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How California campuses are fixing the problem of pricey college books

84 points by palidanx 9y ago

wand3r 9y ago
> By one estimate, college students nationwide spent $701 each year on textbooks in 2008. By 2017 that cost dropped by more than $100. The reason for this is piracy. People save money pirating books and it also provides competition to what was a formerly the extortionist monopolistic practices of publishers.
- wlesieutre 9y ago
  I took a class where the book was hundreds of dollars, only used for homework problems and nobody could find a PDF. One of the students bought it, "scanned" every page with their camera, and returned it. Piracy is definitely how students are saving money on books.
  - nickparker 9y ago
    I've come dangerously close to starting a shadowy organization at my university for the sole purpose of maintaining and operating a couple DIY book scanners.
- vlunkr 9y ago
  I'm sure that's part of it, but there are plenty more factors. I was in school 2007-2013 and I saw a huge decrease (> half) in cost over that time because a local business started doing rental/buyback systems that significantly undercut what the school was doing. I also saw more courses going with cheap/free online content.
eykanal 9y ago
So, we're willing to introduce legislation to bring a $700 textbook bill down to $600, but ignore the fact that tuition is over $50,000 in many institutions. I guess we can call this a small win, but my goodness, that is a small win indeed.
- vonmoltke 9y ago
  > ignore the fact that tuition is over $50,000 in many institutions At what California state institutions is the in-state tuition anywhere near $50,000 (unless you mean for the entire degree program)?
- throwawayjava 9y ago
  > but ignore the fact that tuition is over $50,000 in many institutions These textbook prices do matter! If you're paying 1k in textbook fees and 8k-9k in tuition, then those books are eating up a significant percentage of your total burn. 9k is not a made-up number, by the way. Public colleges and universities without active research programs have tuition in the ~9k range [1]. Which is still a lot, but a student who works a part-time job and lives at home can get out with relatively little debt (or even no debt with a modest scholarship and impressive work ethic). You don't have to go to Harvard or even the state flagship. And you definitely don't need to go to one of the many second-rate schools that charge Harvard prices for access to a much less prestigious network and in many cases inferior education. If a student attends a school with an active research program and chooses not to leverage that expertise in order to level up their career prospects, then that student made a bad decision. Perhaps we should be doing more to shield people from bad life choices, or at least not enable those choices with easy access to huge piles of debt. But in most states, there do exist (more) reasonable options in the current market. IMO we should be moving to self-published open source books, with hard copies sold in the 20-50 dollar price range and with all profits going to the actual author. The online auto-graded homework assignments are an unsolved problem for some courses, but that's nothing a sabbatical or two can't solve. [1] https://trends.collegeboard.org/college-pricing/highlights https://trends.collegeboard.org/college-pricing/highlights
  - ivan_ah 9y ago
    "Pay the authors" is a really good strategy to incentivize the production of quality content. Get rid of the publishers and just have a short supply chain: author --print_on_demand--> readers. With a price tag in the 20-50 range, a prof could make a living from this book, even if the book isn't popular. When using print-on-demand and cutting out all the middlemen, the margins are very good (50% of list price vs 5% if going with mainstream publisher). The useful part of a publisher is developmental editing (product) and copy editing (Q/A), so there is an opportunity for "lightweight" publishing companies that help expert authors produce the book—like self publishing, but you don't have to do the boring parts. I'm working in that space. We have two textbooks out: https://www.amazon.com/dp/0992001005/noBSmathphys https://www.amazon.com/dp/0992001005/noBSmathphys and https://www.amazon.com/dp/0992001021/noBSLA https://www.amazon.com/dp/0992001021/noBSLA
jimmywanger 9y ago
FTA: "A new copy of the textbook for Intermediate Accounting II sells for $373.25, but the same book can be rented for the semester for $149.30." I'm pretty sure that the basic principles of Intermediate Accounting haven't changed for decades. Any recent changes are industry specific and you sort of pick up as you go along professionally. That's especially unconscionable when it's subjects like basic physics, chemistry, and math. Why do we have to use the latest edition linear algebra textbook, when you can get older editions for pennies on the dollar? All they do is change up the pages and switch the problems out.
- iamdave 9y ago
  That's especially unconscionable when it's subjects like basic physics, chemistry, and math. I'm staring at textbooks for next semester, Legal Ethics. Brand new book, 5th edition. $328. 3rd edition? $75. Boondoggle isn't even the word.
  - jimmywanger 9y ago
    > Boondoggle isn't even the word. Boondoggles are unintentional. This is working as intended.
    - iamdave 9y ago
      Elaborate? You lost me
      - deleted 9y ago
        [deleted]
      - jimmywanger 9y ago
        When you are performing a boondoggle, you generally had a reason or purpose in mind, and what you're doing right now is pointless towards that purpose. For instance, let's say you wanted to improve the educational quality of a university and you build a new chemistry lab that costs a lot of money. You're about 80% of the way through when you realize that the lab is never going to help education if you can't attract competent professors. Oops. That's an example of a boondoggle.
yequalsx 9y ago
I teach math at a community college. The courses we teach cover content that hasn’t meaningfully changed in a long time yet textbooks change frequently. About 10 years ago I decided that I would never require paid content for my courses. I make my own problems sets and lectures. I use lectures on YouTube and where possible free, open source textbooks. The publishers got too greedy. Their websites all suck. Their lectures are generally terrible. Their books sneak in ads. There is nothing user friendly about that industry. I hope it withers and dies and gets replaced by something more palatable.
- rectang 9y ago
  Are there no appropriate open textbooks available in electronic form for your courses?
  - mixmastamyk 9y ago
    The form isn’t as important as the price and churn.
  - yequalsx 9y ago
    There is an excellent College Algerva I and College Algebra II open source textbook. It’s very high quality. There is a passable Calculus I and Calculus II open source textbook. I haven’t found any other high quality opens source textbooks for the math courses I teach. Hence I create my own lectures and problem sets. http://www.stitz-zeager.com http://www.stitz-zeager.com open source pre-calculus
