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College level textbooks in USA are a total racket. The major textbooks come out with a new revision roughly annually, where the material is reorganized enough t

• kwhitefoot 5y ago
  We have the same problem with high school (videregående skole) here in Norway. It should be possible for a child to use their older sibling's textbooks, especially for subjects like mathematics and physics, but very often the school requires a particular edition.
  • nvrspyx 5y ago
    At my high school, the textbooks were given to us and then we returned it at the end of the year for the next cohort (we'd right our names on list in the back with the current condition to keep track). I'm not sure if this is how other US high schools did it.
    • leonvv 5y ago
      It's the same in the Netherlands. It's a great system I think. Sometimes you can see kids haul all their books on a bicycle, which is quite a challenge even for the Dutch
    • smeej 5y ago
      We each got a book to bring home, and then there was another set of the books kept in the classroom, and a few copies in the library. That way we didn't have to lug our books back and forth to school and could just use the shared books in the classroom and our own books at home. It seemed to serve us well and not stunt our growth!
  • projektfu 5y ago
    I took Calc 2 at my university and borrowed my roommate's book that he bought the year before. It was useless because it was the "preliminary edition". It was virtually the same book except all the exercises were in customary US units instead of metric. Can you imagine, publishing a math textbook in 1995 in customary units? All of my high school books had been metric and were a decade old. There could only be one reason to do so -- to require the next group of students to buy the new book.
• rplnt 5y ago
  > Then students are forced to buy new books and the publishers can make big profits. So it's the schools that are in on it and the primary target to put blame on. My university (in eastern EU) had majority of textbooks available for free. We could print them ourselves, have them printed at school, or just buy used. I'm sure it wasn't the case for all curriculums, but probably for many. Writing textbooks is one of the things teachers (professors) do after all.
  • netizen-936824 5y ago
    Some instructors are beginning to use more Open Educational Resources (OER) such as open access online textbooks (OpenStax) in their courses. Huge props to them and I hope more do this, but we also need to recognise that most OER today serves the basic classes that more people will take. Its when you get into the higher level, more specific courses where OER is currently under-serving. OER for most of these courses just plain don't exist, I hope someone figures out a way to serve these student and instructors in the near future.
    • fractal618 5y ago
      I' surprised more people don't know about OpenStax. It's an amazing project
• somenameforme 5y ago
  It's definitely not just the publishers. I think rackets like this work so effectively because bellies get buttered all the way down. At one class at my university (an early chem class) the author of the book was also the professor of the course. And each year it was a new version which didn't do a whole lot more than fix some typos, introduce some new ones to be fixed next year, and change (probably automatically through software) the problem sets. Then you'd be forced to buy new copies at full price from the campus book store. And at the end they'd then buy them back for you for a few dimes on the dollar so long as they were in "like-new" condition. And while I don't know what they did with them then I expect at that point they were sold to other universities at a discount for them to start the racket all over again with a set of now "like-new" text books. Really nobody has any motivation whatsoever to change the system besides the student. Though even there most students seemed frustrated but simultaneously pretty apathetic. Everybody of course realized it was a racket, but didn't really care to make too much of a fuss over it since endless loans and the like all make it feel somehow like the money involved is not really real. And, after all, in a decade or two we'd all be millionaires.
  • bradstewart 5y ago
    Interestingly, in most of my classes, the professor-authored textbooks "lasted" the longest. Revisions were infrequent, and the professors would routinely tell you what changed when they did occur so you could continue using older versions These were mostly electrical engineering (and a few software eng) courses, dunno if that has anything to do with it.
    • dkarl 5y ago
      That was my experience, too. Opposing the racket was a reason that a couple of my professors wrote their own textbooks. Only a few did that, but a lot more wrote and distributed their own problem sets so that students could use any edition of the assigned textbook, or even a different textbook if they had one from another school.
  • dzdt 5y ago
    In my experience the professor-authored books are not the same story. Professors teach one or two sections and earn a few dollars per book (author share on technical books is small!). Their main optimisation using the book they wrote is reduced preparation time to teach as they know that version inside and out.
