I'm not generally someone that supports illegal acts, but I fully support pirating/copying of textbooks. The fact that textbook publishing companies have a virtual monopoly and then do other things like coerce professors to continuously force students to use yearly new editions of textbooks makes me believe that the only solution is to pirate their material and starve them of money.
Sorry that some good textbook authors are affected by this, but frankly, there is a bigger issue here, and collateral damage is to be expected. The only solution is to charge fair prices, and until that point is reached, I believe students should pirate textbooks to their hearts content.
If there was some way writers could license out their work to multiple publishers that could create competition. Alas, as far as I know, a publisher won't touch a textbook without exclusivity.
Why not cut out the publishers entirely? Have university professors write textbooks, and have university libraries archive and distribute those textbooks electronically. We live in an age of cheap eink screens and cheap printing -- so what purpose do textbook publishers serve these days?
University professors don't have the time or skills to create diagrams, locate pictures, handle formatting and typesetting issues, write hundreds of homework problems and solutions, proofread, copyedit, and all the other things that go into producing good textbooks.
Really? I know professors who wrote textbooks in their spare time. Universities could give professors a paid year off (no teaching responsibilities) to work on textbooks. Time is a non-issue here.
"...or skills to create diagrams..."
Professors, who spend their time writing research papers that are usually filled with diagrams, don't have the skills to do so? That's an interesting assertion. There are plenty of software tools available for creating diagrams.
"handle formatting and typesetting issues"
Hm, I think there is a tool for that one too: LaTeX. What, it's too much to expect a professor to know how to use LaTeX? Well, there are several other tools that could be used. These problems were more or less solved decades ago. Professors routinely format and typeset their articles; formatting a book is not substantially different.
"write hundreds of homework problems"
I know professors who do this: they write homework and test problems for their courses.
Really, I think you underestimate what an experienced professor could do in a year. Even if what you were saying was true, it would not be hard to solve: universities could hire experts on formatting and publishing to work in their libraries and assist professors. It is also not necessarily the case that every professor would have to write whole books; if books were being shared by universities via their libraries, professors could make corrections and improvements to books as needed, with the changes being propagated in a manner similar to patches in open source projects. We have all the technology that is needed for this, we only need to put in the effort to organize such a system (but I won't hold my breath).
I've had many teachers write their own books and give them to the local copy-shop for distribution to the students at printing cost (~$15). Or we can keep PDF copies of the books for free.
Universities could give professors a paid year off
At whose expense? Taxpayers and the students themselves, of course. There is no such thing as a free lunch.
On top of that, there is no sense going against the specialization of labor. Better leave the professionals (in this case, the publishing companies) to do their thing.
So for a small increase in their tuition, students would be getting free textbooks, or for a small increase in taxes (or just not spending so much on the military), society would be getting free textbooks. In what version of the universe are these negative things?
As for the "professionals" at the publishing companies, what exactly is their profession? We do not need publishers to copy books for us anyone, because we have computers that can copy the books faster, cheaper, and on a much greater scale and if students need printers, they have access to them. So what professionals would you be referring to? Textbook publishing companies are not academies where experts in a subject spend their days writing about that subject; universities are the academies where experts (i.e. professors and researchers) are paid to write about their area of expertise. Textbook publishing companies hire people who can make fancy covers (which adds no value to books), double check typesetting (which is a redundant task, since librarians and professors can do that), and operate machines that print and bind books (but we do not need that anymore, because we have automated ways to distribute books). So in what way are we "going against the specialization of labor" by asking for books that are CC-SA licensed, written by professors, and shared over the Internet?
I don't think it's correct that professors don't do their own diagrams and typesetting for academic works. Sometimes they do. The complaints I hear are that the publisher screwed up the equations and introduced errors, not that they thoughtfully corrected their work and enhanced it.
When diagrams and typesetting are needed though, this is the perfect task for the students to attend to. I'm seeing this right now in the free online classes at Coursera and Udacity - teachers publish notes in lectures and students are providing transcriptions, translations, diagrams, deeper explanations, and overall creating massive improvement on the originals, in many cases creating an online textbook in pdf or wiki format.
My wife and I both have been in multiple courses where either the professor or another at the university wrote the text book. Some weren't so great, but more than a few were outstanding.