- SaltyBackendGuy 9y ago
  Not all heroes wear capes sir. Thank you for not supporting the problem. Edit: Thanks for the down votes for expressing thanks. Would expect nothing less.
  - MikeTheGreat 9y ago
    NOTE: I didn't downvote you. I almost never downvote people, and here on HN specifically I don't have enough karma anyways I wish there was a way to both downvote and anonymously provide feedback. With the thread of retribution downvotes I can understand not wanting to both downvote and publicly say you did so, but it would be nice to have a way of saying what it is you objected to. I also wonder if websites could then use that data to fight astroturfing (e.g., if an account consistently downvotes without providing feedback does that indicate a higher likelihood that the account is being used to influence the site without trying to contribute to and improve it?, etc)
wccrawford 9y ago
>A new copy of the textbook for Intermediate Accounting II sells for $373.25, but the same book can be rented for the semester for $149.30. Students can write on and highlight rented books. The bookstore also sells cheaper electronic copies. My community college did this 25 years ago. Though they "sold" us used books at a huge discount, and then paid us a portion of that when we sold them back. In the end, it was basically a "rental" but if you screwed up the book, you didn't get as much for it.
- Twirrim 9y ago
  The private college my wife did her masters at some 5-6 years ago also did the same thing. Some of her teachers just produced their own material for the students and ran off that instead of overpriced books.
  - wlesieutre 9y ago
    The public university I went to had some teachers like that. It also had some who produced their own material and made you buy it from the university bookstore. $200 for spiral bound 1/2" thick pile of black and white paper that's "totally different" from the one my roommate bought last semester? Ugh.
- MikeTheGreat 9y ago
  Nowadays you can do the same sort of thing (for some books) but not through the campus bookstore. Go online, find a cheap, used copy, and get that shipped to you. (Not all books are available like this, but many are) The prices online are so good that the online-used-book industry basically killed the 'book' part of the campus bookstore.
- dalbasal 9y ago
  The ridiculous part is that accounting II is a course taken by a huge number of students. This isn't a small run problem. The actual solution to all this is to have universities pay for books. They can shop more diligently, roll their own, use out of date books, go digital... Lots of options that are open to the college, but not the student. When the decision maker is not the user, price systems fail.
mixmastamyk 9y ago
Anything to kill the textbook cartel, in league with the campus bookstore. I’m reminded of a brand new Calculus textbook that was mandatory, though the subject has been intact for centuries. Luckily the internet gives so many options to combat this, but would still appreciate open source textbooks.
- refurb 9y ago
  This is so true. On thing I used to do is just buy the previous edition for less than $10. Content was 99% the same, but pages sometimes differed. If the textbook is just a reference and not being used for exercises, then it worked most of the time.
HarryHirsch 9y ago
If a campus were serious about textbook prices they would set up a LON-CAPA server (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LON-CAPA https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LON-CAPA) and employ a dedicated instructional faculty member to maintain the questions database. What students are really paying for is the online homework (the Canada-based Top Hat is a venture-capital based upstart, otherwise each publisher has their own system) because faculty are just too overworked with grading the stuff. Politically it's easier to shift the burden to the students (and mandatory homework doesn't even count as tuition) than finding funding for the Loncapa maintenance man or the teaching assistant that helps grade the stuff.
astura 9y ago
Not mentioned here: My college had many textbooks on reserve in the library. You'd check it out for two hours. I didn't buy books for a lot of classes because I just used the reserve copy when I needed it.
wyld_one 9y ago
Set up digital books for content. Prohibit/censure teachers for 'requiring' books they wrote when they were never used in class.
fabian2k 9y ago
The fundamental problem is that the people selecting the books aren't the ones paying for them in US colleges. There isn't much incentive to choose cheaper books. But that seems to be mostly because courses require very specific books, which certainly could be changed. My experience in Germany was very different, for almost all courses there were no required textbooks, only recommended ones. You were free to buy them, don't buy them, buy different ones or rent books from the library. And the prices are much lower, the most expensive textbook I bought was 80 EUR.
- veddox 9y ago
  Coming from Germany, I find it hard to understand the scope of the problem described in the article. In my course, less than half the students bought any textbook at all during their entire bachelor's program. The professors made almost all their lecture notes available online and if you needed a textbook, there were plenty stocked in the library.
  - Cynddl 9y ago
    Same in France. I've never bought a single textbook, as we either had to take notes during classes, or study documents printed by professors for us. Many professors would actually either write handouts notes, or ask student at some point to write one and would let anyone download it the years after. They sometimes recommended books for us, that were sold for 30-40 € in any library.
- Tijdreiziger 9y ago
  > And the prices are much lower, the most expensive textbook I bought was 80 EUR. That's because all parts of the world that aren't the US or Canada get the international edition of textbooks, which is much cheaper and more often than not page-for-page exactly the same. This isn't only the case for books, by the way. I've heard stories of North American students having to pay over 50 or even 100 USD for MyMathLab for a single course. On the other hand, at my European university, a MyMathLab code is 15 EUR.
  - 9y ago
Skunkleton 9y ago
The fundamental issue w/ college prices probably comes down to 1) lack of state/federal funding for institutions, 2) availability of student loans, and 3) lack of good jobs for people without degrees. What is being done to address the fundamental problems?
electricslpnsld 9y ago
Fun trick: grab the international editions. They are usually soft-cover, and the practice problems are often renumbered so you have to find a friend with the US edition, but they are often 1/10 of the cost of the US editions.
- jstarfish 9y ago
  I did this all throughout college. I never found them to be different in content in any way, so ESID I guess.
- walterbell 9y ago
  Endorsed by US Supreme Court.
mitchdoogle 9y ago
