College Textbook Prices
Yes, we all know $150-$200 college textbooks is a sham. How they can update editions every year to just keep raking it in. This thread is not primarily based on that.
Ten years ago students were stuck. The college book store or other brick and mortar bookstores were the only place to get their books and they had to pay the price. Now with these prices driving students to photocopy entire books, take pictures of every page and seek international versions that cost 1/10th as much - I just wonder how long it will take publishers to drop their prices to compete.
Time to order my textbooks from China so they get here by early September
Ten years ago students were stuck. The college book store or other brick and mortar bookstores were the only place to get their books and they had to pay the price. Now with these prices driving students to photocopy entire books, take pictures of every page and seek international versions that cost 1/10th as much - I just wonder how long it will take publishers to drop their prices to compete.
Time to order my textbooks from China so they get here by early September
Comments
Yes, we all know $150-$200 college textbooks is a sham. How they can update editions every year to just keep raking it in. This thread is not primarily based on that.
Ten years ago students were stuck. The college book store or other brick and mortar bookstores were the only place to get their books and they had to pay the price. Now with these prices driving students to photocopy entire books, take pictures of every page and seek international versions that cost 1/10th as much - I just wonder how long it will take publishers to drop their prices to compete.
Time to order my textbooks from China so they get here by early September
Textbooks are expensive largely because students sell them back at the end of the term.
They will most certainly not drop their prices to compete. They will raise their prices. I'll tell you a little story about my experience making a couple of textbooks:
The book I edited was an anthology of readings along with a bunch of apparatus. Each essay included, unless it was in the public domain, cost money (one essay I insisted upon including cost $900!!). The price of those essays, plus whatever costs for binding, proofing, artwork, etc, determines the price.
Let's call it $60.
Campus bookstores are largely monopolistic and tack on whatever price they want to make money. Call the price, now, $90.
The first run of that goes mostly to pay back all the initial costs. We may have made about $300 on sales of 3000 copies during that first run.
The second run, we have a problem: the students are selling their copies (which they paid $90 for) back to the bookstore for $20 each. Why is this a problem? Because the next term, the bookstore is going to turn around and sell them back to the students for $50, and the students will snap them up because, well, textbooks are expensive.
So now, if the publishers want to make sure they have decent revenues, they have to do two things: 1) make sure the price on the books is high enough to make sure that whatever paltry sales they make pull in as much money as possible and, 2) push the editors and writers to pump out new editions with significant enough changes to warrant the professors ordering, and the students purchasing, this new edition.
These third-party places (we have tons of them around here) can offer the textbooks at such low prices because they maintain lists of universities, departments, professors, and individual courses, and so they know what books are being used. They buy up as many used textbooks as they can (often wandering around and buying professors' old desk copies off them), and then they turn around and sell these desk copies to the students, thus exacerbating the problem.
So. You want cheaper textbooks for college students? Don't ever, ever sell a textbook back to the bookstore or to a 3rd party buyer.
That's the next battle. It's ambitious and probably foolhardy, but I'd never bet against Steve Jobs.
Jobs wants to abolish the entire textbook industry and replace it with a Wikipedia-style collection of texts, edited solely by academic professionals.
That's the next battle. It's ambitious and probably foolhardy, but I'd never bet against Steve Jobs.
Steve Jobs wants to abolish textbooks? That's news to me (maybe I didn't pay attention in class)... Wikipedia is useful, but only as a check against other sources.
Steve Jobs wants to abolish textbooks? That's news to me (maybe I didn't pay attention in class)... Wikipedia is useful, but only as a check against other sources.
Googling Steve Jobs and textbook will bring up the info, but this should get you started.
And the idea is to have the entries limited to academics only, to minimize any Wikipedia-style problems.
Jobs wants to abolish the entire textbook industry and replace it with a Wikipedia-style collection of texts, edited solely by academic professionals.
That's the next battle. It's ambitious and probably foolhardy, but I'd never bet against Steve Jobs.
That will happen once someone figures out how to make electronic annotations usable. Personally, I would love to teach off of e-texts and some kind of gadget, but unless I can have my annotations there, it's not much use to me.
Googling Steve Jobs and textbook will bring up the info, but this should get you started.
And the idea is to have the entries limited to academics only, to minimize any Wikipedia-style problems.
Thanks for the link.
I'm so glad everyone involved with education has the number one goal of making money. Awesome.