Berkeley's eecs department does this. Almost none of the classes have required textbooks, and the prof make sure to mention this on the first lecture so you still have time to return them if you've bought them. They still list the textbooks as references, though, since they may come in handy (eg: [1]). Of course, the book is on reserve in the university library, so even then you don't need to buy it.
Instead of required text books they have lecture notes for most of the classes that are provided free on the website that might as well be a textbook considering how thorough they are (eg: [2]). One or two intro classes had a reader version of the lecture notes, but that was well over 1000 pages, and again, not required since it was provided free on the course website.
For the few classes that did have required textbooks, most of them were books that had been out for at least 3-5 years, so used copies were easily available (eg sicp, K&R C, Vazirani's algorithms, etc.). For the very few classes that had textbooks with a recent version the profs mentioned in the first lecture that the old versions would work fine, but that the students would have to figure out where the assigned reading was if the chapters didn't match up exactly.
[1]: "There is no required textbook for this course, since none is altogether satisfactory, and all tend to be ridiculously expensive. Officially, we'll rely on notes that I provide (on paper and on the web), but many people feel more comfortable if they can supplement this information with other treatments. You might want to take a look at the following books:
Compilers: Principles, Techniques, and Tools by Aho, Sethi, and Ullman—also known as "The Red Dragon Book". You won't need the latest edition.
At least one student recommends Thinking in C++, by Bruce Eckel, which you can download by clicking here.
Python Essential Reference (3rd edition) by David M. Beazley. This is also on-line (see the bar on the left) and at bookstores, on-line and otherwise." - http://inst.eecs.berkeley.edu/~cs164/fa12/info.html
My elective courses are chosen almost entirely by which books I can pirate. At the beginning of the semester, I fire up uTorrent, and start browsing around. If I can find the text book a course uses, then BAM, I'm taking that course.
It's the only thing I pirate these days, and I know its wrong, but I would be lying if I said it didn't feel like victory.
A course requiring 4 books, and using only 1/10th of each one is beyond frustrating.
"You are complaining about an unethical company and solving the problem by doing an illegal action. Isn't this selfish?"
No, it is called "civil disobedience" and it is one of the few effective nonviolent ways to promote change. Further, the law is completely out of alignment is this regard; it is in no way promoting the progress of science or useful arts, nor is it helping to ensure that a needed industry remain solvent. We do not need the textbook publishing industry, because we have a much faster, cheaper, and effective way to distribute textbooks: the Internet. If the law continues to protect these unethical and laughably anachronistic businesses, then the law itself is wrong.
Civil disobedience is a public protest and has been about being willing to go to jail in protest of unjust laws. It is critical that the authorities are aware that you break the laws and you are available to be arrested. People then become outraged at the injustice of your imprisonment, or so you hope.
Sitting at home downloading stuff and then posting about it using an anonymous handle is not civil disobedience.
Maybe the problem is not copyrighting itself, but that the US education system is entirely a rip-off? The copyrighted books not touched by the educational hoax are pretty cheap.
Individually for a student it is pretty justified to use pirated educational books, because the students are clearly being ripped off. But just turning this into another anti-copyright campaign is not the right thing to do.
So your solution is for them to charge fair prices? While we are fixing prices, I suggest we also fix the prices of DeBeers diamonds to appropriate market value. Then why stop there? Lets have the government set the prices of all overpriced commodities, including outrageous salaries. Someone's already beat you to this idea though, it's called communism.
There is no "market" for textbooks. Professors assign a single textbook, and students are forced to buy it. If a class could somehow allow for different textbooks would allow students to pay for cheaper textbooks and create price competition. But it's hard to do in practice if not impossible.
I didn't say they should mandate a fixed price. I said the book publishers should charge a fair price, one that decreases the amount of pirating because it's low enough so that it's not worth it for students to pirate. That's up to them. Until they do, I fully support pirating of textbooks.
Professors assign a single textbook, and students are forced to buy it.
No one put a gun on your head to go to that college. You took this decision and then you must be responsible for the costs of tuition, housing, books... Inform yourself well of the college and professors before enrolling too.