Some tips for textbooks I wish I knew when I started college: 1. Wait until classes start to buy textbooks. You want to have a chance to talk to your actual professor and hear what they say about the textbook and/or look at the syllabus to determine what, if any, readings are actually required from the textbook. In many cases, textbooks are chosen at a departmental level, so some professors may use them sparingly or not at all. 2. If you determine that the textbook is probably needed for you to finish the course, and there is an older edition available less than 5 years old, then buy the older edition. It will be available online on eBay, Amazon, etc. for a much cheaper price than the most current edition. In most cases, the reading content will be very similar, if not identical. Problems sets might change, but if you are assigned them, you can ask another student to take a look at their textbook, or borrow one from the school library. I started doing this my last couple of years at college, and never had any issues. 3. If you do buy a textbook, read it in its entirety. Remember that you are taking classes to learn, not to blindly follow a course syllabus. So read your textbook - all of it - even the parts that aren't assigned.
- tartuffe78 9y ago
  4. Digital copies are often available online for free.
  - zanny 9y ago
    Students should feel absolutely no guilt in pirating textbooks. The whole industry is a racket, designed to exploit kids in a situtation where they have no choice. I did things the "normal" way my first year of college back in the day and realized how stupid paying $400 a semester in books was before I just nabbed pdfs (and finding them was a challenge in the days before The Book Bay was a thing).
    - AnimalMuppet 9y ago
      > Students should feel absolutely no guilt in pirating textbooks. False. > The whole industry is a racket, designed to exploit kids in a situtation where they have no choice. True. But your previous sentence does not follow from this. The bad actions of others do not justify your own bad actions, no matter how tempting it becomes to think otherwise.
snomad 9y ago
This is all just fluff PR. Follett's continues to have a near monopoly on campus book stores and Pearson has outsized influence given demonstrated (in)competence. Want cheaper prices? Cut those 2 out, put out more public bids for service, or gasp if you are a 23 campus university system maybe negotiate on behalf of all 23 campuses instead of 1 by 1. Microsoft gave umbrella rates for all of the CSU system, so why not ask publishers to do the same?
jccalhoun 9y ago
This is a bad article. Renting textbooks is not unique. As others have said, schools have typically sold books and bought them back at the end of the semester. (Of course when they come out with a new version you were stuck with it) Textbook companies are pushing electronic books hard. They say that they have studies showing students learn more because it is interactive and such. I am skeptical though and think it is mostly so they can sell a license to the material and kill off used book sales. Sure it costs less but there is no way to make any money off of selling it and some companies only allow you to access it for a year or so and so even if you wanted to access it later in life you can't (I think there are some that offer lifetime access but that is really lifetime of the software platform). The real cost savings is Open Educational Resources (OER). Basically Creative Commons books that are free for students and educators with no drm. https://campustechnology.com/articles/2014/07/02/16-oer-sites-every-educator-should-know.aspx https://campustechnology.com/articles/2014/07/02/16-oer-site...
- joe_the_user 9y ago
  Indeed, I don't know if this passage was meant to fool me but it fooled me: By one estimate, college students nationwide spent $701 each year on textbooks in 2008. By 2017 that cost dropped by more than $100. - Which I initially read as "to $100", which, unlike a $100 drop, is impressive. $100 drop is a speed bump and if they can only manage such a speed bump, the whole thing is like a press release.
  - jogjayr 9y ago
    I think it's impressive that _any_ college expense has come down at all. Also you're not taking into account the fact that inflation alone should have increased costs by roughly $100 since 2008. But instead there's a net decrease.
    - jjeaff 9y ago
      Looks to me like they are not calculating the net cost. Since they don't mention selling back and all and then attribute some of the fall in price to rentals. Most people would come out farther ahead buying on Amazon and then selling back after the semester. Rather than rent. If their calculations do not include selling the book back, my guess is students are actually spending less up front but spending more overall.
vkou 9y ago
... Here's some crazy ideas for how to deal with the problem of pricey college books. 1. Stop requiring the latest edition for a class. I strongly doubt that the science behind Physics 201 has changed in the past two years - you can probably teach to the 2008 edition of the textbook, instead of the 2018. 2. Stop requiring textbooks containing one-time digital codes.
- munk-a 9y ago
  3. Stop allowing professors to require their own book as a source for the class. It provides a terrible incentive.
- kwhitefoot 9y ago
  For most of the physics taught to undergraduates my textbooks from '74-'77 would do just fine. Newtonian mechanics, thermodynamics, electromagnetism, and special relativity have not changed. Neither has the mathematics used to describe them. And as for the idea of homework assignments, that's just ludicrous. The only reliable way to demonstrate, both to yourself and others, that you have understood something is to successfully explain it to someone else who can ask searching questions; for instance to a tutor or tutorial group.
jfoutz 9y ago
I don't understand why open textbooks aren't more common. Sure, some things are changing quickly, but a calc or linear algebra? Seems like a quality book (or a couple) could be made for lots of courses. Most schools have a print shop and can do binding. $30 bucks maybe, if you want a hard copy?
- Jach 9y ago
  One excuse is lazy teachers. If you force everyone to buy the latest yearly edition, every year, chances are most students won't have access to the teacher's edition solutions guide yet.
- Rebelgecko 9y ago
  A few of my professors did this in college. They wrote their own text (usually focused enough to complement or expand upon the lectures), which cost around $20 at the bookstore. It was a double benefit, because professors who cared enough to do this tended to be better in other ways too.
- coolspot 9y ago
  Don’t teachers get rewarded for requiring latest edition of expensive textbook?
  - HarryHirsch 9y ago
    No. What gives you the idea, one would think that most people on this forum have seen a university from the inside.
    - coolspot 9y ago
      Because they fanatically demand latest edition of expensive book, which has minor changes from previous edition. I mean, how much editions of well established math book you could do? Every year new one.
  - nvusuvu 9y ago
    If they are getting kickbacks or incentives, I'm guessing they are keeping that on the down low.
sizzzzlerz 9y ago
