First off, how many of you really need that damned textbook? Don’t go out and buy a text book just because the prof. tells you to. What next, reading the chapters assigned on the syllabus? Pahlease…
Second:
http://www.abebooks.com
Brialliant, my friends, the Advanced Book Exchange is brilliant.
At UW-Platteville, book rental is part of your tuition. You can buy them (some people did for later reference), but most people just used them then returned them.
Brian
Most undergraduate physics textbooks (not counting the “general physics” books often used in first-year physics classes intended for non-physicists) aren’t necessarily revised even this often. Examples:
[ul]
[li] Griffith’s Introduction to Electrodynamics had its first edition in 1981, its second in 1989, and its third in 1999.[/li][li] Jackson’s Classical Electrodynamics had its first edition in 1962, its second in 1974, and its third in 1998.[/li][li] Kleppner and Kolenkow’s An Introduction to Mechanics came out in 1973 and has not been revised.[/li][li] Reif’s Fundamentals of Statistical and Thermal Physics came out in 1965 and has not been revised.[/li][/ul]
I used all of the above in my undergraduate physics career (between 1997 & 2001), and from what I’ve gathered they’re all pretty common choices for their corresponding courses.
All of the above books will probably run you at least $50 on Amazon, so frequent revisions probably aren’t the primary reason texts are so high…
Johnny Bravo doesn’t have it right. A monopoly is a market-dominating position held by one company or more than one company acting illegally in collusion. The textbook industry is no different from any other—every publisher is angling to take a slice of the other guys’ pie while still looking out for its own bottom line. There’s no stopping some young textbook company from entering the market and lowballing every other company out of existence—except it turns out that to produce the kinds of books your customers (profs) actually want, you’ve got to spend money to do it. It’s not like making cheap textbooks simply hasn’t occurred to anyone, or that the publishing industry just likes to fuck struggling students like you for the fun of it.
Did Stephen King have to have his latest novel fact-checked, and proofread by a fellow professional to make sure the problems all solve correctly or that the answers to the discussion questions are right? Did he have to hire half a dozen or so teachers to create test banks, study guides, PowerPoint slides, videos, and extra problems and examples? (You may not give a rat’s ass about any of that stuff, but odds are your prof certainly does—it’s a big part of the reason why he chose the book. And if the ancillaries help him to offer a better course, you benefit too.) Did he have to license rights-protected photography and artwork to make attractive and pedagogically sound exhibits? Did the interior of his book have to be designed with great precision to ensure that text, illustrations, and problems all work together harmoniously?
If y’all haven’t caught on by now, I work for a textbook publisher. I promise you: nobody is out to screw anybody. Publishers would love to be able to produce great books and ancillaries by first-tier talent and not have to charge an arm and a leg. The market conditions that would allow it simply are not there.
As for regulating the industry, that may well happen soon. If it does, I imagine the results would go something like this:
• Talented teachers would have less incentive to write textbooks because there would necessarily be a limit on the royalty payments they could earn. (Yes, textbook authors earn royalties, just like Stephen King.)
• Ancillaries and teaching aids would be cut drastically, forcing instructors to spend more time prepping for lectures or creating assignments and reducing the time available to work with students or bring extra creativity to the course.
• Textbook development time would decrease, resulting in more errors getting into print and more cookie-cutter designs and pedagogy.
• Student supplements, particularly things like websites and CD-ROMs, would be cut back or phased out all together, since they can only be produced economically by spreading the cost to every new book sold. A textbook review CD-ROM produced as a standalone point-of-sale product cannot sell enough units to make its production economically feasible.
The upshot is that textbooks would gradually get worse, and the used book industry would still be there, undercutting the publishers and forcing their prices even lower as they cannibalize more sales.
You want textbook prices to go down? Here is what you do. Take your case to your teachers. You may be the ones who buy the books in the end, but they’re really being created and marketed to appeal to the professor, not to you. (This isn’t that simple, of course; if a prof picks a book that students like, students will have an easier time in the course and the prof will have added incentive to stick with the book.) Your teachers are the ones who want test banks, PowerPoints and all that stuff. I don’t exactly know how you go about persuading them to do without, but that’s the crux of it: publishers are simply providing what their customers want, at the best price they can manage without going out of business.
Apparently there’s a p2p movement (covered in the CHICAGO TRIBUNE recently) with scanned textbooks. Not terribly common, but the textbook companies were looking in to shutting it down before it really starts to imact their sales.
This is the one book which I regard as not only deserving all those editions, but should have been updated much, much more often than it did. The world of computer hardware literally changes every 6 months. A textbook more than 18 months old is effectively obsolete. If you think the only things that are different from 2001 till now then, just off the top of my head I can think of:
SATA
PCI-E
Prescott
Athlon64
DirectX 9
Dual Layer DVD’s
Brooktree motherboard layouts
etc.
