Textbooks and required crapware

The BBQ Pit
1

So you’re a college student, maybe struggling to pay tuition. You sign up for a class - and find the mandatory textbook is 250 dollars because oh noes, last year’s version won’t do and even if it would, it requires a mandatory online access tool that can’t be reused. So maybe you only pay 150 dollars for the used textbook but you still have to shell out 75 bucks for the mandatory access.

But wait, the school says, that means you can access your textbook electronically!!!

Yeah, right. Except it’s about 80% unusable.

Obvious way to search the text? Nope. Dig around a little bit and you may find a link that’s hidden behind something else non-obvious.

Can you download that text to your laptop to use offline? Yeah, right. You’re kidding, right?

Can you scroll through the text using arrow keys like any sensible human would expect to do? Egad, you must be on drugs.

I am taking a programming course. 600 dollars in tuition, nearly 200 dollars for the mandatory book / online tool. I could have bought (hah) an electronic version from Barnes and Noble - but would still have had to spend a fortune for the online tool. So I’d have saved maybe 10 bucks. Or I could have saved another 10-20 dollars and rented the book from Barnes and Noble. And get this: Barnes and Noble e-textbooks DON’T WORK ON THE NOOK!!!

My son is taking a Spanish class. 600 bucks in tuition - and 250 dollars for the book and access.

Do the teachers tell you “pssst - just get the online: you can read the electronic textbook there!”? Nope. I have to assume they don’t get enough kickbacks or something.

And the quality of the websites utterly sucks as well. A French class I took: yeah, you could view videos that were part of the curriculum. And it even saved the teacher from the hassle of, yanno, having to read and grade the homework because it was all built in to the website. Only, the homework half the time was on stuff we had not yet covered in class (OK, that’s largely poor class design), and the other half of the time the answers it wanted were wrong (OK, not wrong - but any of 3 choices were correct and it’s a crapshoot as to whether you choose the “right” right answer).

I don’t download illegally. I do not steal books. But I found one of my texts available on a site - probably outside the US, or maybe a “honeypot”, or maybe virus-laden, and surely illegal as hell, and I’m so sorely tempted. I’d have no moral qualms - I mean, the company has already extracted a fucking fortune from me.

2

Most professors do not receive kickbacks for choosing one textbook over another and it was my experience as an undergraduate that most instructors would do what they could to alleviate the financial burden of students when it comes to textbooks. Some of them even went so far as to violate school policy by letting the independent textbook brokers know which books they were using in their classrooms for the semester and advising students to go there. There are some scandals involving colleges, faculty and textbook companies but we shouldn’t malign all professors for the textbook racket.

3

True, it’s usually not the professor that gets the kickbacks. That doesn’t change the main point of the rant.

4

My immediate thought is use a VPN on a virtual machine. I’ve never bothered with such security for mere downloading, but googling shows it is done easily. Virtual machines are a piece of cake now ( use Virtualbox, and chose a free operating system different from your regular one ) even for the sort of people who dully click on unsolicited spam for the 5000th time.

Or go to an internet cafe, download and email it to a disposable address.
Of course, this is merely for theory as an intellectual exercise.

5

I’ve been told (by an English professor) that textbook shenanigans are more common in some departments than others. Naturally it depends on the University’s specialty, but generally speaking STEM and certain research-oriented social science fields get most of their money from research grants, while humanities fields like English or <Foreign Language> tend to need student money to get by. So the whole “oh, I’m sorry, we rearranged the chapter numbers in this school-published book so you need to buy a new one” stuff tends to be more prevalent in those departments.

I agree with Odesio, though, in my experience most professors (note that I’m a Comp Sci student) try to ease financial burden. I’ve had insturctors/professors (in fields ranging from Linguistics to Comp Sci):

Self-publish (either the instructor or department) books and give us free copies
Use really good free books online that students have alerted them to
Use really good books that are <100 bucks

The most expensive book I ever had to purchase during my entire 4 years was $150 and the professor apologized profusely and said that it was the department’s decision and not his (it was for a lower level Physics course).

6

I noticed this when I was a math TA back in the late 70’s. Each year the textbook company would put out a version of the same book, chapters rearranged. The math department had the options of a) use the older book, then students couldn’t get enough used books so there would be two versions, with different numbers. b) use the new book, then all the older books are worthless c) shop for a new book company. b) was the only option that works. Yes, it was lazy of the department to put up with this but they really weren’t in a position to put up much of a fight.

My son is in college now and we budget $500 a semester for books. Very little of that is recovered in used books sales, although my son might be spending that on beer. That $500 doesn’t cover all the books he needs for the usual 4 classes he takes in a semester so he has to use creative solutions, like checking the book out of the library or sharing with someone else.

7

I had to get a book like that for my basic Microbiology class last year.
There was no print version less than $400 (it was a combined lab manual and textbook).

The problem is, I needed to use it in class where there was no internet access. So I ended up manually saving each part of the 1,200 page textbook 10 pages at a time to my laptop. (You can only ‘print’ 10 pages at once).

