Copyright is not something one can do away with, but can there be any doubt professors abuse their position to force students to buy their textbooks? C’mon, of course they do. I had a political science prof demand we buy his “Textbook,” which was actually not written by him; it was edited by him, a collection of essays by other authors. Cost me $129 in 1991 dollars. It’s a transparent conflict of interest.
Such conflicts of interest, however, should be dealt with by the school, not by some crazy law that textbooks (and what constitutes a “textbook”? Can a novel in an English class count?) not be subject to copyright.
When I was doing my Computer Science degree back in the late 1980’s the CS textbooks were ideally positioned to teach us critical thinking, editing, and debugging skills. Nearly all of the examples in every book were wrong, i.e. they either wouldn’t compile if you coded them verbatim into the computer or they’d compile but not run correctly as claimed.
So why do textbooks needs to be hardbound on sturdy shiny paper and designed to last for a million years (and priced as such)? I kept a few of mine thinking they’d be good references in my career, but actually never cracked them open after graduation. They were $50 - $100 back then and even then we cried extortion. They really are “use once and throw away” items.
The books for the ethics and political philosophy courses I took in college all used readily available paperbacks of things like Leviathan. That was inexpensive. But imagine if a course in English literature used novels written by famous writers only for that kind of college class. Your book cost would be a bit higher than today. That’s what STEM classes have to put up with.
Textbooks are a gigantic scam. There is nothing wrong with telling the student to buy a certain reference, but colleges now ask for customized editions of books by college and year that serve no purpose except as a blatant cash grab.
FWIW, I don’t know how it is in the States but here in France there’s a specific fair use clause for educative purposes. I’m in uni right now and the teachers aren’t shy about scanning and publishing whole chapters of textbooks ; as well they encourage us to photocopy books from the library if we don’t want to buy them.
I agree that copyright law is entirely the wrong place to deal with the problem, but aren’t the schools on the wrong end of the conflict of interest too? Aren’t university bookstores run at a profit?
I don’t know. The last time I read a thread about this topic, the prices quoted seemed absurdly high to me. I checked the price of textbooks in France, and, though I don’t remember them anymore, they were massively cheaper (and like in the USA, they are produced by private companies, individual authors, etc…they’re not produced/provided by the colleges or public authorities at a reduced price or anything like that).
So, frankly, it seems there’s actually something weird wrt the cost of textbooks in the USA. It would be interesting if other non-Americans would chime in to say whether textbooks are sold at similar exhorbitant prices in their own countries.
I’d wager some very large percentage of on-campus, central or “official” bookstores are university property, or at the very least something like a chartered company.
From the University of Arizona bookstore page (just the first one I found at random):
Bookstores are a profit center at every college and university I can think of. You’re welcome to post counter-examples, where such a commercial entity is allowed to exist on campus soil, have a captive market AND owe the U. nothing but perhaps rent.
And while professors may not be on the grift directly, there are certainly many ways big publishers can reward them, their departments and the school for choosing their books - and for playing the “new edition every two years” and “custom edition just for YOUR school!” games.
FWIW, when I was at the University of Illinois (Urbana-Champaign) about 25 years ago, there was an official on-campus bookstore, but also many students bought their textbooks from Follett’s, a commercial bookstore located just off campus in the “campustown” commercial area. I see that this store recently closed.
This doesn’t necessarily mean they’re gouging students on textbooks. They could make a substantial profit selling sweatshirts and notebooks with the school logo, and all sorts of other non-textbook merchandise, while selling textbooks at only a modest markup. Whether this is what actually happens, I don’t know. But, at least in the case of standard textbooks, there’s competition (from online sources like Chegg and Amazon, if not from bricks-and-mortar alternatives).
Those custom editions are pushed by publishers as a way to “save money for your students,” since they’ll only have to pay for the chapters they’ll use. Which may be true as far as it goes, but of course is much less of a good deal for the students when you figure in the effects on the used/resale market.
I was going to mention exactly that. At MIT you buy books from the Coop, which is not university owned, and which has or had branches at MIT and Harvard. On university property, but leased. Maryland had a Barnes and Noble on university property.
I’m not sure I ever bought a textbook when I was in Louisiana, but I didn’t get anything for the ones I assigned my students to buy.
As I mentioned the list price for technical books I get for review is insanely high also, and no university bookstore is involved. Unless someone can show a conspiracy among bookstores to force publishers to raise prices, or show that university bookstores mark up prices, this looks like the market at work. You naturally have a large captive audience of customers who need one book right away. That’s not going to encourage discounting.
When I was in college the university bookstores sold used copies of textbooks also, and bought them. That’s not a sign that they are trying to gouge students.
