College textbooks are a huge burden to students. Having them copyrighted forces the students to buy from one publisher. I think this is highly unethical. “You’re buying this deluxe book from Pearson for $275 if you want to pass the class.” How is that any different from extortion?
I have studied for a few IT certifications, and the study guides for those are competitve. You can choose from whichever publisher you like, and each one offers different packages. College courses are more like “Buy this exact book, or don’t bother coming back” I think we should exempt college books from copyright, to allow competition. That is the only way for prices to fall. It only costs about $6 to make a textbook, but they sell for hundreds because they are sold by cartels.
Do you know what copyright is? All the study guides you used were copyrighted, I’m sure. A professor choosing one book has nothing to do with copyright, and everything to do with the professor wanting all students literally on the same page.
If you took a class for certification, as opposed to studying on your own, there would be one book also.
Cite for your $6 figure. Because I suspect it is garbage. Competitive novels that are smaller than textbooks and not as expensive to produce cost more than $6 to produce.
The other thing is that most textbooks have very small markets. The same is true for technical books. The specialty books I review (and get free) are well over $100. The authors are not making a fortune - I know this firsthand.
And I’m saving the biggest thing for last - if textbooks could be freely copied, there wouldn’t be many, since they take a long time to write and are not simple to write.
There are some things to criticize about the industry like excessive new editions to reduce the value of used books. But mostly I think you should read a textbook on copyright law.
Textbooks are available used and for rent. Perhaps schools should make sure students aren’t financially burdened by the initial price of a textbook but there are certainly ways to make them affordable. Certainly some of these books are no better than others available and the high prices and requirements are feathering someone’s nest but as Voyager says it has to be economically viable to write the new ones. I have an old engineering book that shows you the best place to cut leather for a machine belt from the hide of an ox, useful info once, but I think there may be some new engineering concepts that have arisen since then.
You’ve complained about this before. I refer to you the responses you got in that thread.
This makes no sense. As Voyager pointed out, being required to buy a specific book for a college course has nothing to do with copyright.
Copyright is what ensures that anyone writing a book—which in the case of textbooks typically requires a great deal of time, effort, and expertise—gets compensated for their efforts.
Students have trouble gleaning knowledge from a single textbook, and even if explicitly told where to look some will get it wrong. How should they integrate knowledge from many contrasting textbooks?
Textbooks are somewhat of a racket, but given a choice of multiple methods to make them more affordable, this thread chooses the least effective one. Why bother choosing any textbook at all and just make it 100% lecture, which is a possible solution that avoids the many pitfalls of this proposal.
Textbook renting that I’ve looked at is still a scam. Sure you can save 10% to 50%, but then you’re gambling on the resale value.
Do they still have reserve copies in the library?
In my experience, only if the professor requests one, and often the library doesn’t have a copy so the prof/department provides one. One perk of academia is that publishers might provide a free copy (sometimes with a “demo copy not for resale” cover, although in many cases they provide a regular copy).
I remember reading not long ago about experiments at teaching using only “freesource” material. Not sure if that is something that will grow in popularity.
My wife teaches Business Law at a community college. The main text books are not only pretty poor, but awfully expensive. Yet a single person (not my wife) has the say on what books are used. Really unfortunate, because it encourages students NOT to buy/read the books.
This is basic economics here, it’s not extortion. As mentioned above, text books are NOT easy to write, they take potentially years of research and expertise, careful editing, often lots of graphs, images, and they’re often printed on higher quality paper, in color, and in hardback. On top of that, the demand for a particular book, particularly the more specialized ones, is probably a couple orders of magnitude lower compared to a generic other book, so they have to recoup those higher costs over fewer sales. Then from the student side, also as pointed out above, the demand is based on the particular class, it just doesn’t make sense to have a professor lecturing for several different books which might cover slightly different material in slightly different ways. So, it’s no wonder that textbooks can end up being a few hundred bucks. I can assure you, having had several professors that had written books, some even being world renowned in their niche, they weren’t rich as a result.
That said, I do think there’s ways to combat the costs. For instance, I had a couple professors that either just provided all the notes for free and basically had a textbook as a recommendation for those who wanted/needed to read to learn, but otherwise just wasn’t necessary. I had one professor who had even compiled a pretty good set of notes over several years and had it all printed out and cheaply bound and sold basically at cost, so it was like $20, and it was one of the more useful books I had.