I'm a long time out of college but even back then, textbooks were hugely expensive. One trick my school had was the EE/EL club ran their own used book store. We'd buy books at the end of a term and resell them next term for a small profit. Students who sold and/or bought got a great deal and we made money for out club to pay for activities.
njarboe 9y ago
Since at least some university professors should be able to write a good textbook on the subject they teach, the university should give them a semester or two off of teaching classes to write one, give the professor a little royalty ($1/book?), and then publish and sell the book at cost. $15 to $30 per book. Then don't change it until necessary (calculus could be the exact same book for decades) so that even cheaper used books are plentiful. Many universities even already run their own publishing houses. I'm not sure where the friction is that prevents this from happening? University presidents like to have fancy dinners with textbook publishing house CEOs?
- wedowhatwedo 9y ago
  That's good in theory, but what currently happens is a professor takes a fully paid sabbatical and writes the book for a publishing company. That company sells the book to students for $300 a copy and pays the professor $50 a copy (with a possible sizable amount up front). The professor and friends of the professor requires it for their classes. The friction that prevents your plan from happening is that the professors won't do it for so cheap. There is a ton of money they can make under the current system.
  - walterbell 9y ago
    Can the University press offer a similar deal to their employee/professor, undercut the commercial publisher, save the student money and still profit?
    - wedowhatwedo 9y ago
      It's possible but what happens often now is the professor is getting paid twice. Paid sabbatical and bonus money for the book. If the University was doing it, they wouldn't pay a person twice for one job. At least that's how my university would view it. Also, I'm not sure if a professor gets much credit from the University toward tenure for writing a book. Because of this, if there is no money involved, I doubt many professor's would do it. They do it for the money only right now.
  - 9y ago
Myrmornis 9y ago
Virtually all textbooks are available as pirated copies for free on library genesis. Of course it may be illegal in your jurisdiction to download them. So in a sense this problem is currently fixed, if your ISP allows access to libgen and if you are not worried about the consequences.
- dredmorbius 9y ago
  Tor is an option.
tzs 9y ago
Another tip: if you buy a new copy, consider an international edition if it is available. For example, suppose your calculus class uses Apostol's "Calculus". You can buy the US edition, which is an utterly ridiculous $270 on Amazon at the moment, and that's just for volume 1! Volume 2 is similarly priced. (It's particularly ridiculous because today's edition of Apostol is still the 2nd edition, from the 1960s. At least with those calculus books that they make gratuitous changes to each year to discourage use of used books, they can at least try to claim that the price keeps going up because they keep doing things to the book). The international edition, which is exactly the same content as the US edition, but in paperback instead of hardback, and on thinner paper, is around $20 [1] per volume from numerous small booksellers. There's even a couple that are Prime and fulfilled by Amazon. (I've heard that for some textbooks, the US edition uses color and the international edition is only black & white. For Apostol the US edition is black & white so it does not matter, but if you are considering a book that is in color keep this in mind). If Amazon does not have the international edition, try AbeBooks.com. It is far more likely that AbeBooks will have a seller with it than Amazon, actually. Similar to AbeBooks.com is Biblio.com. Occasionally one will have a textbook that the other does not. [1] https://www.amazon.com/gp/offer-listing/8126515198 https://www.amazon.com/gp/offer-listing/8126515198
- ct0 9y ago
  Some Universities will have an edition that puts their name on the cover, with a unique ISBN. If you look through the first few pages, it may be possible to find the original ISBN number from book the content came from and buy that for a significant savings.
Animats 9y ago
A new copy of the textbook for Intermediate Accounting II sells for $373.25 Looking at the prices for accounting books on Amazon, there are two kinds - books for people who need to do accounting for a business, which sell for about $20, and textbooks, which sell for $100-$300. Most of the textbooks come from Wiley or McGraw-Hill.
pacetherace 9y ago
Universities should be ranked on based Availablity of Textbooks (i.e. essential for courses offered) as well. It is not uncommon for a University library to claim that they have a gazillion books but when you go to find a course textbook, they have like 3 copies of those. Universities will do anything for the rankings.
keithpeter 9y ago
https://openstax.org/subjects https://openstax.org/subjects What do US students and teachers think about openstax? I've made use of short excerpts of some chapters as extra content in my own teaching (UK, not university level)
rdm_blackhole 9y ago
How about the Netflix of textbooks, pay 30-50$ a month and access all the textbooks on demand? The rise of Netflix has almost ended the piracy of movies, the same would happen for textbooks if this service was created.
pitaa 9y ago
Accessing the material is becoming less and less of a problem, for all the reasons already stated - piracy, international editions, OER, etc. The real issue is that the textbook publishers know this and are pushing more and more access codes so it doesn't matter where you get the book, you still have to shell out $100 to be able to submit homework. I still haven't seen a good solution for this issue.
- dingo_bat 9y ago
  Why would you need a textbook code to submit homework? As long as I can read the text of the book (that I pirated), why can't I solve the homework and submit it to my school?
  - ThrustVectoring 9y ago
    They're selling automatic grading systems to professors and administrators as well.
    - fjsolwmv 9y ago
      Can I just buy an automated professor and administrator?
  - Something1234 9y ago
    MyStatLab. $110 just to submit homework I already paid for. I don't get to keep any of it either. I just have my class notes which were never that good.
    - dingo_bat 9y ago
      Pretty ridiculous.
  - pitaa 9y ago
    Some classes don't accept paper homework these days, everything is completed online- The textbook publishers have started selling access codes to online homework websites. So s physics professor might decide to use "MasteringPhysics" for all the homework in their class, so every student has to pay ~$100 for a access code (subscription) to that website. The professors that use these systems like them because they don't have to grade anything. The departments like them because they don't have to pay graders and can have bigger classes. An the publishers LOVE them because students have no choice but to pay.

