4 ms·

But it's just everyday academic publishing. I used to work at a large and well-known academic publisher, and the main thing I learned at company all hands mee

But it's just everyday academic publishing. I used to work at a large and well-known academic publisher, and the main thing I learned at company all hands meetings was that senior leadership had no desire to make money by simply making and selling products that people wanted to buy. They were always much, much more preoccupied with coming up with schemes to compel people to purchase their products.

musicale 4y ago
> But it's just everyday academic publishing Yes it is. Publishers already try to sabotage reuse and resale of their print textbooks by tying them to single-use codes for their digital platform, which they somehow lure instructors into using. Instructor collusion with this is really a sort of professional malpractice that should be banned by the educational institution, but of course institutions are bribed with kickbacks from the publishers. Yet it would be more efficient for the institution just to raise tuition and fees which are charged to students directly.
- sitkack 4y ago
  > somehow lure instructors into using The publishers offer "free grading" of homework from the textbook, but it is one time use. It really is a bribe to the teachers so they no longer have to grade homework in exchange for the student buying a book at full price that they can't resell. There really should be a class action lawsuit against publishers and schools for this behavior.
bambax 4y ago
Some ideas are brilliant, though. Music books for my kids have exercises that need to be completed in the book itself, making resale impossible. Expensive books, too. As a parent that has to buy new books every year, I resent it. But I admire the concept.
- Joker_vD 4y ago
  Teaching books for kids over here in general have their exercises in separate "exercise notebooks". Normally they're sold bundled with the textbook itself, but you can buy them separately as well and they cost closer to what an empty note book would cost.
- asimovfan 4y ago
  Why? Can't you just photocopy the exercise pages and work on them? Was there a holographic feature preventing it? This is common practice in my country.
  - anonymousab 4y ago
    I would assume they need to hand in the book itself for grading/verifying those exercises. Some instructors are against the nickel and diming and rentseeking in education textbooks. Others are fully on board and participating.
    - HarryHirsch 4y ago
      A third group of instructors are adjuncts who teach at three or four local institutions and are reliant on the lecture slides the publisher puts out to accompany the course textbook. That's the reason the textbook racket works at all. You want to improve things, you have to improve working conditions at second-tier colleges.
  - bambax 4y ago
    There's nothing preventing it, but it would be a big hassle to scan the pages with the exercises and print them. Also young kids tend to lose everything. If they have to bring the book and the correct pages it's a recipe for disaster. Anyway I didn't do it; but I actively looked, every year, for used books and couldn't find any, which means not many people did it either.
    - withinboredom 4y ago
      Back in the day, it cost $0.05-0.10 a copy at the student library, sometimes even free, if you knew the guy/gal working that day. I suppose with the internet being in the palm of your hand, there’s less reasons to be in the library, but back in the day, you’d be in the library 2-3 times a week.
- goosedragons 4y ago
  A looot of universities use online homework tools from the big textbook publishers especially for first year classes. Each new book has a code the students can use to access the homework included. Buy a used book and you now need $80 or whatever code often making it more than the new book. Worst part is there is open source tools that are similar but take effort to setup and host so universities don't use them.
colpabar 4y ago
There was a professor where I went to college who would do this too. He had his own freshman engineering "textbook" that he'd "update" every year and force his students to buy. It was legitimately the lowest quality textbook I had ever seen - it was as thick as a dictionary but only because the font was huge, the "covers" were just thicker paper, and it was full of spelling/grammatical errors as well as technical ones about the subject matter. His "updates" were always minor restructuring of text rather than any actual improvements too. FYI for any current students or parents of students: check the library for textbooks before doing anything else. Even if they don't have it, most universities have a system to check out books from other libraries that are "in network". I learned about this after my freshman year and didn't pay a dime for textbooks the rest of my time in school. bonus crypto complaint: it's really sad to imagine crypto/blockchain tech being used to force students (or anyone) to pay for library books.
- nradov 4y ago
  One of my college biology professors assigned his own textbook for the class, but in order to avoid a conflict of interest he refunded his royalty to any student who purchased a new copy. https://www.hmc.edu/about-hmc/2020/05/28/in-memoriam-biology-department-founder-william-k-purves/ https://www.hmc.edu/about-hmc/2020/05/28/in-memoriam-biology...
kkielhofner 4y ago
My dad was a professor and thought leader in his space (Occupational Therapy). He's long dead so I don't think he's going to have any problems with me disclosing this... My childhood was spent with him complaining about pressure from his academic publisher to release "new editions". OT programs around the world would update the syllabus to call for the latest edition even though my dad (the guy writing the book) thought it was ridiculous that he had to essentially re-hash and re-word the same material over and over again. Looking back on it he was really dismayed and demotivated by the whole thing but he understood that's just how things are. According to his Wikipedia page he wrote at least seven editions of his two main works... Academic publishing long-ago addressed the secondary market issue. In terms of the blockchain aspect of this - generally anyone who thinks these existing institutions (up to and including governments) are just going to sit on their hands and forgo revenue "because blockchain" they're not living in reality. If anything (as we see here) blockchain is going to be used to as another tool to boost their revenue (assuming it ever gets any real traction anyway).
- hotpotamus 4y ago
  I went to college in the mid aught's and it was obvious how it worked back then. I mean, has intro algebra or calc changed much in the last couple centuries? Basically all the different editions did was shuffle the chapters around a bit to make it hard to share a page number with a classmate and changed the values on the homework problems so you couldn't complete assignments using the old edition. I don't think it fooled many people, but on the other hand, people keep wanting to eat. It does feel like there are a lot more productive uses of human work, but that's true for a lot of the economy.
  - sitkack 4y ago
    > people keep wanting to eat This is not what the rent seeking publishers are doing. They are hoarding record profits. Agriculture is a single digit percentage of the workforce. https://ourworldindata.org/employment-in-agriculture https://ourworldindata.org/employment-in-agriculture
  - mrguyorama 4y ago
echelon 4y ago
The college textbook publishing industry seems to have always sucked. When I was in college, textbook companies started rolling out "online portal codes". For many core classes, the industry sells these codes to submit homework that require a new license each semester, regardless of whether your textbook is new or used. They cost hundreds of dollars apiece, the software sucks, and it doesn't fit with the coursework. It's clearly a grift. I swore back in college that if I ever made it big, I'd hire academics to write textbooks to license under Creative Commons, then push them to state representatives, university presidents, and students. This industry is part of the problem. The other is easily accessible loans with no spending caps, and college admins with no desire to stop growing.
- anakaine 4y ago
  I've been a student across multiple universities where the academic staff and school heads have actively shown predatory publishers, like those mentioned in this thread, the front door. Those academics published their own course notes, and printed spiral bound texts on campus with reading included. Able to be purchased for $10 each. They wrote their own presentations. We did have some textbooks, though only for particularly advanced subjects, and those were the sort of texts whose content doesn't change particularly much. The issue with the predatory practices, as you rightly point out, is that some institutions, for whatever intrinsic reasons, are prepared to accept the predatory lock in business practices which disadvantage students and create an exorbitant amount of waste.