I also fully agree with pirating textbooks. I'm still at university and require books every now and then. Just the other night I needed access to a book that hasn't been published as an e-book and was $105/£65 if I even had enough time to get it from Amazon. So I downloaded it from a popular torrent site.
No it isn't, but thanks for the 1970s propaganda flashback. If the government is setting prices that private producers are bound by, then that's some form of socialist/capitalist mixed economy. If it were communism, the means of producing textbooks, diamonds, etc. would be publicly owned in the first place. That is, DeBeers wouldn't even exist unless it were some kind of state appendage.
It's funny, because intellectual "property" is actually the opposite of real property: a state-mandated monopoly, long ago useful because it only was for a few years (and it only mattered to publishers who owned presses), but now a hindrance after decades of lobbying for extensions.
I wouldn't call that communist, but it's not a free economy either.
Who's the biggest state-run-economy advocate, I wonder?
the government ability to set prices for another corporation makes it a little bit less like a corporation, and a little bit more like a government run "Ministry of diamonds" agency. Governments dictating prices of textbooks would be a step toward communism. After they set they diamond prices, then next up on the agenda is to set employee salaries at fair prices.
>the government ability to set prices for another corporation makes it a little bit less like a corporation, and a little bit more like a government run
There is nothing inherent in the definition of corporation saying that corporations are 'more corporatey' when left unrestricted by an external legal system. In fact the only way a corporation (a legal entity) can exist is within a legal framework. That is, corporations can't exist without being regulated into existence.
>Governments dictating prices of textbooks would be a step toward communism
No, if anything it would be shifting the socialism/capitalism balance towards the former. Regulating a market price isn't making a claim on ownership of the means of production, and so has nothing to do with communism.
The US government sets price floors on almost every crop produced in the country. Nobody claims this to be communism or a step towards communism, because it isn't. Price guarantees are a transfer of wealth from non farm-owning taxpayers to farm owners, which is an economic policy rooted in socialism. Price-setting for textbooks or diamonds would also be a policy rooted in socialism.
If your argument is that any socialist policy inevitably leads to communism, then I don't know what to tell you. Do you really think the USG has communism in mind as an end goal?
Good grief, get over yourself. There are not communists lurking under every rock trying to grab your ankles, FFS.
The solution to piracy is for the publishers to charge fair prices. In other places such as the UK where textbooks are sensibly priced, there is almost no incentive for piracy and people are far more inclined to buy the text from a bookstore than used.
But he never mentioned government intervention. He suggested that students vote with their wallets, and since they can't decide to purchase another textbook (as one would do in a typical market, which the textbook market isn't), the solution is to pirate.
Textbooks and Diamonds are in the same boat. Free Market supply and demand has been subverted in favour of entities controlling the entire market and setting the prices where the consumers are powerless to punish waste and corruption by selecting an alternative book.
A solution would be to make sure that Colleges have to pay for half of the price of student books, and put it into Tuition. That way when students see the inflated tuition prices (due to lots of $300 books), they go with the other college that has book prices that are reasonable.
It's a nifty switcheroo to charge students tuition, then say "you are responsible for buying the books, and by the way you don't have a choice in the books."
These are Apostol's excellent two volume undergraduate calculus textbook. Volume I is $231.25, and volume II is $189.49.
They were around $22 each when I bought my copies in 1977. I'm sure that NONE of the subsequent price increase is due to revisions and updates, because there have been no revisions or updates. Volume I is still the second edition (from 1967) and volume II is also still the second edition (from 1969). (There has been no need to revise or update them).
Based on inflation, these books should be about $80-90 per volume now (if we assume that $22 in 1977 was a reasonable price).
Maddening how so many classic textbooks have new versions every few years that add a few nominal features ("Calculus in the Real World!" "Online Tutorials That're Worse Than What Someone Else Made on YouTube!") with the real goal of shuffling around the exercises so a student can't do his or her homework without having the correct edition. Completely squashes resale markets.
> Based on inflation, these books should be about $80-90 per volume now (if we assume that $22 in 1977 was a reasonable price).
And based on the fact that books and other "intellectual" goods may be expensive to create, but only as a one-time investment, and all the years that have passed they should be dirt cheap by now.
In fact, they should be in the public domain, if we had something resembling a fair copyright law.