84 points by palidanx 9y ago

> By one estimate, college students nationwide spent $701 each year on textbooks in 2008. By 2017 that cost dropped by more than $100. The reason for this is piracy. People save money pirating books and it also provides competition to what was a formerly the extortionist monopolistic practices of publishers.

wlesieutre 9y ago
I took a class where the book was hundreds of dollars, only used for homework problems and nobody could find a PDF. One of the students bought it, "scanned" every page with their camera, and returned it. Piracy is definitely how students are saving money on books.
- nickparker 9y ago
  I've come dangerously close to starting a shadowy organization at my university for the sole purpose of maintaining and operating a couple DIY book scanners.
vlunkr 9y ago
I'm sure that's part of it, but there are plenty more factors. I was in school 2007-2013 and I saw a huge decrease (> half) in cost over that time because a local business started doing rental/buyback systems that significantly undercut what the school was doing. I also saw more courses going with cheap/free online content.

eykanal 9y ago

So, we're willing to introduce legislation to bring a $700 textbook bill down to $600, but ignore the fact that tuition is over $50,000 in many institutions. I guess we can call this a small win, but my goodness, that is a small win indeed.

vonmoltke 9y ago
> ignore the fact that tuition is over $50,000 in many institutions At what California state institutions is the in-state tuition anywhere near $50,000 (unless you mean for the entire degree program)?
throwawayjava 9y ago
> but ignore the fact that tuition is over $50,000 in many institutions These textbook prices do matter! If you're paying 1k in textbook fees and 8k-9k in tuition, then those books are eating up a significant percentage of your total burn. 9k is not a made-up number, by the way. Public colleges and universities without active research programs have tuition in the ~9k range [1]. Which is still a lot, but a student who works a part-time job and lives at home can get out with relatively little debt (or even no debt with a modest scholarship and impressive work ethic). You don't have to go to Harvard or even the state flagship. And you definitely don't need to go to one of the many second-rate schools that charge Harvard prices for access to a much less prestigious network and in many cases inferior education. If a student attends a school with an active research program and chooses not to leverage that expertise in order to level up their career prospects, then that student made a bad decision. Perhaps we should be doing more to shield people from bad life choices, or at least not enable those choices with easy access to huge piles of debt. But in most states, there do exist (more) reasonable options in the current market. IMO we should be moving to self-published open source books, with hard copies sold in the 20-50 dollar price range and with all profits going to the actual author. The online auto-graded homework assignments are an unsolved problem for some courses, but that's nothing a sabbatical or two can't solve. [1] https://trends.collegeboard.org/college-pricing/highlights https://trends.collegeboard.org/college-pricing/highlights
- ivan_ah 9y ago
  "Pay the authors" is a really good strategy to incentivize the production of quality content. Get rid of the publishers and just have a short supply chain: author --print_on_demand--> readers. With a price tag in the 20-50 range, a prof could make a living from this book, even if the book isn't popular. When using print-on-demand and cutting out all the middlemen, the margins are very good (50% of list price vs 5% if going with mainstream publisher). The useful part of a publisher is developmental editing (product) and copy editing (Q/A), so there is an opportunity for "lightweight" publishing companies that help expert authors produce the book—like self publishing, but you don't have to do the boring parts. I'm working in that space. We have two textbooks out: https://www.amazon.com/dp/0992001005/noBSmathphys https://www.amazon.com/dp/0992001005/noBSmathphys and https://www.amazon.com/dp/0992001021/noBSLA https://www.amazon.com/dp/0992001021/noBSLA

jimmywanger 9y ago

FTA: "A new copy of the textbook for Intermediate Accounting II sells for $373.25, but the same book can be rented for the semester for $149.30." I'm pretty sure that the basic principles of Intermediate Accounting haven't changed for decades. Any recent changes are industry specific and you sort of pick up as you go along professionally. That's especially unconscionable when it's subjects like basic physics, chemistry, and math. Why do we have to use the latest edition linear algebra textbook, when you can get older editions for pennies on the dollar? All they do is change up the pages and switch the problems out.

iamdave 9y ago
That's especially unconscionable when it's subjects like basic physics, chemistry, and math. I'm staring at textbooks for next semester, Legal Ethics. Brand new book, 5th edition. $328. 3rd edition? $75. Boondoggle isn't even the word.
- jimmywanger 9y ago
  > Boondoggle isn't even the word. Boondoggles are unintentional. This is working as intended.
  - iamdave 9y ago
    Elaborate? You lost me
    - deleted 9y ago
      [deleted]
    - jimmywanger 9y ago
      When you are performing a boondoggle, you generally had a reason or purpose in mind, and what you're doing right now is pointless towards that purpose. For instance, let's say you wanted to improve the educational quality of a university and you build a new chemistry lab that costs a lot of money. You're about 80% of the way through when you realize that the lab is never going to help education if you can't attract competent professors. Oops. That's an example of a boondoggle.

yequalsx 9y ago

I teach math at a community college. The courses we teach cover content that hasn’t meaningfully changed in a long time yet textbooks change frequently. About 10 years ago I decided that I would never require paid content for my courses. I make my own problems sets and lectures. I use lectures on YouTube and where possible free, open source textbooks. The publishers got too greedy. Their websites all suck. Their lectures are generally terrible. Their books sneak in ads. There is nothing user friendly about that industry. I hope it withers and dies and gets replaced by something more palatable.