musicale 4y ago

> But it's just everyday academic publishing Yes it is. Publishers already try to sabotage reuse and resale of their print textbooks by tying them to single-use codes for their digital platform, which they somehow lure instructors into using. Instructor collusion with this is really a sort of professional malpractice that should be banned by the educational institution, but of course institutions are bribed with kickbacks from the publishers. Yet it would be more efficient for the institution just to raise tuition and fees which are charged to students directly.

sitkack 4y ago
> somehow lure instructors into using The publishers offer "free grading" of homework from the textbook, but it is one time use. It really is a bribe to the teachers so they no longer have to grade homework in exchange for the student buying a book at full price that they can't resell. There really should be a class action lawsuit against publishers and schools for this behavior.

bambax 4y ago

Some ideas are brilliant, though. Music books for my kids have exercises that need to be completed in the book itself, making resale impossible. Expensive books, too. As a parent that has to buy new books every year, I resent it. But I admire the concept.

Joker_vD 4y ago
Teaching books for kids over here in general have their exercises in separate "exercise notebooks". Normally they're sold bundled with the textbook itself, but you can buy them separately as well and they cost closer to what an empty note book would cost.
asimovfan 4y ago
Why? Can't you just photocopy the exercise pages and work on them? Was there a holographic feature preventing it? This is common practice in my country.
- anonymousab 4y ago
  I would assume they need to hand in the book itself for grading/verifying those exercises. Some instructors are against the nickel and diming and rentseeking in education textbooks. Others are fully on board and participating.
  - HarryHirsch 4y ago
    A third group of instructors are adjuncts who teach at three or four local institutions and are reliant on the lecture slides the publisher puts out to accompany the course textbook. That's the reason the textbook racket works at all. You want to improve things, you have to improve working conditions at second-tier colleges.
- bambax 4y ago
  There's nothing preventing it, but it would be a big hassle to scan the pages with the exercises and print them. Also young kids tend to lose everything. If they have to bring the book and the correct pages it's a recipe for disaster. Anyway I didn't do it; but I actively looked, every year, for used books and couldn't find any, which means not many people did it either.
  - withinboredom 4y ago
    Back in the day, it cost $0.05-0.10 a copy at the student library, sometimes even free, if you knew the guy/gal working that day. I suppose with the internet being in the palm of your hand, there’s less reasons to be in the library, but back in the day, you’d be in the library 2-3 times a week.
goosedragons 4y ago
A looot of universities use online homework tools from the big textbook publishers especially for first year classes. Each new book has a code the students can use to access the homework included. Buy a used book and you now need $80 or whatever code often making it more than the new book. Worst part is there is open source tools that are similar but take effort to setup and host so universities don't use them.

