement or ruin, or some tool or pottery gets redated or discovered somewhere unexpected, and suddenly timelines can change by hundreds, if not thousands of years. A civilization may have started sooner than we thought or built upon another older civilization that we didn't even know existed, or regions may have traded centuries before we thought they did.
And those a
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And don't forget the SJW revisionism of ancient history as well.
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Need to be careful about that. Less than 100 years ago Troy was just some legend, not an actual place. Just over 70 years ago Linear B was completely unreadable and not even thought to be Greek.
Heck what we know an awful lot more about William Wallace and what we knew when Braveheart was released as a movie (good movie, just remember historically it's all philsh).
History does indeed change because we keep finding new things out through either historical research (you have no idea how many manuscripts exists
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Need to be careful about that. Less than 100 years ago Troy was just some legend, not an actual place.
So? Did Troy really do much to change the course of history in an interesting way? Or was it just one more primitive city state?
Heck what we know an awful lot more about William Wallace and what we knew when Braveheart was released as a movie (good movie, just remember historically it's all philsh).
And....no one really cared. William Wallace would barley be referenced in a footnote in a freshman history class. I'm just saying that you're straining over gnats, which had no significant impact on the overall ebb and flow of history.
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https://www.makeuseof.com/tag/android-ebook-reader-annotation/ [makeuseof.com]
I agree with previous posters that this is a scam to keep collecting money and squash resale of books. But, highlighting sections of the digital book is possible. What I would think more problematic would be the printing of highlighted pages. I could see people wanting to do that. And I don't know of any method to do that.
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Highlighting can be done for only $0.10/word.
Printing can be enabled for only $5.00/page.
Bookmarking can be enabled for only $1.00/bookmark/day
annotations can be enabled for only $0.25/annotation/page/day
Great the text book p;ublisher scam (Score:2)
Question, are the days of a teacher standing in the front of a classroom dispensing obsolete knowledge over?
I mean, I learn everything I want tech wise on the internet and have not bought a book in a decade. I have adjusted to the poin
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lawmakers already know. But rather than working for their constituents they just go to the same text book publishers/College professors and hit them up for campaign cash to drop the subject.
Public Service today is all about stuffing other peoples money and tax dollars in YOUR pockets.
Just my 2 cents
Make sure you read your assignments... (Score:2)
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I think that depends on the digital book format.
If the digital book were a PDF, as long as there wasn't a restriction on what devices I could use to read it, I'd actually prefer it over a physical textbook.
Comment removed (Score:4, Insightful)
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At the local University here, the only textbook reseller is the university owned bookstore. The independent ones stopped selling them long ago on account of the pointless revision scam.
I will say, that was the nice thing about about getting a humanities degree and knocking out most of my "hard" subject classes in high school with AP/post AP classes in my STEM magnet program. The only subject that I took where I really had to worry about revisions for textbooks was my psych class where I needed the current DSM, and even then the teacher recommended getting the cheaper quick reference version. Fortunately my German and Arabic classes didn't have expensive textbooks either since they were
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Ah. To blame corporate greed on government subsidies. Truly a virtue.
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So, you're admitting that you couldn't afford the economics textbook?
BTW, you're greedy, too. All people are.
Big question (Score:2)
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Based on the CEO's comments in a BBC interview it's obviously rentals. His claim was books can be updated instantly which means they're not PDFs or ePubs but some online-only DRMed bullshit.
That post is amusing. (Score:3)
The real question is why *wouldn't* they? Name an industry that has willingly left that kind of money on the table. The market is use to paying hundreds of dollars per textbook, so they're going to continue paying hundreds of dollars per textbook........costs reductions and market efficiencies be damned.
Of course before students had a textbook they could keep for years whereas now it's a "license" that expires after a certain amount of time. The end user is getting way less for their money but of course they don't want to discuss that.
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Assuming they won't still charge $300 for a textbook just because it's no longer in dead tree format.
TFS says they will be priced from $40 to $79 dollars. It remains to be seen how long those prices will last. This doesn't seem too far out of line from the current market. You buy a new book for $300 and sell it for $250 once you are through with it. Your cost: $50. The next buyer picks it up for $250 and sells it for $200, etc. Until the inevitable revision drives the value on the used market down to zero.
Name an industry that has willingly left that kind of money on the table.
They haven't really left anything on the table. They have just wiped out the used text market and dire
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Assuming they won't still charge $300 for a textbook just because it's no longer in dead tree format.
TFS says they will be priced from $40 to $79 dollars. It remains to be seen how long those prices will last. This doesn't seem too far out of line from the current market. You buy a new book for $300 and sell it for $250 once you are through with it. Your cost: $50. The next buyer picks it up for $250 and sells it for $200, etc. Until the inevitable revision drives the value on the used market down to zero.