rectang 9y ago
Are there no appropriate open textbooks available in electronic form for your courses?
- mixmastamyk 9y ago
  The form isn’t as important as the price and churn.
- yequalsx 9y ago
  There is an excellent College Algerva I and College Algebra II open source textbook. It’s very high quality. There is a passable Calculus I and Calculus II open source textbook. I haven’t found any other high quality opens source textbooks for the math courses I teach. Hence I create my own lectures and problem sets. http://www.stitz-zeager.com http://www.stitz-zeager.com open source pre-calculus
SaltyBackendGuy 9y ago
Not all heroes wear capes sir. Thank you for not supporting the problem. Edit: Thanks for the down votes for expressing thanks. Would expect nothing less.
- MikeTheGreat 9y ago
  NOTE: I didn't downvote you. I almost never downvote people, and here on HN specifically I don't have enough karma anyways I wish there was a way to both downvote and anonymously provide feedback. With the thread of retribution downvotes I can understand not wanting to both downvote and publicly say you did so, but it would be nice to have a way of saying what it is you objected to. I also wonder if websites could then use that data to fight astroturfing (e.g., if an account consistently downvotes without providing feedback does that indicate a higher likelihood that the account is being used to influence the site without trying to contribute to and improve it?, etc)

wccrawford 9y ago

>A new copy of the textbook for Intermediate Accounting II sells for $373.25, but the same book can be rented for the semester for $149.30. Students can write on and highlight rented books. The bookstore also sells cheaper electronic copies. My community college did this 25 years ago. Though they "sold" us used books at a huge discount, and then paid us a portion of that when we sold them back. In the end, it was basically a "rental" but if you screwed up the book, you didn't get as much for it.

Twirrim 9y ago
The private college my wife did her masters at some 5-6 years ago also did the same thing. Some of her teachers just produced their own material for the students and ran off that instead of overpriced books.
- wlesieutre 9y ago
  The public university I went to had some teachers like that. It also had some who produced their own material and made you buy it from the university bookstore. $200 for spiral bound 1/2" thick pile of black and white paper that's "totally different" from the one my roommate bought last semester? Ugh.
MikeTheGreat 9y ago
Nowadays you can do the same sort of thing (for some books) but not through the campus bookstore. Go online, find a cheap, used copy, and get that shipped to you. (Not all books are available like this, but many are) The prices online are so good that the online-used-book industry basically killed the 'book' part of the campus bookstore.
dalbasal 9y ago
The ridiculous part is that accounting II is a course taken by a huge number of students. This isn't a small run problem. The actual solution to all this is to have universities pay for books. They can shop more diligently, roll their own, use out of date books, go digital... Lots of options that are open to the college, but not the student. When the decision maker is not the user, price systems fail.

mixmastamyk 9y ago

Anything to kill the textbook cartel, in league with the campus bookstore. I’m reminded of a brand new Calculus textbook that was mandatory, though the subject has been intact for centuries. Luckily the internet gives so many options to combat this, but would still appreciate open source textbooks.

refurb 9y ago
This is so true. On thing I used to do is just buy the previous edition for less than $10. Content was 99% the same, but pages sometimes differed. If the textbook is just a reference and not being used for exercises, then it worked most of the time.

HarryHirsch 9y ago

If a campus were serious about textbook prices they would set up a LON-CAPA server (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LON-CAPA https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LON-CAPA) and employ a dedicated instructional faculty member to maintain the questions database. What students are really paying for is the online homework (the Canada-based Top Hat is a venture-capital based upstart, otherwise each publisher has their own system) because faculty are just too overworked with grading the stuff. Politically it's easier to shift the burden to the students (and mandatory homework doesn't even count as tuition) than finding funding for the Loncapa maintenance man or the teaching assistant that helps grade the stuff.

astura 9y ago

Not mentioned here: My college had many textbooks on reserve in the library. You'd check it out for two hours. I didn't buy books for a lot of classes because I just used the reserve copy when I needed it.

wyld_one 9y ago

Set up digital books for content. Prohibit/censure teachers for 'requiring' books they wrote when they were never used in class.

fabian2k 9y ago

The fundamental problem is that the people selecting the books aren't the ones paying for them in US colleges. There isn't much incentive to choose cheaper books. But that seems to be mostly because courses require very specific books, which certainly could be changed. My experience in Germany was very different, for almost all courses there were no required textbooks, only recommended ones. You were free to buy them, don't buy them, buy different ones or rent books from the library. And the prices are much lower, the most expensive textbook I bought was 80 EUR.

veddox 9y ago
Coming from Germany, I find it hard to understand the scope of the problem described in the article. In my course, less than half the students bought any textbook at all during their entire bachelor's program. The professors made almost all their lecture notes available online and if you needed a textbook, there were plenty stocked in the library.
- Cynddl 9y ago
  Same in France. I've never bought a single textbook, as we either had to take notes during classes, or study documents printed by professors for us. Many professors would actually either write handouts notes, or ask student at some point to write one and would let anyone download it the years after. They sometimes recommended books for us, that were sold for 30-40 € in any library.
Tijdreiziger 9y ago
> And the prices are much lower, the most expensive textbook I bought was 80 EUR. That's because all parts of the world that aren't the US or Canada get the international edition of textbooks, which is much cheaper and more often than not page-for-page exactly the same. This isn't only the case for books, by the way. I've heard stories of North American students having to pay over 50 or even 100 USD for MyMathLab for a single course. On the other hand, at my European university, a MyMathLab code is 15 EUR.
- 9y ago

Skunkleton 9y ago

The fundamental issue w/ college prices probably comes down to 1) lack of state/federal funding for institutions, 2) availability of student loans, and 3) lack of good jobs for people without degrees. What is being done to address the fundamental problems?

electricslpnsld 9y ago

Fun trick: grab the international editions. They are usually soft-cover, and the practice problems are often renumbered so you have to find a friend with the US edition, but they are often 1/10 of the cost of the US editions.

jstarfish 9y ago
I did this all throughout college. I never found them to be different in content in any way, so ESID I guess.
walterbell 9y ago
Endorsed by US Supreme Court.

