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High prices make textbook ‘piracy’ acceptable to most students
- TrackerFF 3y agoIt must have been "acceptable" for a couple of decades. When I was in Uni. almost 20 years ago, we'd all share scanned books between us. Don't think I ever heard "Oh, no thanks - that's illegal"
- wholinator2 3y agoWell that's extremely easy for publishers to defeat these days. Just make all the homework questions online and put a one time use code in the front and lock essential course material behind the purchasw of a _new_ book. Lots more publishers do this then was probably 20 years ago.
- rolph 3y agohttps://torrentfreak.com/court-sentences-man-for-selling-pirated-textbook-pdfs-230510/ https://torrentfreak.com/court-sentences-man-for-selling-pir... [While this type of activity is clearly illegal, the sentence also has an ironic twist. A quick calculation shows that the fine and confiscated money amount to less than $20 per pirated textbook, meaning that buying them legally would probably have been more expensive.]
- lordleft 3y agoI think that high textbook prices is one of the many little signals we sent young people, for the last 3-5 decades, that we are not interested in creating a better world for them. Isn’t it interesting how little effort has been invested in mitigating the runaway cost of higher education? That we enabled college administrators to turn up the cost dial without speed bumps? No wonder why young people have become cynical: we exploit them at every turn.
- roughly 3y agoYes - why do students feel fine pirating text books? Because it’s blatantly obvious to even the most doe-eyed freshman that they’re being fucked by the textbook company and that the administrators and professors are at best complicit. Welcome to the university, now ignore all that crap on the marketing material and open your wallet - no, the 17th edition of “discrete math” isn’t acceptable, you need the 18th.
- skykooler 3y agoEspecially because there's no way undergraduate discrete math has changed significantly since last year - the only difference is going to be shuffling the page and problem numbers around so you can't get away with using the older textbook.
- polishdude20 3y agoYeah it seems to be a very prevalent thing in the world. We exploit 20 something year olds new found freedom and cashflows. This is the first time they are making money and are looking to be independent and "grown up" or "find themselves" so the market says "hey, I'll help you find yourself if you give me money." Young people have a natural sense of invisibility. "I can do anything I set my mind to" has been burned into their brains since grade school. The market turns this into "I can buy anything I want to." It's like society says "Look, you're grown up now so you need to participate in the economy. Not only do you need to make money, but what's more important is you need to spend money so I can have it."
- bredren 3y agoThis is done around all key stages of life where insecurities can be exploited. The wedding industry from wedding rings to venues, new babies, even interviewing for white collar jobs used to be accompanied with the need for a new suit. Once it can be established something is important and to be revered, rent seeking knows no bounds.
- nervousvarun 3y agoAll true and don't forget that even death you're not safe (the funeral industry is one of the worst offenders).
- pessimizer 3y agoThe American Way of Death by Jessica Mitford. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_American_Way_of_Death https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_American_Way_of_Death
- visarga 3y agoGoal misalignment - education vs profit, and similarly health vs profit. Both discriminate against poor people by making their services too expensive to reach.
- asynchronous 3y agoThe world burns hotter and more apparent everyday to the younger generation, those of us that survive are going to be extremely cynical for the rest of our lives.
- courseofaction 3y agoAbsolutely. My entire university experience confirmed this: Structurally, the place didn't give a shit. Individuals in the system were great, but the system itself was primarily set up to extract from students while they are too naive to resist it, and indebt them to the financial system.
- PreachSoup 3y agoBesides bleak job market, horrible healthcare, being potential homeless due to skyhigh housing cost, stark contrast to the boomer's easy life, the more extreme weathers and the climate change, textbook is probably an afterthought. It's not even in top 10 things to worry about
- sgift 3y agoIf a textbook you require for a course can cost up to 500 dollar (not unheard of in e.g. medicine) and you have to buy multiple books in one semester it's no longer an afterthought. What is top ten will always depend on personal situations.
- PreachSoup 3y agoI mean in the context of this post, paying for textbook is an afterthought(i.e. pivacy)
- fallingknife 3y agoMillennials have more money than boomers did at the same age. There was no "boomer's easy life." That's a myth. https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2023/05/millennial-generation-financial-issues-income-homeowners/673485/ https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2023/05/millenn...
- PreachSoup 3y agoAre you sure about that? Have you actually talked to the students about the cost of everything right now? Especially the housing stats is such an easy stats to game on. They usually mean the family unit who owns the place they live in, so if a student who lives with his parents, the whole family would be considered as home owner. Btw Im not a student and I lucked out in the tech. I just feel sorry for the current kids
- zbrozek 3y ago50 percent of Boomers owned their own home as 25-to-39-year-olds, compared with 48 percent of Millennials, hardly a difference deserving of headlines or social-media memes. That's a ridiculously wide age range to use for comparison. And you'd be better off showing the median age of first home purchase or mortgage payoff. A modest increase in income or net worth is meaningless if housing has skyrocketed in comparison.