Have a look at this mid-2001 archive of anandtech and you can quite clearly see how much the PC world has changed.
Blame the textbook wholesalers. If we’re buying a $70 textbook back for that little, it’s going to a wholesaler. If we’re buying it back to be sold in the store… you’re getting 40-50% back.
Why do textbooks cost so dang much?
Several reasons, the very least of which is money!
Consider:
Higher educational institutions may be a part of a conspiricy but most likely they have instituted the system to take advantage of the extra funds.
I just punched in some of my books ISBN’s into Amazon, and they cost twice as much there as what my university is willing to give them to me
Alright Nonsuch (Nonesuch? )
Uh, no. The prof says, “buy this textbook,” and you have to go buy it. By providing perks to profs, your forcing students into your textbook. That is not a free market. If the prof said, “go purchase a textbook which you feels provides a solid background in this topic including indepth discussion of Western Laggerhead and Southern Snapping turtle stacking, I recomend one of these three turtle stacking texts: etc…” then that would be a free market.
Does anyone care? No. Is the extra material crap-tastic and does it do very little to contribute to the teaching ability of the text? Yes. If you’ve managed to leverage your market position by convincing stupid profs to assign texts that have lots of worthless pretty colors in them, we’ll, then you’d be the evil text book industry that we have today.
Again, considering how error riddled my O-Chem text this summer was, especially in relation to the answer solution booklet, perhaps you should cut down on the fluff and actually make an accurate text. Just a thought.
No professor worth his or her salt would dare trust a textbook that he didn’t write himself or herself to provide the lesson plan. I did have one last year, and I will assure you, she sucked. She was also apparently very lazy. Again, cut out the worthless crap that nobody wants and you won’t have to claim so many expenses.
Thanks for proving my point for me. Nobody values your work enough to actually buy it unless it has homework questions in it that have to be turned in.
No, they don’t. Who in the hell would use a test bank for a serious college course? They like your text because you loaded them up with free textbooks to screw over people that have no choice. It is not a free market.
Any questions?
(Note: If you try to come back to this thread in more than a week, all of the posts will have been randomly scrambled and post numbers changed for no apparent reason; you must re-pay your annual SDMB subscription fee to access the thread again)
The professor chooses the product, but it’s the publisher who is to blame? Very strange. So if the IT department at work tells me they’re standardized on Windows and therefore I can’t use a Macintosh, I should blame Microsoft?
And what’s stopping profs from doing that? One simple reason: they don’t have the time. They don’t have time to read half a dozen books on their subject, then design every one of their lectures, quizzes, homework assignments and exams to be compatible with them. They want to be able to stand up in lecture and say, “Please look at the exhibit on page 49,” and know that every student in the room has the same exhibit in front of them. You can say that makes them lazy and maybe you’re right. But I think there’s an equally strong argument that a good teacher should leverage every possible advantage from their chosen text, and that trying to “support” every book on the market would ultimately result in a poorer teaching and learning experience.
I’m eager to know how you arrive at this conclusion. Do you teach many course sections at the university level?
So it’s the big bad textbook industry preying on helpless university professors, who are so feebleminded they happily adopt whatever book has the shiniest colors? Brilliant analysis. Go share that with your professors; I’m sure they’ll be very receptive.
Ah, this is beginning to make sense. You paid through the nose for some lousy books, and you want to take it out on someone. No problem; I’d feel the same way. If you’re stuck with a book that’s inaccurate and has lousy supplements, tell the professor; if s/he doesn’t seem to be paying attention, email the department head. Believe it or not, profs don’t like to hear their students are struggling with their textbooks. After all, it only makes their job more difficult in the end.
It’s just possible you know more about our market than a dedicated sales force that’s out in the field talking to professors every day of the week, but I’m not counting on it.
If nobody wanted lesson plans, test banks, PowerPoints etc., some publisher would figure out they could produce books more cheaply without them, and eat every rival publisher’s lunch. Unfathomably, it hasn’t happened yet.
For organic chemistry, probably not that many. For 100- or 200-level history, sociology, economics, finance, accounting etc. etc., a lot more than you evidently think.
You continually come back to this idea that professors are the helpless dupes of some quasi-criminal enterprise. I’d be interested to hear some Dopers who teach college courses weigh in on that.
I know spending a lot of money on textbooks sucks. I bought plenty of used books myself as a college student. I only want to reiterate that there is no conspiracy. A few rotten exceptions aside, your average college prof is simply trying to teach the best course he can and to get as much help as he can, because ultimately that’s the best thing for his students. The vast majority of profs want books that deliver genuine benefits to both themselves and their students, and that’s the market that textbook publishers are competing in.
Nonsuch: You too see what you want to see.