Efficient use of time indeed. I wish I would have taken out a loan to cover the damn thing.

8

I’m very focused on cost when assigning books for my CompSci classes. We have to publish the textbook lists about four months ahead of the semester (by state law), so sometimes we don’t have the latest ones to choose from.

I’ve just gotten on the radar of the textbook publishers, some of whom have been useful in getting me review copies of editions we WON’T use. (For a Microsoft Office class, we’re sticking with the Office 2010 edition for $95 instead of the Office 2013 edition which now costs $145; I don’t think it’s worth it). It’s fun to ignore them.

I try to use mass-market paperbacks that can be found at B&N for $80 or less. For example, I use Deitel’s C# for Programmers ($36 at Amazon), instead of their Visual C# How to Program at $142 which merely has more exercises. I can save my students $100 for a one-semester course and create my own exercises and projects. Humbug on crapware add-ons and lab workbooks; I’m a good enough instructor to create those myself.

Another benefit is my recent graduates have commented that at their new workplaces, their coworkers are impressed with their libraries of non-textbook books. It makes them look like they bought these books at B&N recently for self-education, instead of them being “assigned” as a textbook.

9

Think that’s bad? I ordered an ebook and found out immediately after the deadline for returns in that the professor didn’t allow electronic devices in class. Including laptops.

10

It varies from publisher to publisher, and from teacher to teacher. Wiley’s online service, for instance, actually seems to be pretty good. And I’ve had teachers who have specifically pointed us to cheaper ways to get the textbook, or who have said “There are three good books on this topic, and I chose this one because it’s $25.”.

On the other hand, though, I’ve also heard of professors who write their own textbook, sell it for $500, and then make it a required text for their courses. And that was back before the electronic age, even-- I shudder to think what those professors are doing now.

11

Filled with rage at this very thing the last time I took classes last year, I just went ahead and torrented the books. Fuck the police, etc. There was no way in hell I was paying $175 for a used paperback copy of a biology text book when there was a handy dandy torrent easily found via Google.

Of course, I didn’t need to access any online portals, so that throws a wrench in that option for you. That said, a torrent might let you have offline reading. Just something to think about!

12

Urghl. Textbooks are a scam right up there with used cars and magic beans. I changed my major in the middle of a semester in college but couldn’t sell back a $150 Statics & Dynamics book. Two years later when they adjusted my new major I still had to take the class, but there was a new edition of the book. I was pissed.

They were still similar enough that we could use the old edition though. It seemed all they had changed was the homework problems. We did notice that they didn’t do a very good job though. There were places (in the new edition) where the answers in the back of the book were the answers to the questions from the old edition.

If you’re going to pretent you’re not exhorting money from us, at least try to do a decent job.

13

Here’s the email I sent to tech support last night:

And their barely comprehensible response:

And my response (where, with some difficulty, I managed to refrain from saying “if you spoke English you might have understood my question”):

What I’m really frustrated about is that there IS NO FUCKING CHOICE in these textbooks, we have no way to fight back, and even public schools are starting to force kids to use these kinds of “books”.

14

Is it a PDF? Use PDF X-Reader; it lets you scroll with the directional keys.

15

Any student these days should know they can get their books anywhere, it’s common knowledge. Sure, they’re easier to get at the campus bookstore, but for example that French textbook was cheaper directly from the publisher.

JRagon, that meshes with what we’ve seen, for sure. The Spanish and French books are real ripoffs (though so is the Java book I’m using now). In college, several of my professors let us use “not yet published” version of their own books; iirc they may have charged 3 dollars a copy or something else utterly reasonable (and paid us a dollar per error found to boot).

The French interface was at least not too awful (except for the whole “can’t search” idiocy). The Java one (from Pearson Publishing, please boycott them if you have any choice) is truly a piece of shit.

16

No, if it were a PDF it might be downloadable and, yanno, USABLE.

Supposedly - from the email I excerpted below - it is something using Adobe software. But not as usable as Adobe.

17

Nice - I just tried “printing” several pages from the current chapter, to see if I could at least save those. I used a “print to PDF” tool.

One. Page. At. A. Time. I appended each page to the same document, and got 5 total pages.

And the result is: an insanely large PDF (over a meg) of image data, not searchable text.

So: textbook company: Fuck You with the sharpened edge of every paper textbook you have ever produced.

Oh: and if you’re going to be printing textbooks in English, you might consider hiring support staff that actually speak that langugage.

18

Not true. Depending on the book and edition, there may be no other source. ANd it’s rather obscene to expect students to figure out how to game the system in order to avoid being raped by their own school and teachers.

19

One good approach is to see if the text is sold (in English) in China. They tend to be about 10%-40% of the price.

http://www.time.com/time/nation/article/0,8599,1838849,00.html

I know it won’t help for everyone, but it is handy sometimes.

eta: it’s also completely legal for you to purchase them, according to all sources that I’ve encountered:

20

Library Genesis coupled with the copies of assigned texts held in reserve in the university library are your friends.