I am really excited to see what companies like Boundless (http://boundless.com) do to disrupt the college textbook market.
Boundless is taking OER resources and syncing it up to the chapters in existing textbooks, so a student can enter the textbook for the course and get a customized online replacement.
As a college kid who refuses to pay for textbooks: Thanks!
When you go to the site it already knows what school you go to (or at least it did for me). There's more then one school in my town, so I don't know if they just do geo-location and go with the larger school, or if they have some other source (I don't see how or what though). On one hand very cool, on the other a little worrying.
I propose an alternative: after some number of years of teaching, professors get a year off to write textbooks; these books are then distributed under a creative commons license, with university libraries acting as archives and hosts for textbooks. Encourage students to share their books with others.
We do not need the textbook publishing industry in this day and age. They have outlived their usefulness: we can distribute books without them. When their idea of a "new edition" is to change the problem sets, when their idea of an electronic edition is "something you cannot read past the end of the year," we do not benefit in any way from their existence. We are not talking about entertainment here, we are talking about an important medium for preserving and propagating human knowledge -- the very thing that has led to the overwhelming success of human civilization.
I suspect that many faculty do recognize the issue and are taking steps to correct it, but are held back by systems put in place by college admins.
Anecdotally, over the course of my program (CS) I paid around $50 per term for textbooks. The majority of materials we worked from were either open source/free (e.g. SICP) or canonical texts (e.g. CLRS) available electronically from the library. That said for each course, there were other very expensive textbooks listed as required on the syllabus. We'd always get the "required, yes, wink wink" from profs on the first day of class, with a strong statement that all of the course material could be gleaned from the open-source or free resources we'd been given. But yes, the expensive texts were "required". By someone other than the professor, obviously.
I don't know how common it is for universities (or specific departments) to have relationships with textbook distributors. But I suspect that's what went on in the courses I describe. A large publisher makes a deal with the university, like "all students in {A, B, C ...} courses must be instructed to purchase Y book from our catalogue", in return for who knows what.
I've worked at three Canadian universities, including being a senior administrator at two of them, I've been to meetings with other senior administrators accross the country ... and I've never heard anything of the kind. Profs always have the freedom to decide which textbook(s) to recommend/require - something that is fundamental to Academic freedom.
I was married to a professor for years, and it's a little more complicated than that. Full time professors do have some leeway, but they catch shit if they try to require something "weird," or inconsistent with other professors teaching similar classes. Adjunct professors have exactly zero say in the books they teach with, they can't even require extra books (which would be a sort of workaround).
And consider the trend to hire more and more adjuncts in lieu of full time faculty.
When I was younger, I really bought in the myth that the U.S. was the country where true freedom could be found. I can guarantee you that here, in Canada, even adjuncts (at universities where I worked) have true Academic Freedom when it comes to choice of books, etc.
Specific to Canadian universities, I know that many bookstores have been taken over by Gigantic Multinational Bookstore Management Company. Is it possible that departments incentivize profs somehow (even soft incentives like shaming deviants, etc.) to order strictly through the bookstore, which would have the effect of limiting textbook choices to whatever GMBMC Inc. stocks?
The not-so-required texts I speak of were always from the same publisher, which is the 'coincidence' that got me thinking about this in the first place.
The pressure, if any, would likely not come from Academic Departments. I can see how the admin side of the institution might want, for financial reason, to encourage purchases through the bookstore... Also, in order to have books available for first day of classes, it is difficult to do anything other than ordering through the bookstore.
At one of the institutions I've worked as a senior administrator, we did contemplate no longer having a bookstore and instead relying on Amazon/Chapters given their excellent service and general book availability. However, I would never have supported the idea of contracting out to some firm that dealt with a limited number of publishers.
When I was in school I'd sell my unwanted books not to the bookstore for 1/30 what I paid, but to a student in the next session of the same class for 80%-90% of what I paid. I advise others do the same whenever possible as it dramatically reduces the average price paid.
Version churn can work to your advantage. Recently I bought a couple of previous-edition textbooks on subjects I was interested in. In both cases the newest edition was over $100 and the previous edition less than $10. The differences between editions are negligible. Despite this, I realized reviewing these books that the reason I don't normally do this is that textbooks are almost universally of utterly abysmal quality and riddled with errors, superstitions, and nonsense compared to the state of the art knowledge in any field.