When I graduated in '44 engineering text books were priced where there was little or no used book turnover. I still have most of those texts.
My son graduated from UT in '75 and the UT and area merchants did as much or more business in used text books as they did in new books! Today there are no stores near campus dealing in used texts. The UT bookstore stock and sells new texts and deals in a few used texts. Students and profs. alike say it is a racket.
My grandson is a senior at Auburn and there are NO USED TEXT BOOK STORES and no market for used books as a new edition (with really minor revisions) are required.
Call it a conspiricy or not, all players except the students, parents, and grandparents are acting as if it were such.
Exactly. For the $150 required for my 5th Edition Carey O-Chem text, my prof and TA both explained that there were significant problems in the questions and answer solutions because the textbook publisher switched up the questions and made new ones in the new text for the hell of it. No one really thought that the new questions were in any way an improvement over the 4th edition questions, just different.
This is what makes me hate the textbook industry. You didn’t improve something, you just changed it around a touch and made everyone buy a new one. O-Chem profs have to be able to assign problem sets, and they cannot just tell everyone that they need to be able to find a copy of the old 4th edition because there may not be enough used 4th’s hanging around. Therefore, everyone has to shell out cash for the 5th edition.
My prof actually knew the original author of the text, and the author has even retired and is no longer involved with the updating of the text. Virtually nothing has changed in the basic field of organic chemistry between the revisions, and the first would be just as relevant and effective as the fifth edition. Hence, the textbook industry is still a bunch of bastards.
My mistake… you are, of course, correct.
But the point was I can’t justify the purchase of 50 of these books every 6 months. Yes, the students need the new info once they hit their advanced classes, the this book is used in Intro to Hardware 101. The instructor is responsible for providing the supplementary information on the newer technologies, and should be able to provide said information much cheaper.
Bottom line – I could either purchase the new revisions of the texts, or I could buy newer computers for the students (at the costs of a little bit more research for me). I chose the computers.
spingears, what I see is what I see. I’m not a student anymore and I don’t sell books at retail; I’m privy to textbook development, production and marketing, but I really can’t speak to what happens once they leave the warehouse.
You’re saying that new editions are required purchasing for every course in every department, even if the book isn’t revised?
The website for your book lists about 20 changes, including a newly written chapter (and, yes, new problems, which some profs actually want).
This is common. Authors are brand names after all, and they tend to have no problem with receiving royalty checks while others do the donkey work. Ditto with most professional publishing (rule of thumb for academic papers: the first name credited is there to get the paper published; the names after his are the ones who actually did the work) and “emeritus” professors who no longer appear on campus at all except at commencement ceremonies. Welcome to academia.
No professor in the world is going to adopt an o-chem text that hasn’t been revised in 10 years—particularly with reps from 4 or 5 other companies knocking on his door to boast that their books were actually revised this millenium.
:rolleyes:
Nonsuch: You have misquoted me more that once in your last post #56.
Some of the quotes you attirbuted to me were made by others, not me.
The curent textbooks system stinks & I suspect that deep down you also agree.
Take the time to read and comprend what I have stated above and compare with post #56!
I could be all wet but I think not.
I’ve taken college classes and bought textbooks for 20 years, and have taught college classes for 10. I’m currently adjunct faculty at a local college but don’t have the responsibility of choosing texts.
It’s my opinion as a student and a teacher that the text book trade is a scam. I teach chemistry, and basic chemistry in most undergraduate courses hasn’t changed enough to justify a new text every 3 years.
If I had my choice, I’d go 10 years on a basic course text, and suplement it with current information during lectures or with online sources or with hand outs.
I feel for the students; I didn’t like getting screwed when I was there and I can’t justify having my students spend outrageous sums of money on “not really that different” new editions.
At last corroboration! 
Thanks
Saying it is all a scam is a bit harsh. To give a kinder-gentler spin on it, I’d prefer to say it is very inefficient. Generally, in competitive markets, one of the best ways to get the consumer dollar is to give them more value (or perceived value) for that dollar. Consumers demand it, and are will give you money if you give them value.
Students are in far too weak a position to demand anything of the publishers, so the effort to get sales does not include high value for students. As a result, we don’t get cost efficiencies directed toward the consumer. In a desperate attempt to get some winning texts, they throw out dozens of texts hoping one will catch one and actually be profitable, making up for all the failures, this is very inefficient. There is a lot of effort going into books that don’t sell, so the other books have to be overpriced to the point of screwing the students for the publisher to be profitable.
A textbook that had high student value would probably have:
Well made primary book
Simple, paperback, disposable, question book which can change yearly
Updates/expansion to the text done in backwards compatible fashion, so the primary book does not immediately go valueless. Keeping subjects in the same chapters and in the same order will help immensely.