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- kelseyfrog 3y agoHere's a weird idea. Bundle materials into tuition expenses. It incentivizes the right people with the power and market participation to optimize for the right thing. Presumably, teachers and departments would have to justify costs from a materials budget to an admin forcing real downward pressure on the textbook market. The current state of textbooks acts like a surprise fee(dark pattern) where you purchase a product(education via tuition) and choices are made for you(textbook selection) that you have to pay for in order to pass the class(see the realization of tuition). That's fundamentally broken market mechanics. The folks in charge of making the market decision(which textbook to use) should be the same ones paying for it. We have a term for this pattern - moral hazard, and we shouldn't be surprised when students continue the same pattern of behavior when the system continues unchanged.
- cde-v 3y agoSounds like we have to peacefully protest until Citizens United gets overturned so the publishers can't just out lobby/spend us. Then continue peacefully protesting to change the tuition/book cost structure. Totally realistic set of goals, but until then I'll be pirating.
- bequanna 3y agoDon't try to externalize blame when it falls squarely on University Executives and Administrators. Their primary focus seems to be empire building: Create as many admin positions under me in the Org Chart as I can get away with and extract as much money from students as possible to fund the growth of my empire. This has been allowed to happen because they have essentially unlimited access to funding, no accountability and can make hand wave arguments about needing more staff (DEI, etc.)
- Danjoe4 3y agoThe solution is gov loans for higher ed needs to be contingent on a given school having administrative costs be less than 10% of their budget.
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- SanjayMehta 3y agoWe had paperback editions which were a fraction of the cost of the US editions. Some years ago, to prevent US students from using these versions, most publishers changed the page numbering, some content and the problem sets.
- Scandiravian 3y agoI studied law for a few years in Denmark and I remember the insane amount of money required to purchase all the books on the curriculum Most of them were written by the professors who taught the course and every year or two, they'd reshuffle the contents of the book to make it harder for students to follow the course by purchasing used copies from the previous year Most of the time only a small part of the books were actually part of the curriculum. It wasn't unusual to spend $100-$200 for a 700 page book only to later realise only 50 pages from it would actually be part of the curriculum. It seemed to me the page count had only been boosted to inflate the sticker price I can understand why students turn to pirated copies when they realise they're just viewed as cash cows by the teaching staff
- the_only_law 3y agoThe recent strategy I’ve heard of is to release new version of books with special online codes needed to access other content. That way, the students can’t even purchase used books.
- shigawire 3y agoThat's how it works for many courses now. A strategy I thought was fair at my school was - the main text is free, but you can pay for extra practice problems written by the professor for like $50. That seemed fair to me since I know these adjunct professors aren't making anything for the amount of time they spend.
- hgsgm 3y agoWhat subject is this that doesn't have thousands of practice problems available for free online or in a $10 used book?
- AYBABTME 3y agoI quit a mandatory econ course, in my engineering track, because the teacher insisted that we buy their 200$ textbook. I switched class to his competitor.
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- jitl 3y agoWhen I was in school, if we could find a way to take a course without buying a full price book we would. Piracy was a no brainer — it opened doors to all kinds of learning. I’m hugely thankful to the cracking teams that made some textbooks free and helped me learn Photoshop for $0 as a student.
- raincom 3y agoCulprits are always the instructors/professors who teach courses. Aren't they happy with their salaries? How much royalty do these instructors get from selling $200 textbook to their students? These professors should be ashamed of themselves in involving this scammy behavior, while at the same time these unethical/immoral professors ask their students to sign honor code.
- beej71 3y agoI'm not a professor, just a full time instructor, but my salary is 40% what I'd make in industry. But it's worth it for the great health insurance and 4 months off per year. And for the fact that teaching is what I love. The salary is frankly embarrassing to share with my peers in industry. But not all of us take it out on the students. I find free books whenever I can for my courses. I even write books and let the students (and everyone) freely use them. If there are good for-profit books out there, I only use them if they're cheap and something useful beyond college. I got it from Dad, who was also a teacher. He got tired of book prices and wrote his own. Students still had to buy it, but they could do so at cost at the college print shop. Dad made no money from it.
- jliptzin 3y agoIf only there were more teachers like you and your dad
- electriclove 3y agoAre you considering becoming a professor? Salaries for many US colleges and universities are much higher than most think.
- analog31 3y agoEverybody's considering becoming a professor. What's your research portfolio look like? How much grant money can you raise? Demand for those jobs is extreme. Meanwhile the ranks of tenured professors are shrinking as colleges make more use of contract teaching staff.
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- valine 3y agoTextbook prices are so high that they create the impression among students that the publishers are stealing from them. Copyright provides publishers with a legal monopoly, which they exploit to increase prices. Whether we like it or not, piracy disrupts this monopoly. Given years of abuse, the customer base that purchases textbooks has no patience for moral grandstanding. 'Lower prices or die' should be the message to publishers.
- GartzenDeHaes 3y agoIf educational institutions had any morality or integrity, they would use their large staff and student body to write public domain textbooks. Undergrad textbooks do not contain any new or novel information.
