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Perhaps if text books didn't cost $200 each, broke college kids would actually be able to afford them.
by rhinoceraptor 7y ago
Perhaps if text books didn't cost $200 each, broke college kids would actually be able to afford them.
- SkyBelow 7y ago>$200 each Sadly, you are dating yourself with that comment.
- nvusuvu 7y agoHas the price changed recently?
- LeifCarrotson 7y agoYes, it's inflated. Looking up a selection of my engineering textbooks from junior and senior year at my alma mater, where I remember new list prices of $150-200 and used prices of $100-150 per course in books they now add up to a typical $250 list new. However, there are a lot of ebook options now for $50-100 per course. Books that can stop working, as crazy as the linked tweet thread acknowledges. Books that will not be available on my bookshelf if I want to keep them for reference in the future. And there's still piracy. I expect the ebooks will make this more and not less popular; a lot of pirated textbooks were...allegedly....low-quality scans when I was in college.
- asdff 7y agoPirated textbooks are better than the ebook even. I wonder how they are sourced, because they are clean proofs even with markings where the binding obscures the pages when printed as a textbook. Must be from someone with access to those raw files. Plus, they are PDFs, and not clunky slow ebook files of varying proprietary format and offline availability. Textbook prices correlate with federal loan amounts. Publishers probably take the same % of that loan limit to price their books, so ironically the tools designed to help make education affordable are being exploited to make education unaffordable.
- cydonian_monk 7y agoEspecially when it comes to an engineering textbook. While my university's selected electrical engineering books were all sub-$500 (usually in the $300 range), most of the "core" civil engineering books were at or over $1,000. Just insane for anyone who was not on scholarship. (And this was 20 years ago!)
- DenisM 7y agoSurely with prices going that high the students could pool their resources to buy one copy and have it professionally scanned? It's only $1 per 100 pages.
- cyphar 7y agoMany students do that, but print shops might refuse to do the copying if they notice it's a textbook. At least, that's my experience in Australia. That's the kind of system draconian copyright laws create.
- DenisM 7y agoOne only needs a single shop that would agree. And at those prices the shop can be in any country.
- ahakki 7y agoThere could not be a more literal copyright violation than what you described.
- DenisM 7y agoSo?