The Cost of Text Books

Factual Questions
21

For those of you buying anthologies of stories you already own and/or are in the public domain - WHY?? Why bother? Get your course syallabus, go to Project Gutenberg or your own bookshelf and find the texts you’ll need and read them from there! I never understood why people would buy material they already have!

As for the sciences - 99% of the time, there is nothing wrong with the old edition, especially at the undergraduate level. Use it, compare chapter quizes and questions to the new edition (or photocopy relevent questions that you might have to do) and read the text from the old one! I refused to buy textbooks last semester unless I needed them - total cost for me (in my last semester of an Honours Biochemistry program) was 25.50$ CDN. That was the cost of a lab manual and a course pack, plus 50 cents at the dollar store for a hard bound notebook for lab. Everything else I could find in books I already owned, or on this wonderful thing called the internet!

Just because a prof recommends a book, doesn’t mean you’ll use it, and it doesn’t mean you have to buy it. Get it off a friend (share the cost) or take it out of the library or photocopy chapters or whatever. Save yourselves some money!

22

I think strong words of warning to the OP are quite warranted. In several of his fields of interest there are far, far more people applying for positions than are positions available. Unless the OP is extremely dedicated to an area, the chances of getting one of those positions is remote. Remember, the people the OP would be competing against, might, for example, have been dreaming about becoming a Physics prof. since grade school.

You really have to be obsessed. Dilitantes need not apply.

But some helpful advice: On your first year of college get in on the “inside” of the department. Become a paper grader, tutor, lab assistant, whatever it takes. Once on the “inside”, the professorial career track becomes a lot easier and clearer. I was paper grading my own section of Calculus the 2nd quarter of college. By my 2nd year I was working for both the Math (no CS then) and Physics deptarments. During my third year I was accepted into grad school in both. I was teaching college level classes at the age of 21. First tenure track position at 26.

Research has always been a breeze. I love problem solving and have been doing that since I was a little kid. You have to like what you’re doing to the point of obsession, 'cause there are others who are even more obsessed.

23

Low demand does decrease the price, but it also increases the percentage of the fixed costs that each consumer has to pick up. Granted, that’s not the only reason, but it’s a factor.

24

Very, very sorry. Posting to two college related threads at the same time.

So here’s the textbook post:

As a student, I never used a book written by a prof. As a professor, very view profs in any dept. I was with ever wrote and used their own textbooks. In almost all cases where they did it was because in Computer Science it’s all new and there just wasn’t a good textbook in the field yet. The two cases that come to mind most are:

  1. In job 1, two profs wrote one of the first textbooks in the field. It became a bestseller by academic standards. No other book around that time came close. Not using their book would have been stupid.

  2. In job 2, we hired the co-author of one of the most famous and respected CS texts ever. We were already using it, we kept using it. Not using his book would have been worse than stupid.

In short, I don’t think that “having to buy the prof’s book” is that common and not always a bad thing.
Some things to keep in mind about textbooks:

They are really, really hard work to produce. Far harder than producing a comparable number of pages of journal articles. Like I’ve said, I’ve known textbooks authors. In general they end up realizing they’ve wasted a lot of time for very little money. It’s not something that most profs take lightly.

In my younger years, I was already quite well known in my field which was just getting off the ground. Many publishers tried to lure me into writing a book, especially when they heard that I was teaching a course on it with course notes. But there was just no way it was going to be worth my while. (And over 20 years later there still isn’t a remotely decent book in the field. Profs are just not falling over themselves to write textbooks.)

–

In Computer Science, there is no way you can get by using a 5 year old book in most areas. In many courses, a 2 year old book is ancient history. So once your write a book in CS, you have to extensively revise it every couple years or it’s out. Who needs that?

–

I never saw or heard of publisher perks to choose a book outside of preview copies. And then, quite a few were stingy about those. (Even if you pick the book, getting the instructor’s supplement was sometimes a pain.) No money, no meals, nada, nothing.

–

Many posters are under the false impression that the cost of a text should be ~ the cost of printing it. Ha! Printing is the cheap part. Producing, promoting, distributing the book what costs money. And these are very real, very costly, unavoidable components.

I have reviewed for publishers drafts of books submitted for consideration. (And get a whopping $100 for it!) These drafts were invariably terrible and required an extensive amount of editing to make them publishable. (Somehow, no publisher ever took my “No, walk away from this garbage.” advice and turned a project down.) This is not cheap work.

In other threads in the past, people have explained why bookstores charge so much over “retail” prices, because of the special system set up to allow returns and such. That adds a lot of cost.

Consider the cost of producing the book to be zero and everything else is the real cost.

25

I occasionally buy a physics or math text from Amazon but I almost always buy it from their “Used and New” sites. I have yet to see any difference in these texts and yet the prices can be as low as 60% of the regular price. How does this work? Are these gray market books or something?