For-pay college and textbooks are a waste of time and money. Stealing textbooks is pointless and futile as you are doing something illegal, but for taking something of no real value.
Speaking here as a sometimes college lecturer and teacher.
Interesting that the American Enterprise Institute (a conservative think tank) is the one coming out with criticism of high textbook prices. Aren't they supposed to be "pro business"? Shouldn't they be cheering how much profit the textbook industry is able to squeeze out of consumers?
I'm sure they would point to the market-distorting high availability of (government-backed) loans as a factor in inflated book prices (and tuition, etc.). And to some degree, they'd be correct.
AEI is pro-capitalism / freedom, not pro-business, they also do a lot of work on the ridiculousness of the war on drugs. AEI is fairly consistently against distorted markets, I believe they were consulted on the recent Republican paper that came out against the copyright policies with regard to the DMCA and fair use.
Saving money is business. As far as I know no capitalist in history likes being fleeced and when others do the fleecing it erodes confidence in the system. Never good for a true capitalist. Also, conservatives are not all alike. This appears more Libertarian than say, a neo-Christian group.
Also like in Medicine, the US publishers charge US students much more than they charge students elsewhere (even in other Western countries). I think part of the reason they're able to do this is because college itself costs much more here. When people started importing international books, they started changing the questions in those books.
That's also how they are able to sell new editions constantly. Many subjects (math, mechanics, etc.) don't change much, but the publishers come out with different editions every 2-3 years so people can't just buy used books.
It's a ridiculous system, but hopefully open textbooks and online education will help change things.
I received my AA at a community college last year and they were beginning to take an interesting direction when I was leaving that I hope to see other institutions take.
The college itself was commissioning certain professors (department heads in some instances I believe) within each department to put together their own textbooks for certain subjects. When I would go to the bookstore, I remember seeing books branded with the colleges name rather than your typical textbook publishers. If I remember correctly, these textbooks were significantly cheaper, something on the order of ~$30 for an algebra or calculus book (I can't remember which it was).
Sure, it takes a little bit of work, but in the long run the students save money and the college may actually stand to make a little (or a lot, I don't know what, if any, markup is on them) money as well.
I've had professors apologizing to students in pretty much every class I've taken because of the textbook prices, so they're definitely starting to look at alternatives. So much so that I've had a couple professors tell us to return the books.
I recently followed a Computer Networking course, and the teachers actually went though pains to ensure those with older editions could follow the assigned exercises.
From what I could tell, the differences between the 6th, 5th and 4th editions were not discernible in the text, only the exercises had changed positions and had subtle variations in the numbers and wordings. That was my first experience with the textbook industry. The book, Computer Networking: A Top-Down Approach by Kurose and Ross was very good, but the obvious abuse of their monopoly by forcing students to buy the newer editions gave me my first look into how the textbook industry operates.
Still, I have great respect for my University (Utrecht University in the Netherlands) for (until now) either using syllabi that can be freely downloaded or cheaply bought for a hardcopy or accommodating students with older editions of textbooks.
There are very few things I hate, but textbook publishers is certainly one of them. Really, a Calculus book with material from a century ago costs 150 bucks? And they change the order of the exercises every 2 years so you can't get a used one? A F#$%^&* hate those mafakas.
My son's Spanish book this semester is a special edition - Googling the ISBN brings up only the school bookstore. $175, but that does include the web access code for online stuff. What a bargain! Luckily we were able to score all the books for his other 4 classes for about $130 at Amazon, so I guess $300 for the semester really is not that bad.
Make sure Colleges have to pay for half of the price of student books and put that cost into Tuition. That way when students measure the inflated tuition prices (due to lots of $400 books), they go with the other college that has book prices that are reasonable.
Colleges trying to increase enrollment will discover that switching to a non corrupt book seller will be in everyone's best interests. Free market will thus be restored and prices will float according to their value, rather than by authoritative fiat.
Sorry that some good textbook authors are affected by this, but frankly, there is a bigger issue here, and collateral damage is to be expected. The only solution is to charge fair prices, and until that point is reached, I believe students should pirate textbooks to their hearts content.