I think the best way to learn is to be motivated and teach yourself from a variety of sources. Anyone thinking that their school provides all of life's answers to them wrapped up in a package should have their head checked... and beyond that, learning is a lifelong endeavor. A "school" is just a forum that provides a 'rounded' person (a.k.a.: meatbots suitable for employment). Schools can provide the competitive environment for students all doing the same thing, they are lousy at dealing with the more creative, difficult types. Those kids end up dropping out of school, and if they're lucky, their creativity will be recognized or given a chance to grow.
I'm so glad everyone involved with education has the number one goal of making money. Awesome.
Tell me about it. But the bastards demand on being paid for their labor.
Textbooks are expensive largely because students sell them back at the end of the term.
I dunno. Lots of things are sold used. Cars, for example. And there's a huge used book market, not to mention the library, for regular books as well, but they're nowhere near as expensive as textbooks. And these book companies change their texts so often that the used market doesn't last very long. It's every two years in several of my classes like Psyc 101. They're playing lots of other games to get students to buy the new copies as well, like including things along with the books if you buy them new.
I think a good part of the reason they're expensive is that they have a captive audience - you want to take this class, you've got to buy this book. So there's no competition within a given class. And the people who assign the books aren't the ones paying for them, so the free market isn't much at play.
I dunno. Lots of things are sold used. Cars, for example. And there's a huge used book market, not to mention the library, for regular books as well, but they're nowhere near as expensive as textbooks. And these book companies change their texts so often that the used market doesn't last very long. It's every two years in several of my classes like Psyc 101. They're playing lots of other games to get students to buy the new copies as well, like including things along with the books if you buy them new.
I think a good part of the reason they're expensive is that they have a captive audience - you want to take this class, you've got to buy this book. So there's no competition within a given class. And the people who assign the books aren't the ones paying for them, so the free market isn't much at play.
Well, you hit the nail on the head there, didn't you? You're absolutely correct: if there weren't a captive audience, this kind of thing wouldn't happen. But there is a captive audience that is required to purchase a certain item and that audience will, in turn, sell back that item in huge numbers, allowing later generations to own the item without any revenues going back to the publisher or editor, and so the publisher EOLs the item and publishes a new and, slightly modified, version in order to make some money.
What's shocking, really, is how little money gets generated after all of these shenanigans. We made enough money off of our text to fund a few scholarships for grad students and to pay the editors a little bit, but pretty much, that was it.
With all that said, when it came time to order my new, new, new copy of the friggin' Norton Anthology, I almost said "sod it" and assembled a readings packet to sell for $10. My plan this term is to assemble the packet as I teach; I'll make PDFs of the texts (all of them are public domain) and add in whatever notes I want, then use it next term.
Got your syllabi ready?
I got my Fulbright and my sabbatical, and at this point I don't know what I'll be teaching. I'll just be happy if, whatever it is, I can do it in English.
Congrats! We have a kind of "standing" Fulbright to Bavaria in our department (we do a yearly prof exchange with a uni there) and I was asked if I was interested. I suspect they just want to get me out of the country in case any more terrorist attacks follow me around.
And my wife said she'd kill me if I took off for a year.
Where you going, and, once you get there, do you plan on selling any textbooks back?
Congrats! We have a kind of "standing" Fulbright to Bavaria in our department (we do a yearly prof exchange with a uni there) and I was asked if I was interested. I suspect they just want to get me out of the country in case any more terrorist attacks follow me around.
And my wife said she'd kill me if I took off for a year.
Where you going, and, once you get there, do you plan on selling any textbooks back?
I'll be not too far away from there, in Heidelberg. We'll have to meet up for Oktoberfest if you go.
And I wonder what College Textbook Prices are like in Germany.
I'll be not too far away from there, in Heidelberg. We'll have to meet up for Oktoberfest if you go.
And I wonder what College Textbook Prices are like in Germany.
Heh. I actually just got back from northwest Germany. God I love that place.
And considering a friend of mine attended Universität Bonn for something like $50, I'd imagine textbook prices are pretty cheap (don't they have pretty rigid price controls?).
Heh. I actually just got back from northwest Germany. God I love that place.
And considering a friend of mine attended Universität Bonn for something like $50, I'd imagine textbook prices are pretty cheap (don't they have pretty rigid price controls?).
Yeah, I'm looking forward to it.
I have no idea about text prices there. But we've probably hijacked this guy's thread long enough.