Bwahahahaha! Where did you go to school or who did you sell to that would buy your used book for that? Having three degrees I have bought and sold *a lot* of text books over the years and can count on one hand how many times I got even half of what I paid back. Amazon was a nice step up, but even then books were bought back at well below their initial cost.
They haven't really left anything on the table. They have just wiped out the used text market and directly charged customers the actual cost of the text, $50. Since they no longer have to compete with the used market, their pricing looks like a wash. Higher volume, less revenue for each sale.
Christ do you work for a publisher? That's all just really naive. Seriously.
Currently, resale market or not, they charge $300 for a print book. D
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Bwahahahaha! Where did you go to school or who did you sell to that would buy your used book for that? Having three degrees I have bought and sold *a lot* of text books over the years and can count on one hand how many times I got even half of what I paid back. Amazon was a nice step up, but even then books were bought back at well below their initial cost.
So you are supporting my assertion. Losing 50% of the initial price of a textbook on resale would be $150 (assuming a printed book price of $300).
Do you honestly think that $50 is not an artificially low price to speed adoption at which point the price will go up?
So the break-even point for the customer would be $150 for an e-book. $40 to $79 is a good deal.
To sit there and say "we don't know if there will be a hardcopy"
In a reference book format, almost certainly. It's still a profitable market.
And to answer your original question: I went to school in the 1970's. When engineering textbooks cost (new) $50 to $75. Following an initial sale into the used market (where one would expect a
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Bwahahahaha! Where did you go to school or who did you sell to that would buy your used book for that? Having three degrees I have bought and sold *a lot* of text books over the years and can count on one hand how many times I got even half of what I paid back. Amazon was a nice step up, but even then books were bought back at well below their initial cost.
So you are supporting my assertion. Losing 50% of the initial price of a textbook on resale would be $150 (assuming a printed book price of $300).
No, losing 50 percent was an *optimal* result that rarely happened. The norm was more like a buyback at 15 - 25 percent. Or, if you were unlucky, they wouldn't buy it back at all (new edition coming out, professor changing textbooks for next year etc).
The bookstore would buy back that $300 book for $50 and then resell it next semester as "used" for $150 - $200. That was mid - late 90's. mid to late aughts there were online buyers that would pay a little more, but there was still a significant spread.
Do you honestly think that $50 is not an artificially low price to speed adoption at which point the price will go up?
So the break-even point for the customer would be $150 for an e-book. $40 to $79 is a good deal.
"Good deal" is relative. You get a semester out of the book before the DRM locks you out. It may certainly be considered "cheap".
I don't know where you're getting this "break even" point from. It's a completely arbitrary number that you've chosen.
To sit there and say "we don't know if there will be a hardcopy"
In a reference book format, almost certainly. It's still a profitable market.
And to answer your original question: I went to school in the 1970's. When engineering textbooks cost (new) $50 to $75. Following an initial sale into the used market (where one would expect a loss) if you took care of your books, you could often beak even by buying used and then reselling for the same price.
Within the context of the article and discussion we're not talking industry references. We're talking specifically textbooks aimed at education. Reference books arguably aren't subject to the same pressures as textbooks because they are held for longer periods of time and are sold to a wider audience.
That explains a lot actually. Your experience is from before the text book publishers started getting sneaky about defeating resale (things like "new editions" with minor changes, one use supplemental CD
Pick one and only one (Score:1)
Our digital first model lowers prices for students
And over time, increases our revenues,"
Mutually exclusive goals.
Also, for the record, paper or bust. No point forking out for a textbook some bunch of nitwits will disappear when the contract to the DRM provider expires.
Entitlement, much? (Score:4, Insightful)
"As Pearson faces mounting pressure from the resale market,"
That should be: As Pearson feels entitled to extract as much money as possible from every student.
This is about maximising revenue of an already successful and profitable company from their captive market.
A market captured for them by university lecturers and professors.
Piracy's too good for 'em.
(compare: Elsevier delenda est)
Pearson Re-invents Algebra Yearly... (Score:1)
Teaching methods notwithstanding, basic math, language and science has not changed enough in hundreds of years to necessitate yearly revisions. Universities should have their own basic texts as part of their courses at no additional charge.
I worked for a public school district in Texas and saw a math book revision that mostly only changed the page numbers and order of practice problems. There were no significant changes in the text.
The end of open-book tests, then? (Score:3)
no the end of paper tests replaced with paid e-tes (Score:4, Interesting)
no the end of paper tests replaced with paid e-test fees.
So by avoiding the resale market... (Score:1)
... they're opening up the piracy market instead. Great! It's really hard to download a hardback, but it's a lot easier to download a PDF. I'm sad that bookshops and individuals will lose a source of revenue from selling last years text books, but I'm far happier that this will result in far fewer people actually buying the books in the first place too. Maybe if they were sold at something closer to a reasonable price then this wouldn't be an issue in the first place.