mitchdoogle 9y ago

Some tips for textbooks I wish I knew when I started college: 1. Wait until classes start to buy textbooks. You want to have a chance to talk to your actual professor and hear what they say about the textbook and/or look at the syllabus to determine what, if any, readings are actually required from the textbook. In many cases, textbooks are chosen at a departmental level, so some professors may use them sparingly or not at all. 2. If you determine that the textbook is probably needed for you to finish the course, and there is an older edition available less than 5 years old, then buy the older edition. It will be available online on eBay, Amazon, etc. for a much cheaper price than the most current edition. In most cases, the reading content will be very similar, if not identical. Problems sets might change, but if you are assigned them, you can ask another student to take a look at their textbook, or borrow one from the school library. I started doing this my last couple of years at college, and never had any issues. 3. If you do buy a textbook, read it in its entirety. Remember that you are taking classes to learn, not to blindly follow a course syllabus. So read your textbook - all of it - even the parts that aren't assigned.

tartuffe78 9y ago
4. Digital copies are often available online for free.
- zanny 9y ago
  Students should feel absolutely no guilt in pirating textbooks. The whole industry is a racket, designed to exploit kids in a situtation where they have no choice. I did things the "normal" way my first year of college back in the day and realized how stupid paying $400 a semester in books was before I just nabbed pdfs (and finding them was a challenge in the days before The Book Bay was a thing).
  - AnimalMuppet 9y ago
    > Students should feel absolutely no guilt in pirating textbooks. False. > The whole industry is a racket, designed to exploit kids in a situtation where they have no choice. True. But your previous sentence does not follow from this. The bad actions of others do not justify your own bad actions, no matter how tempting it becomes to think otherwise.

snomad 9y ago

This is all just fluff PR. Follett's continues to have a near monopoly on campus book stores and Pearson has outsized influence given demonstrated (in)competence. Want cheaper prices? Cut those 2 out, put out more public bids for service, or gasp if you are a 23 campus university system maybe negotiate on behalf of all 23 campuses instead of 1 by 1. Microsoft gave umbrella rates for all of the CSU system, so why not ask publishers to do the same?

jccalhoun 9y ago

This is a bad article. Renting textbooks is not unique. As others have said, schools have typically sold books and bought them back at the end of the semester. (Of course when they come out with a new version you were stuck with it) Textbook companies are pushing electronic books hard. They say that they have studies showing students learn more because it is interactive and such. I am skeptical though and think it is mostly so they can sell a license to the material and kill off used book sales. Sure it costs less but there is no way to make any money off of selling it and some companies only allow you to access it for a year or so and so even if you wanted to access it later in life you can't (I think there are some that offer lifetime access but that is really lifetime of the software platform). The real cost savings is Open Educational Resources (OER). Basically Creative Commons books that are free for students and educators with no drm. https://campustechnology.com/articles/2014/07/02/16-oer-sites-every-educator-should-know.aspx https://campustechnology.com/articles/2014/07/02/16-oer-site...

joe_the_user 9y ago
Indeed, I don't know if this passage was meant to fool me but it fooled me: By one estimate, college students nationwide spent $701 each year on textbooks in 2008. By 2017 that cost dropped by more than $100. - Which I initially read as "to $100", which, unlike a $100 drop, is impressive. $100 drop is a speed bump and if they can only manage such a speed bump, the whole thing is like a press release.
- jogjayr 9y ago
  I think it's impressive that _any_ college expense has come down at all. Also you're not taking into account the fact that inflation alone should have increased costs by roughly $100 since 2008. But instead there's a net decrease.
  - jjeaff 9y ago
    Looks to me like they are not calculating the net cost. Since they don't mention selling back and all and then attribute some of the fall in price to rentals. Most people would come out farther ahead buying on Amazon and then selling back after the semester. Rather than rent. If their calculations do not include selling the book back, my guess is students are actually spending less up front but spending more overall.

vkou 9y ago

... Here's some crazy ideas for how to deal with the problem of pricey college books. 1. Stop requiring the latest edition for a class. I strongly doubt that the science behind Physics 201 has changed in the past two years - you can probably teach to the 2008 edition of the textbook, instead of the 2018. 2. Stop requiring textbooks containing one-time digital codes.

munk-a 9y ago
3. Stop allowing professors to require their own book as a source for the class. It provides a terrible incentive.
kwhitefoot 9y ago
For most of the physics taught to undergraduates my textbooks from '74-'77 would do just fine. Newtonian mechanics, thermodynamics, electromagnetism, and special relativity have not changed. Neither has the mathematics used to describe them. And as for the idea of homework assignments, that's just ludicrous. The only reliable way to demonstrate, both to yourself and others, that you have understood something is to successfully explain it to someone else who can ask searching questions; for instance to a tutor or tutorial group.

jfoutz 9y ago

I don't understand why open textbooks aren't more common. Sure, some things are changing quickly, but a calc or linear algebra? Seems like a quality book (or a couple) could be made for lots of courses. Most schools have a print shop and can do binding. $30 bucks maybe, if you want a hard copy?