• chrisseaton 5y ago
  In the UK we (or at least I) never used the exercises from the text books - the lecturer sets their own questions and exercises. So the exact page layout of the text books doesn't matter, and you can use any edition. In general text books just seem to be less of a big deal in the UK. I remember reading all the classic text books, but the course didn't revolve around them. You could often pick which text books to read out of a selection. And you just get them from the library.
  • mavhc 5y ago
    I was never required to buy a textbook in uk for maths/physics, my biology friends had to buy 1 large textbook, that was it
• voxadam 5y ago
  I personally believe that public universities in the US should be incentivized if not outright required to use and contribute to open textbooks when possible.
• jccalhoun 5y ago
  Well good news: they don't bring out new versions as often any more for most subjects. Bad news: they are pushing hard for ebooks that are drm'ed to hell so you can't resell them. And if they do still have paper books, increasingly they are moving to "loose leaf" editions which are "cheaper" because they are just loose pages which means they are much more likely get damaged so you can't resell those either. Or if they do offer actual books, they do "rentals" which means you pay most of the price but have to return them and so you have zero chance of being able to resell them. But that's ok, I'm sure your local bookstore can help you. Oh wait, most college bookstores are now owned by Barnes and Noble and so they are just another corporate business...
  • chrisseaton 5y ago
    What I don't get is - do US universities not have libraries where you can borrow these text books?
    • malauxyeux 5y ago
      They might have one or several copies, though maybe not the right edition and never enough for an entire cohort of students. At my university, students who didn't buy the book would simply make photocopies from the library's copy or from a friend's. But then the photocopiers were modified so that they only operated using credits from "copy card" that was tied to the student ID. I never knew anyone who got into trouble, but heard that you'd be called in if you were making "too many" copies. edit: an extra word
      • chrisseaton 5y ago
        It's weird because they know how many students they have, they know the text books needed before the course starts, they have a library, seems like the library should provide them.
    • jccalhoun 5y ago
      They will generally have one on reserve that you can only check out for something like 4 hours or something. My college has used the government covid money to pay for all students' textbooks and we hope to be able to include textbooks in tuition price from now on but they are ebooks only.
• ajsnigrutin 5y ago
  In slovenian (tech) colleges, years ago most of the books were written by professors, and published directly by in-college publishers, so calculated to current prices, books cost 10-20eur (literally depending on thickness and size), and were resold and reused for many years. Even photocopied versions were available at a few photocopied places around, due to a size difference (A4 book shrinked down to two A4 pages, side by side on one landscape A4 page), and noone cared, not even the authors. Checking the situation now, some are even available online, eg: http://antena.fe.uni-lj.si/literatura/ed.pdf http://antena.fe.uni-lj.si/literatura/ed.pdf Some are even unchanged from my times: https://www.fe.uni-lj.si/mma/Osnove_elektromagnetike_2016-02-22.pdf/2016100912013151/ https://www.fe.uni-lj.si/mma/Osnove_elektromagnetike_2016-02... (1999) Basically, noone really cares.
• viovanov 5y ago
  Reminds me of Feynman's anecdote about how math textbooks were evaluated by the Curriculum Commission. "The reason was that the books were so lousy. They were false. They were hurried. They would try to be rigorous, but they would use examples (like automobiles in the street for "sets") which were almost OK, but in which there were always some subtleties. The definitions weren't accurate. Everything was a little bit ambiguous – they weren't smart enough to understand what was meant by "rigor." They were faking it. They were teaching something they didn't understand, and which was, in fact, useless, at that time, for the child."
• deckar01 5y ago
  It has been getting worse recently. Publishers are encouraging institutions to adopt programs that use dark patterns to force students to *rent* ebooks for the same price as purchasing textbooks new. The default release date for telling the student what book to buy is the first day of class, but reading and homework is assigned that same day. Unless you want to go in person to a book store and wait in a long line (or rent the ebook) you are going to be a week behind schedule waiting for a used book to ship from an independent marketplace. https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2017/11/07/inclusive-access-takes-model-college-textbook-sales https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2017/11/07/inclusive-acc... More recently I was required to purchase an ebook that included online tests and homework hosted by the publisher. There is no 3rd party marketplace for that content. There is no way to get a refund if you do not use it. Publishers are allowing professors to outsource basically all of their lesson planning and content development responsibilities and pass the cost off to students. To add insult to injury, that product is setup to allow each institution to be the sole distributor of the license to their students and charge an additional markup to mail you a physical card containing the product activation code and offer no digital delivery option. https://www.oercommons.org/about https://www.oercommons.org/about
  • newsclues 5y ago
    I used to work in the textbook industry. I’m going back to school. My networking course recently changed from CCNA to CompTIA network plus content. I complained that I pay tuition and my coursework labs and tests for over 85% of the marks, are all done via CompTIAs cloud service. And this costs over $200. On top of this, CompTIA charges the school thousands of dollars a year for the right to teach their content. So I quit. If I wanted my network + cert, I’d self study and take the tests myself.