Riiiight, because it's the cost of printing... (Score:2)
...that makes college textbooks so expensive.
If a physical book is $200-300 but the electronic version is $40, are they really trying to get people to believe it's the printing that adds $160 to the cost? Come on now. More likely textbook prices will rise back to $200-300 and companies like this will save $5/book in printing costs.
Re: (Score:2)
^^^^ This right there.
Just visit a Barnes&Noble and look at how many obscure, yet non-college books (ie, low-volume, "coffee table" books) sell for more that $100.
Uncertain percentages (Score:3)
Pearson seems to imply that the materials, printing process and distribution network comprise the large majority of the costs associated to a book. I believe this is not true. Most of the money actually goes to the editorial, marketing campaign (particularly in academic conferences, etc) and the original book author. Particularly in novels, ebooks are around half the price of the printed versions. Textbooks, however, have different conditions: the amount of printed copies is not so large, and the books last for a few (3-4) years only, since they encourage the authors to get a new version.
Contrary to my belief, I have found this page [textbookspyder.com] that states that 56% of the cost of a textbook goes to printing, bookstore and shipping (the part that would be saved in the electronic version). However, they do not provide the source of this data, and I seriously doubt it is accurate. Pearson provides tricky numbers in their statement, since they compare the $40 average for an ebook to the priciest printed books at $200 or $300.
My belief is that they are actually increasing their benefits, by slightly reducing their benefit per unit, but completely killing the second-hand market using draconian DRM.
Books are cheap. (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
There are bookstores in every city that contain books with less distribution than textbooks, and you'd be hard pressed to find ones that cost over $100. Textbooks are a cash cow, because there is very little reason to stock large inventories. Since the schools will be putting in "orders" (the teacher has to let the bookstore know to stock the book well in advance), the needed production is VERY easy to predict.
My experience. (Score:1)
Community college last year: $800 per class for online classes (I work full time), Pearson books are $150-300 each, digital copy costs $20 less than the print version but is required because it comes with classwork. That classwork is the entirety of the class and "teacher interaction." Answers are available via google search, and the book and classwork are only available when their servers are up, which crash whenever HW is due because everyone tests on the same day. Digital copy is unsellable and expires w
Re: (Score:3)
Visually Impaired getting a break? (Score:2)
Does this mean the visually impaired folk will be getting a break finally for usability, or just a shift to have reading habits (and other mobile app features) mined for profit and income?
Open Educational Resources (OER) (Score:1)
The future of Ed publishing is in OER. The average textbook costs $30 to print or is free in digital versions, e.g. Word, PDF, or EPub. The quality is as good or better than commercial publishers' & OER textbooks get developed & updated according to students', teachers', & institutions' needs rather than the publishers'.
Universities are part of the Scam (Score:2, Insightful)
Our chemistry department got tired of dealing with publishers so we published our own general chemistry book. It is free to every student in PDF form. Granted, it isn't as good as a major publisher's text book, and many of the images are of poor quality, but it is very hard to beat free. We are continually revising it, and all revisions are free as well. The students are happy with it, and the library binds and sells it for the binding cost (US$20).
Low hanging fruit (Score:3)
....how does no politician see this as an OBVIOUS low hanging fruit target to attack?
I mean, there aren't many issues where Democrats and Republicans can agree, but the whole ridiculous textbook monopoly bullshit has been an issue for 30 years. We could finally all hold hands while we tar & feather these guys out of town...right?
Or is it because we have two factions sucking from that teat? ...ergo, corrupt individuals important to both parties have their hands in this particular cookie jar.
- publishers as big businesses likely are supporting republicans
and
- the schools/professors that are complicit in the scheme by approving or worse, requiring these 'updated' textbooks are all hardcore democrats
Re: (Score:2)
I mean, there aren't many issues where Democrats and Republicans can agree, but the whole ridiculous textbook monopoly bullshit has been an issue for 30 years.
TRUMP: We must stop feeding this runaway textbook industry!
LEFT: Trumps an anit-intellectual! Why does Trump hate education! He's a racist!
AOC: We must stop feeding this runaway textbook industry!
RIGHT: She's a socialist that wants to take control of everything! She should have read her economics textbook she bought from Amazon!
Editions (Score:2)
Just like (some) software versions, publishers release new editions for no other purpose than to extort new money for the same product. It's been done in software and in pharmaceuticals.
I once worked at a university bookstore and it was heartbreaking to see so many students paying about CA$299 for the latest editions of text books in first-year calculus (which hasn't changed in 250 years) and second-year calculus (which hasn't changed in 100 years).