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In many European countries, this problem was resolved by what I feel is mostly student pressure. Our student union (for lack of better word) owned printing equ
by lvh 10y ago
In many European countries, this problem was resolved by what I feel is mostly student pressure. Our student union (for lack of better word) owned printing equipment and worked with most professors to do exactly what's suggested in this article: most professors wrote their own books (not 140 pages, though). Most of my textbooks were between 2 and 7 EUR, which I'm led to believe is approximately at cost. Occasionally, a particular textbook was "recommended", but there would always be ample library copies available, and often you wouldn't _really_ need it. I'd have about 4-6 courses per semester, so I'd spend maybe 25-30 EUR on our own textbooks. Occasionally I'd have to shell out for a traditional textbook, and that would utterly dominate that semester's materials budget.
The future's already here, it's just not evenly distributed.
- jabl 10y agoAs a fellow European, my experience is similar (though our prices were higher but still substantially lower than the big-name commercial publishers.), but I suspect it would never fly in the US (communism, boo!).
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- patrickmn 10y agoIt just needs to be spun as a free market thing (the professors are entrepeneurs and competition brings down prices) :) And then cross your fingers nobody gets sued into oblivion.
- beerbajay 10y agoTextbooks which are essentially the same are available in europe for like 1/3 of the price of the american versions. I bought $70 books for my master's courses in Sweden that would have been $300 in the US (where I did my undergrad). The "invisible hand" of capitalism at work!
- wolfgke 10y ago> I bought $70 books for my master's courses in Sweden that would have been $300 in the US (where I did my undergrad). The "invisible hand" of capitalism at work! I personally believe free markets ("invisible hand" of capitalism) work well in nearly all cases (yes, there exist cases of market failure, but these are IMHO rare). The problem rather is that copyright laws prevent a free market, since the copyright holder has a monopoly (i.e. opposite of free market) on the work.
- SolarNet 10y agoBy that logic we should get rid of property, since the property holder has a monopoly on the property. I would put "(i.e. opposite of a free market)" sarcastically, but I'm being serious. Go read an economics text book on the definition of a free market, and while you are at it, what properties they have (muh freedom is not even a primary one) that make us want them so much, and what the requirements are (natural monopolies are a problem, but copyright and property are not monopolies; run-away patents are though) to have them. The person you are replying to is wrong, the free market is what allows for corrections that are starting to happen (e.g. cheaper better books, student groups publishing their own books, etc.) it's just that Sweden has a free market with better conditions than many free markets in the U.S. so they get faster reactions in their prices. But you are wrong in a worse way, you don't even understand what you are advocating for. Edit: To expand on the copyright is property argument. Copyright allows you to own the result of your work. If someone happens to make something very very similar without ever seeing your copyrighted work, they have the copyright to their work, and you to yours. Like property you only have that which is yours (e.g. if I built a house on my land that looks exactly like my neighbors, I still own my property and the house; but if I took their house and put it on my property I wouldn't); this is why certain techniques like Clean Room development allow companies to build very similar products that are all protected by copyrights assigned to each company. The problem you have is with patents which allow the patent holder to claim all work done that matches the patent (even if the patent holder never actually made something that matched the patent; which is especially absurd).
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- swimfar 10y agoAt my US university the school had a (free) text book rental program. I never had to buy any books. edit: Obviously the initial cost of the books is paid for by tuition, but it's much less than the cost of each student buying their own book.
- gcb0 10y agolucky you. California universities living largely on subsides just moved to Pearson's online homework. Requiring every single student (even the ones taking a extra language class for a single semester) to buy $300+ dollars text books just for the online access code for the lame online homework website. you simply cannot pass any class without the $300+ ticket from that publisher. Oh yes and the actual books are old and full of misogynistic cultural commentary. The riches generated in this illegal scheme is definitely not going to improve or update the books. Few student organizations from UCLA tried to fight it, the result was that some graduate students that did not sign the petition won all the TAships next year and that was it.
- sitkack 10y agoThe autograder homework hack by Pearson is epic. I wonder how many people from ticketmaster and comcast started working at Pearson?
- tnecniv 10y agoIn the math and engineering classes I took, the prof normally just distributed his notes via PDF.
- pirocks 10y agoI read this as the "prof had normally distributed notes".