26

I once took a college course in which the professor used his own book as the textbook. He was nice enough to pay us back in cash for the royalties he earned from those sales. He said he didn’t want to make a profit off his own students.

Ed

27

This sounds like BS to me. If they are made as such, they certainly don’t stand up to the test. I mean, the used books sold at campus bookstores are rarely in decent shape, and they’ve generally only been used a semester or possibly two. It’s not like students treat them like garbage; most are well aware of how much they cost. What’s more, paperback textbooks are just as expensive as hardback.

28

Although your suggestion makes a lot of sense, there are a number of reasons why most students generally would not follow it. First, of course, is that we’re just not trained to think that way. K through 12, we’re taught do what teacher says or else. So, if a syllabus says a particular text is required, most students will believe it.

Also, not having the same anthology as everyone else screws up classroom readings. “Mephisto, open your Norton’s Anthology to page 261 and read to the class lines 820 to 840 of the Odyssey, please. Okay, and you, mnemosyne, when he gets done, read lines 5 through 35 of Book IV of the Iliad.” If you screwed up and don’t have the correct translation in your downloaded copy of the work in question, or if your professor just asks you to start reading a certain page, things can quickly become confusing and embarassing and you’re likely to earn the ire of your professor while you fumble around.

Last semester, my lit professor gave me a copy of her teacher’s edition of Norton’s Anthology of World Masterpieces because she had an extra copy (I guess the Norton people give her one every once and a while), and because I’m a good, financially challanged student who actually asked. Even the subtle differences between the teacher’s version and the “classroom” version caused some minor difficulties.

Also, getting books, poems, and stories from the Internet or library or whatever won’t give you the same introductory material and footnotes and other sources of test material as the anthologies.

Finally, sometimes professors just tell you to do something and they can get mighty pissed when you don’t do it. Or so I’ve heard . . . :wink:

29

Because the problem is, with something in the public domain, there are 800 translations/whatever, and if the professor is like most of the ones I’ve had, they want the EXACT ONE they are using in class, not the other 799 that are out there.

30

As a Poly Sci major at the Unversity of Maryland, I never bought the books. I checked them out of one of the libraries. I was lucky that the U. of M. has wonderfully huge, beautifully stocked libraries.

The bonus was that my parents were paying for the books and I used the money for beer.

I’m going to call my father and apologize right now.

31

All the bookstores around my campus (Univ. of Michigan - d*mn you USC!) have signs saying that they’re not responsible for the price of the textbooks, and that in most cases they make barely any profit. That’s why they all have signs that say “Break the cycle! Sell books and keep prices low!”
The thing that always pisses me off most is when I get the guest professor who wants a particular textbook, and then the next semester when he’s gone, it’s somebody else who wants a new one. That’s when Half.com comes in to save the day.
On a side note, I’ve had many professors who refuse to use their own textbooks even though other professors teaching the same subject use it. Interesting.

Oh, and one other thing. Apparently (according to an article ran in our newspaper) you can buy textbooks from Amazon.com in France, or Canada, or other foreign countries. Same textbook (most of the time - sometimes they were black and white instead of color or something else like that) but about 40% cheaper. The publishers were trying make this illegal because they were losing money by it.

32

How could they possibly attempt to make selling private property illegal?

33

You think textbooks are bad? I was an art major, you should have seen what supplies for that cost me. And you can’t resell those later, not even for $18.

34

When the heck was that? I have an English-Teaching degree. (I finished college in 1999) My books cost between $150 and $350 a semester, and that’s with buying used when possible.

35

  1. I have never been given any consideration when choosing a text except a free copy.

  2. I totally agree that textbooks are incredibly overpriced. Especially those that have undergone minimal revisions over the years. One that comes to mind is a heat transfer text that I bought as an undergrad in 1975 at a cost of $12.95 (it still has the sticker on it) that now costs over $100. It still has chapters in it that were out of date in 1975.

  3. Some of your profs do care about the cost of texts, others do not. We routinely talk about the cost of textbooks in our department and try to minimize same. However, we ultimately choose your texts based on content not cost.

  4. If you have an issue with the physical quality of your text bring it up with the prof. One semester we got Thermodynamics books that essentially fell apart mid-semester. I (the prof) thought mine fell apart because of all the stuff I stuck in it. But when it came to my attention that everyone’s books were falling apart I was able to get the publisher to replace them all.

  5. We, the profs, hate the random edition changes as much if not more than you do. We can figure out the mistakes in any given edition the first year. It drives us crazy that every new edition doesn’t just correct the old mistakes, it incorporates new ones. Not to mention the random restructuring so that all of a sudden I think I’m teaching a topic that was in chapter 3 but for some obscure reason is now located in chapter 6. Or even worse not even included in the text but put on a CD or website not accessible to students during class time, Arrrrgghhhhhh.