Another thing that really should be happening faster is a push toward eBooks. That will not only help with reducing all of the printing cost, saving money, but can then be easily rented for a semester, also reducing costs, and allow for updates and corrections on the fly.
My specific objection is when there are “special” editions applicable only to one college… meaning that you buy that ISBN at premium price, often without used or rental options. I’ve run into it recently with my middle daughter, who is taking basic classes in an undistinguished community college… but somehow they are so SPECIAL that the standard English, History, Business 101 texts aren’t good enough… they have to have one that’s rearranged and contains a four-page chapter unique to that edition.
These are neither custom editions for superstar professors, nor dumbed-down editions for CC use. They’re just… shuffled and re-dealt to preserve maximum profit.
Pure scam, on top of the other questionable issues about textbooks and their updates and key cards and online components and so forth.
Perhaps you might talk this over with your daughter as one aspect of where she should study next academic year?
Historically speaking, copyright has been more about protecting publishers than authors. That is amply the case with textbooks.
Past that, the price of textbooks is something that professors are concerned with. The problem is that the professors are trapped too. Various mechanisms have more or less killed the resale market, such as online access codes that are only good for a semester, shortened edition durations (four years used to be the standard, now it’s three), individualized editions (where each school can customize the textbook to its syllabus), and so on. And there are various forces pushing professors in certain directions. That individualized edition, for example, probably costs $50 or so less than the standard version, which is good if you’re buying but not so good if you’re trying to sell.
All this essentially requires a brand new book for every course, and with the captive market, the prices have been going up up up.
There is a small trend toward open source textbooks, but so far it hasn’t gone too far, in no small part because writing a textbook is an effort in culling and simplifying information. The result is that there is a trend in open source toward thorough but opaque information, which despite being free or cheap, is not as great as you might hope. (See any Wikipedia article on an advanced subject for an example).
Another trend is to not use a textbook at all, and teach the class through articles, worksheets, and the like. This is how pretty much all advanced classes are and always have been taught. It gets harder, though, for introductory classes, since so much is assumed that the reader already knows in these articles, in addition to the time and effort it takes to compile things.
It’s the same pretty much everywhere.
My son recently graduated from an engineering school. I don’t think he actually bought a physical textbook since his sophomore year. Softcopies (mostly illicit) circulated widely among the student body.
All colleges do it. At least, the plethora of them around here do.
Since ethics isn’t taught in STEM curricula.
The problems seems to me to be that professors are teaching to a book instead of using a book to reinforce the class.
Passing a course is now akin to “learn this book”, where in the past, you’d have to learn the course and use whatever resources available to you to do so.
It is extortion when it comes to specific codes or passwords in a purchased book that will allow you access to a segment of the class. Teachers need to do better
As a (part-time) professor of engineering who has written 1 textbook and is working on another one, I find this pretty appalling from the standpoint of engineering ethics.
If you have no copyright, you have no books. Few publishers are going to publish books they can’t copyright.
Textbooks are just the cost of an education, like tuition. You have to pay that to pass a class too.
Get used to it.
I suspect that maybe you’re a young person raised in the era of free (i.e. stolen) media who doesn’t understand how copyright works.
I fear you may be right. In my understanding, education from the age of 16 onwards ought increasingly, and especially by the start of university education and from then on, should be precisely about getting the students to read and explore (with guidance), not about the teacher and one textbook laying down the law about everything. Of course, my experience is in humanities, rather than STEM subjects, so I’m used to less exactitude being required.
Several hundred dollars for an essential text sounds a bit steep. But the idea that a course can be taught from one textbook sounds hokey. Textbooks are a necessary, but not a sufficient, condition of the educational process.
Interesting question.
I have a narrow specialty in a specific area and the software used in that work, actually 3 different types of software used all for a different purpose but interconnected. There is no current curriculum that puts it all together in a comprehensive way professors can use. This would be in engineering actually for a subset thereof.
I am thinking this is 4-5 months of work for me and perhaps another $ 50,000 or so in out of pocket expense such as proofing, professionally draw plans, etc.
And now I read in this thread that engineering students are just copying textbooks from one another. So why would I bother ?