- a3n 10y agoHaving been a US citizen for all of my 60 years, and often wondering "why things so fked up?", I've come to understand or believe this about the US: If it makes money, it's good, regardless of whether it's good or bad for people or the environment. Once something is making money, it becomes a god-given right (cheap labor, insurance companies as health-care middlemen, etc). If you propose something that inhibits the above, you will be opposed with all available resources by elected members of government at every level. That people are the ones suffering and electing is a mystery that I don't think I have enough remaining years to understand.
- taeric 10y agoBeing opposed by elected officials is one thing. What truly baffles me is being opposed by the very people that are adversely affected. Many policies are literally convincing poor families that it is in their best interests to help support the frail legacy of billionaires. How!?
- supremesaboteur 10y agoPoor people are lifted out of poverty when they get jobs. Jobs are created by incentivizing job creators.
- mattnewton 10y agoOne of the biggest job creators is the government, with their massive budget and public needs. Yet we are often lead to believe that we need to coddle billionaires so that they feel comfortable enough to lay a few more jobs, and starve the federal government of revenue and responsibility.
- a3n 10y agoIndeed. The government, like poor people, spend every dollar they take in, which allows that money to circulate. To use a cliche, a billionaire can only buy so many yachts, pieces of art or gold bricks; at some point, the excess is going to land in an offshore account or otherwise be underutilized. Billionaires grudgingly create jobs.
- mattbettinson 10y agoThis has happened to me in a few courses at Queen's University in Canada
- igk 10y agoWas in the students union for my faculty. We pulled out all stops to make things as efficient and cheap as possible(we actually sold them below cost because we found other ways to subsidise them). 10ish euro maximum performance semester for all the textbooks that were used in the classes, and printing thesis was 50 % of the next cheapest option... if we had doubled our prices. We also did "university politics", basically creating pressure for professors to make good textbooks. I typeset one myself for a professor who wanted to "beat" another one. Join your students union, union or local cooperatives and cooperative oriented parties people. Infrastructure and necessities should be run like that or by government institutions.
- chipperyman573 10y ago>We also did "university politics", basically creating pressure for professors to make good textbooks. I typeset one myself for a professor who wanted to "beat" another one. Out of curiosity, how would his textbook beat another colleague's?
- riffraff 10y agoItalian, and fellow european here. When I started university (1999, I think) there were still plenty of Big Expensive Books (I recall my Chemistry one was like that). The "student pressure" materialized in the form of doing illegal copies of the books. This used to be totally illegal, but incredibly easy. At some point the legislative environment changed so that photocopying up to a decent percentage of the books was considered legit. Suddenly, low price books started to bubble up everywhere. So, if you don't have this yet, start lobbying your parliament for a "fair use" textbook copying policy, publishers will follow.
- tunnuz 10y agoThank you.
- gwillen 10y agoIn the US it feels to me like it's gone the opposite way. The textbook publishers are increasingly able to block people from using pirated books, or even buying used books, by including one-use online codes in the books. Then they can raise the prices because there's no other market. Don't ask me what I think the punishment should be, for devising this system, or for a professor requiring the use of such a thing in a course.
- abakker 10y agoMy wife works for a major textbook publisher. Not all those free textbooks or cheap textbooks are the same quality as the ones produced by big evil corporations. Frequently, when looking at competitors books, she will find more typos, fewer citations, out of date studies with small sample sizes, poor quality graphics, and sometimes just wrong information. Big books are expensive because the companies frequently worry a lot about these things and also spend lots of effort on the pedagogy of the text. However, management is not good, the commercial model frequently prioritizes things which are not good for students, and the industry is still shedding revenue. In an effort to change that, they seems to be doubling down on digital products, which are still less popular than print by several orders of magnitude.
- worldsayshi 10y agoWhenever I was in an international class, the study language was english, the textbooks were American. Extremely dense and horrible to read tombs. In my early courses most of the material was in swedish. Textbooks were a tenth of the size and had at least some personality. Some of them were quite enjoyable. Those were readable.
- dctoedt 10y agos/tombs/tomes/ [0] [0] https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/tome https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/tome
- sitkack 10y agoI think the meaning is more accurate with tombs.
- worldsayshi 10y agoThanks for the correction. Seems it's too late to edit though. Guess the somewhat suitable typo will have to stand. :)
- kazagistar 10y agoThe only time we had to use a professor written paperback textbook the quality was abysmal and the layout unusable.
- lvh 10y agoI don't have any data to objectively support the textbook quality, but overall I generally preferred them to standard textbooks. Perhaps how common it is impacts quality.