Jach 9y ago
One excuse is lazy teachers. If you force everyone to buy the latest yearly edition, every year, chances are most students won't have access to the teacher's edition solutions guide yet.
Rebelgecko 9y ago
A few of my professors did this in college. They wrote their own text (usually focused enough to complement or expand upon the lectures), which cost around $20 at the bookstore. It was a double benefit, because professors who cared enough to do this tended to be better in other ways too.
coolspot 9y ago
Don’t teachers get rewarded for requiring latest edition of expensive textbook?
- HarryHirsch 9y ago
  No. What gives you the idea, one would think that most people on this forum have seen a university from the inside.
  - coolspot 9y ago
    Because they fanatically demand latest edition of expensive book, which has minor changes from previous edition. I mean, how much editions of well established math book you could do? Every year new one.
- nvusuvu 9y ago
  If they are getting kickbacks or incentives, I'm guessing they are keeping that on the down low.

sizzzzlerz 9y ago

I'm a long time out of college but even back then, textbooks were hugely expensive. One trick my school had was the EE/EL club ran their own used book store. We'd buy books at the end of a term and resell them next term for a small profit. Students who sold and/or bought got a great deal and we made money for out club to pay for activities.

njarboe 9y ago

Since at least some university professors should be able to write a good textbook on the subject they teach, the university should give them a semester or two off of teaching classes to write one, give the professor a little royalty ($1/book?), and then publish and sell the book at cost. $15 to $30 per book. Then don't change it until necessary (calculus could be the exact same book for decades) so that even cheaper used books are plentiful. Many universities even already run their own publishing houses. I'm not sure where the friction is that prevents this from happening? University presidents like to have fancy dinners with textbook publishing house CEOs?

wedowhatwedo 9y ago
That's good in theory, but what currently happens is a professor takes a fully paid sabbatical and writes the book for a publishing company. That company sells the book to students for $300 a copy and pays the professor $50 a copy (with a possible sizable amount up front). The professor and friends of the professor requires it for their classes. The friction that prevents your plan from happening is that the professors won't do it for so cheap. There is a ton of money they can make under the current system.
- walterbell 9y ago
  Can the University press offer a similar deal to their employee/professor, undercut the commercial publisher, save the student money and still profit?
  - wedowhatwedo 9y ago
    It's possible but what happens often now is the professor is getting paid twice. Paid sabbatical and bonus money for the book. If the University was doing it, they wouldn't pay a person twice for one job. At least that's how my university would view it. Also, I'm not sure if a professor gets much credit from the University toward tenure for writing a book. Because of this, if there is no money involved, I doubt many professor's would do it. They do it for the money only right now.
- 9y ago

Myrmornis 9y ago

Virtually all textbooks are available as pirated copies for free on library genesis. Of course it may be illegal in your jurisdiction to download them. So in a sense this problem is currently fixed, if your ISP allows access to libgen and if you are not worried about the consequences.

dredmorbius 9y ago
Tor is an option.

tzs 9y ago

Another tip: if you buy a new copy, consider an international edition if it is available. For example, suppose your calculus class uses Apostol's "Calculus". You can buy the US edition, which is an utterly ridiculous $270 on Amazon at the moment, and that's just for volume 1! Volume 2 is similarly priced. (It's particularly ridiculous because today's edition of Apostol is still the 2nd edition, from the 1960s. At least with those calculus books that they make gratuitous changes to each year to discourage use of used books, they can at least try to claim that the price keeps going up because they keep doing things to the book). The international edition, which is exactly the same content as the US edition, but in paperback instead of hardback, and on thinner paper, is around $20 [1] per volume from numerous small booksellers. There's even a couple that are Prime and fulfilled by Amazon. (I've heard that for some textbooks, the US edition uses color and the international edition is only black & white. For Apostol the US edition is black & white so it does not matter, but if you are considering a book that is in color keep this in mind). If Amazon does not have the international edition, try AbeBooks.com. It is far more likely that AbeBooks will have a seller with it than Amazon, actually. Similar to AbeBooks.com is Biblio.com. Occasionally one will have a textbook that the other does not. [1] https://www.amazon.com/gp/offer-listing/8126515198 https://www.amazon.com/gp/offer-listing/8126515198

ct0 9y ago
Some Universities will have an edition that puts their name on the cover, with a unique ISBN. If you look through the first few pages, it may be possible to find the original ISBN number from book the content came from and buy that for a significant savings.

Animats 9y ago

A new copy of the textbook for Intermediate Accounting II sells for $373.25 Looking at the prices for accounting books on Amazon, there are two kinds - books for people who need to do accounting for a business, which sell for about $20, and textbooks, which sell for $100-$300. Most of the textbooks come from Wiley or McGraw-Hill.

pacetherace 9y ago

Universities should be ranked on based Availablity of Textbooks (i.e. essential for courses offered) as well. It is not uncommon for a University library to claim that they have a gazillion books but when you go to find a course textbook, they have like 3 copies of those. Universities will do anything for the rankings.

keithpeter 9y ago

https://openstax.org/subjects https://openstax.org/subjects What do US students and teachers think about openstax? I've made use of short excerpts of some chapters as extra content in my own teaching (UK, not university level)

rdm_blackhole 9y ago

How about the Netflix of textbooks, pay 30-50$ a month and access all the textbooks on demand? The rise of Netflix has almost ended the piracy of movies, the same would happen for textbooks if this service was created.

pitaa 9y ago

Accessing the material is becoming less and less of a problem, for all the reasons already stated - piracy, international editions, OER, etc. The real issue is that the textbook publishers know this and are pushing more and more access codes so it doesn't matter where you get the book, you still have to shell out $100 to be able to submit homework. I still haven't seen a good solution for this issue.

dingo_bat 9y ago
Why would you need a textbook code to submit homework? As long as I can read the text of the book (that I pirated), why can't I solve the homework and submit it to my school?
- ThrustVectoring 9y ago
  They're selling automatic grading systems to professors and administrators as well.
  - fjsolwmv 9y ago
    Can I just buy an automated professor and administrator?
- Something1234 9y ago
  MyStatLab. $110 just to submit homework I already paid for. I don't get to keep any of it either. I just have my class notes which were never that good.
  - dingo_bat 9y ago
    Pretty ridiculous.
- pitaa 9y ago
  Some classes don't accept paper homework these days, everything is completed online- The textbook publishers have started selling access codes to online homework websites. So s physics professor might decide to use "MasteringPhysics" for all the homework in their class, so every student has to pay ~$100 for a access code (subscription) to that website. The professors that use these systems like them because they don't have to grade anything. The departments like them because they don't have to pay graders and can have bigger classes. An the publishers LOVE them because students have no choice but to pay.