Do you realize how vanishingly rare this sort of circumstance is, at least in the humanities? As a percentage of all academics, only a tiny, tiny number write textbooks. In my field, the vast majority of academics write journal articles (generally available to students for free through the campus library databases) and scholarly monographs (often too specialized and/or sophisticated for undergraduate classes, especially for large freshman classes).
And for those who do write textbooks, assigning those books to their classes is likely to represent such a small percentage of the book’s overall sales that it makes almost no difference to the professor’s own income.
For the last three years, i’ve been using a US history textbook written by Eric Foner, one of the most well-respected historians in the United States. This book sells in the thousands or tens of thousands of copies every year. I’d be willing to bet that Foner is so senior at Columbia University that he never even teaches the freshman history survey; that sort of thing is often left to junior faculty. I’d also bet that, if he did teach the survey, Foner probably wouldn’t even assign his own book, because his book is designed for students who are generally not as sophisticated and well-prepared as the typical Columbia undergrad.
I know quite a few historians who assign their own books in their upper-division or majors classes, and also in their grad classes. And i have no problem with that. These people are, after all, the experts on that subject matter, and their books often represent years of original research that makes a new and important contribution to knowledge. Do you have any idea how much money a typical academic makes from the sale of a scholarly book produced by a university press? It’s generally less than a buck. Academics receive royalty checks every so often for their books, and those royalty checks are typically for amounts like $21.84.
Many scholarly and academic presses, suffering under severe financial constraints and the fact that the market for academic books is generally small, make authors pay for things like placing images in books. If you’re an author and want a dozen historical images to accompany your text in a historical monograph, you could end up paying hundreds or even thousands of dollars just for the privilege. Same if you want images to appear in your journal articles. I know academics who, when you take into account these sorts of fees charged by the publishers, have lost money on well-reviewed and ground-breaking works of scholarship. And the only people who make money on journal articles are the big content portals like EBSCO and Wiley.
I’m not complaining about this. Most academics recognize that scholarship is one of the responsibilities that comes with being a professor, and most are happy to write their books and share their research with the world in exchange for a university salary. They don’t want or need large royalties from their book sales.
But i also get annoyed, in discussions like this, when too many people who don’t know what they’re talking about imply that large numbers of academics are sitting on a publication gravy train, and that the money only rolls in because they unfairly force their poor captive students to buy their vanity projects. That’s just not how it works, in 99.999% (conservatively) of cases.
When I was an undergrad about half my EE professors were writing books, and we got to beta test them. The good news is that we bought Xerox copies of them for about $10, which was cheap even in 1971 dollars.
I had a chapter in a technical book. I got an advance, but after a year the royalty statements showed negative sales. I didn’t exactly get rich on it.
Plus, in STEM at least book writing is done by tenured professors I suspect. When I was at Illinois two professors in the same area were up for tenure. One was writing a book, the other was writing journal articles. Guess who got tenure?
I just looked up the only textbook I can remember from my Biochemistry degree in the UK in the 1970s. Lehninger sells for $230 on amazon.com and £56 (about $80) on amazon.co.uk.
I just looked at the last 3 texbooks I used (so anecdote != data). Amazon.fr is maybe slightly cheaper than .com, but still godawful expensive. .co.uk is more reasonable. However, the French (not sure what language it’s in) Kindle editions are substantially cheaper than US Kindle.
Hmm…you would need to compare books published and sold in the USA to their equivalent published and sold in other countries, rather than compare the price in various countries of books published in the USA.
You have a point, but in my example a US-published book was three times the cost in the US compared to the UK. It would still be much cheaper to buy it off the UK web site and have it shipped to the US.
And Foner’s book, first published in 2005, has had quite a number of different versions even in little more than a decade. (The current fourth edition, for example, is available as regular one-volume, regular split into two volumes, Seagull [“a compact, value edition”], and brief [“a brief, full-color edition”], most available as hardcover, paperback, loose-leaf, or e-book.) That’s not even counting any university-specific editions that might be out there. Some professors are quite easy-going–if you’ve got a 2nd regular or 3rd Seagull or 4th brief, good enough. Others are not so forgiving: you absolutely must have the 4th Seagull, and the 4th regular or 3rd Seagull is absolutely unacceptable.
The current one-volume regular lists for $143; if the school decides next semester to use the Seagull and the professor is hard-ass, the resale value of that book may be quite low. Moreover, because there are so many versions requiring separate press runs, editing, proofing, etc., the economies of scale are severely diminished, keeping prices high.
American history and the interpretations thereof have at least changed a little bit over the past decade, although I’m not sure they’ve changed enough to justify four editions. Other subjects, though, really haven’t–why would a calculus book need a new edition every two or three years, sometimes with the major change being the problem set being shuffled or revised (so that when the professor assigns homework, you have to have the same edition s/he’s using)?