    • deckar01 5y ago
      My last internship was working on a textbook publishing tool. The whole reason I took the job is that it allowed authors and small teams to create beautiful books, publish them independently, and push updates rather than sell new editions. It did not take long for the big publishers that were partnered to cut off independent publisher access and continue rereleasing small revisions as new editions that had to be purchased at full price. * Some speculation, but this was the optics.
• jcranberry 5y ago
  I think it's more secondary school textbooks which are the racket, as schools buy up the new versions of the textbooks when they come out without care for the prices. It depends on the course and subject but I find that professors often recommend books which aren't so difficult to get cheaply or second hand. I think high prices for textbooks are fair (although compared to the field Pearson et al seem to have extortionate prices), they contain high-value knowledge. I think it's more ridiculous that universities don't provide students with textbook copies, given the incredible cost of degrees.
• taubek 5y ago
  Same thing is happening in my country. Is starts at primary school level. We used to have separated text and exercise books. Now the have up to three books for same math class and they have to write in at least in two of them.
• VikingCoder 5y ago
  When I was a kid, watching a movie on TV, it would pop up and say, "This movie has been edited for time, and for content, and to fit this screen," or whatever, and my dad would always jokingly mutter, "BASTARDS!" So, my mom is in grad school, and in the second quarter of a class, and the professor announces, "I'm sorry, but there's a new version of the textbook, so you'll need to buy it," and my mom, without thinking at all, muttered, "BASTARDS!" Everyone turned in shock to stare at my mom.
• dartharva 5y ago
  Ugh. As a non-American I have not heard a positive thing about American Education in any kind of media at all. There always seem to be a dozen problems with American colleges at all times yet so many flock there for higher education (mainly for Masters).
  • mindcrime 5y ago
    Sure, largely because the press are more interested in negative stories, because they generate more "engagement" and outrage and sell ad impressions and clicks. Education in the US absolutely has issues, including the textbook pricing racket shown in this very thread. But at the same time, there's no question that the US has some absolutely fantastic universities and that the quality of education you can receive here is very high. I say "can receive" because obviously not all universities are equal, or even all programs within a given university. Still, all of those people flock here for grad school for a reason. Note that I'm mainly talking about post-secondary education. Primary and secondary education in the US has a very tremendous degree of variance from state to state and is generally not seen as being in the upper echelon internationally.
  • lariati 5y ago
    It is because when we have this discussion it is 95% about credentials and 5% about education. I mean almost every class is available to be audited online for free. Most professors are average when it comes to teaching ability. There is no reason a foreign school can not mirror any program or class in the US. Of course, the value of the credential is a totally different story. We are really talking about the education equivalent of Louis Vuitton bags and not the general function of a bag.
  • DoreenMichele 5y ago
    There always seem to be a dozen problems with American colleges at all times yet so many flock there for higher education (mainly for Masters). When I was more up on issues in education years ago, I read that people come here for an education because they can. In their country, there may be barriers to education that we don't have. If you are an adult who wants an education and can pay for it, the US will let you pursue it. That isn't always true in other countries.
• deknos 5y ago
  i do not really understand, why students do not come together then and try to write, for example on wikibooks.org good comprehensive study material. i mean after that, and when everybody looks on the project, that would be done? and at least that works for the entry level courses? why does nobody do that?
• jordan_curve 5y ago
  In my experience undergraduate math textbooks are not like that at all. Perhaps for the introductory calculus sequence, but rarely for anything upper-division. There are so many good textbooks for Algebra, Analysis, Topology and the most commonly taught ones are (Dummit&Foote, Rudin, Munkres) are nothing like what you describe.