colpabar 4y ago

There was a professor where I went to college who would do this too. He had his own freshman engineering "textbook" that he'd "update" every year and force his students to buy. It was legitimately the lowest quality textbook I had ever seen - it was as thick as a dictionary but only because the font was huge, the "covers" were just thicker paper, and it was full of spelling/grammatical errors as well as technical ones about the subject matter. His "updates" were always minor restructuring of text rather than any actual improvements too. FYI for any current students or parents of students: check the library for textbooks before doing anything else. Even if they don't have it, most universities have a system to check out books from other libraries that are "in network". I learned about this after my freshman year and didn't pay a dime for textbooks the rest of my time in school. bonus crypto complaint: it's really sad to imagine crypto/blockchain tech being used to force students (or anyone) to pay for library books.

nradov 4y ago
One of my college biology professors assigned his own textbook for the class, but in order to avoid a conflict of interest he refunded his royalty to any student who purchased a new copy. https://www.hmc.edu/about-hmc/2020/05/28/in-memoriam-biology-department-founder-william-k-purves/ https://www.hmc.edu/about-hmc/2020/05/28/in-memoriam-biology...

kkielhofner 4y ago

My dad was a professor and thought leader in his space (Occupational Therapy). He's long dead so I don't think he's going to have any problems with me disclosing this... My childhood was spent with him complaining about pressure from his academic publisher to release "new editions". OT programs around the world would update the syllabus to call for the latest edition even though my dad (the guy writing the book) thought it was ridiculous that he had to essentially re-hash and re-word the same material over and over again. Looking back on it he was really dismayed and demotivated by the whole thing but he understood that's just how things are. According to his Wikipedia page he wrote at least seven editions of his two main works... Academic publishing long-ago addressed the secondary market issue. In terms of the blockchain aspect of this - generally anyone who thinks these existing institutions (up to and including governments) are just going to sit on their hands and forgo revenue "because blockchain" they're not living in reality. If anything (as we see here) blockchain is going to be used to as another tool to boost their revenue (assuming it ever gets any real traction anyway).

hotpotamus 4y ago
I went to college in the mid aught's and it was obvious how it worked back then. I mean, has intro algebra or calc changed much in the last couple centuries? Basically all the different editions did was shuffle the chapters around a bit to make it hard to share a page number with a classmate and changed the values on the homework problems so you couldn't complete assignments using the old edition. I don't think it fooled many people, but on the other hand, people keep wanting to eat. It does feel like there are a lot more productive uses of human work, but that's true for a lot of the economy.
- sitkack 4y ago
  > people keep wanting to eat This is not what the rent seeking publishers are doing. They are hoarding record profits. Agriculture is a single digit percentage of the workforce. https://ourworldindata.org/employment-in-agriculture https://ourworldindata.org/employment-in-agriculture
- mrguyorama 4y ago

echelon 4y ago

The college textbook publishing industry seems to have always sucked. When I was in college, textbook companies started rolling out "online portal codes". For many core classes, the industry sells these codes to submit homework that require a new license each semester, regardless of whether your textbook is new or used. They cost hundreds of dollars apiece, the software sucks, and it doesn't fit with the coursework. It's clearly a grift. I swore back in college that if I ever made it big, I'd hire academics to write textbooks to license under Creative Commons, then push them to state representatives, university presidents, and students. This industry is part of the problem. The other is easily accessible loans with no spending caps, and college admins with no desire to stop growing.

anakaine 4y ago
I've been a student across multiple universities where the academic staff and school heads have actively shown predatory publishers, like those mentioned in this thread, the front door. Those academics published their own course notes, and printed spiral bound texts on campus with reading included. Able to be purchased for $10 each. They wrote their own presentations. We did have some textbooks, though only for particularly advanced subjects, and those were the sort of texts whose content doesn't change particularly much. The issue with the predatory practices, as you rightly point out, is that some institutions, for whatever intrinsic reasons, are prepared to accept the predatory lock in business practices which disadvantage students and create an exorbitant amount of waste.