- jwie 3y agoIt’s so much worse than you think. Many textbooks come with license keys specifically so you can’t buy used books anymore. Students who do buy a used book are typically coerced into buying the license key to do digital homework, or whatever other reason. When I was teaching during a graduate fellowship I accepted paper assignments for students who bought used books, or who shared books with other students. The Pearson representative complained and I was given a talking to by the graduate student dean about consistency or some such nonsense. Eventually I would be reassigned to teach classes that didn’t involve digital components. We called it the textbook industrial complex.
- Aeolun 3y agoWhy wouldn’t the dean tell them to go pound sand? Does Pearson do anything for the university except extracting money?
- jwie 3y agoI did more or less. I said I’m the instructor of record I can decide how I take assignments. Next thing was “paperless” complaints. I was “using too much paper.” After a little back and forth they got tired of me, handed me a degree and told me to leave. I think what really irked them was other students found out and started demanding it from all the real professors and adjuncts and in other contexts. Then I was an actual problem not just a troublemaker.
- giantg2 3y ago"Then I was an actual problem not just a troublemaker." Maybe I'm weird, but this sounds like the highest form of compliment.
- BuyMyBitcoins 3y agoIt’s also a great quote.
- ddingus 3y ago
- whywhywhydude 3y agoWon’t things like blanket student loan forgiveness or very cheap student loans make such moral hazards even worse? Publishers, college administrators, football coaches, etc. will try to extract as much as possible from the free student loans provided by the government.
- sowbug 3y agoHang on there. A legal hazard is not necessarily a moral hazard.
- ChadNauseam 3y agoOf course it would. There’s an argument that cheap student loans combined with need-based scholarships are one of the factors that caused college prices to balloon in the first place. Need based scholarships allow universities to charge everyone the maximum they’re willing to pay (“just give us your parent’s income and a ton of other data, and we’ll tell you how much you have to pay to go here!”)
- dehrmann 3y ago> football coaches The football team probably brings in enough revenue to pay the coach.
- downrightmike 3y agoSince the vast majority of tuition is just stuffed into endowments, the repayment of funds from the scams should be taken from the endowments.
- frob 3y agoWhen I taught algorithms, I had 2 or 3 textbooks students could buy if they really wanted them, but there was no required textbook. I provided students with detailed slides and lectures notes covering the course material. I would try to find a handful of websites and videos I had vetted covering the topics using the same terminology as we used in class, or with a note explaining the difference. Not only did it mean students were not stuck with a surprise bill for a book they'd rarely use, but it also meant I had more freedom to teach what and how I wanted. Since I was teaching it with a focus on being a day-to-day developer, I put in my own section on await/async style coding and optimizing chains of dependent asynchronous calls. It was one of my favorite sections as it was exactly the sort of thing I would actually do in my job.
- BasedAnon 3y agoIt's really not like most people really consider piracy a crime anyway. Most people have pirated something at least once, it's basically a ubiquitous 'crime'. The war on copying has failed.
- j_m_b 3y agoThe best college prof I had used scientific article printouts as our text. She provided excellent notes to present the material.
- nine_zeros 3y agoI support this kind of piracy. If society thinks education for kids is important, they should make it easy for kids to get that education.
- geraldwhen 3y agoThe only useful textbook I had in college was the book algorithms, which was a $20 paperback. Price to value was solid.
- praxisdevel 3y agoFor the business operations and analytics courses I teach, many of the available textbooks are outdated or out of touch with industry. Thankfully, our library has a license to subscription services like O’Reilly Media, which gives students “free” access to their books and learning platform.
- giantg2 3y agoGuess what? You do not need to buy textbooks if you have a smart professor that cares and isn't into the racket. You can use 15% of a copyrighted work for educational purposes. That means you can pick and copy chapters from different books to cover the course material. All free!
- aio2 3y agoHow would you be able to pick and cover specific covers without buying the book?
- giantg2 3y agoThe library, potentially. The other option that I've seen is that the professor buys one copy of the books and then copies the parts they want so they can distribute to the students.
- aio2 3y agoOh, okay.
- ketkev 3y agoThe teacher/professor would be able to buy the book and can then copy and hand out the parts they are actually using for their classes.
- xur17 3y agoI wonder if you can use 15% from each "edition" (since they're all basically the same anyways).
- IshKebab 3y agoNo. The law generally doesn't stand for "aha, but what if I ..." tricks.
- cultureswitch 3y ago
- ourmandave 3y agoSerious question. Anybody actually keep and use their old textbooks? Way back in the day, I only ever kept an algorithms book and used it once a never.
- omoikane 3y agoI still have my "Fundamentals of Physics" (5th edition, I think they are on 12th edition now). This one I still occasionally read from time to time just for the fun of it. The other textbooks I still keep just for when I need weighted objects to stack something. I don't actually read them.
- ardkf 3y agoI kept my compiler textbooks, my computer architecture textbooks, and my algorithms textbooks. These include Crafting a Compiler, Engineering a Compiler, Code (by Petzold), Computer Architecture (by Hennessy). By far the one I reference most is Skiena's Algorithm Design Manual. I actually bought the new edition of that one for myself since it's in color now. My $250 differential equations textbook was ritualistically burned at the earliest opportunity.
- dark-star 3y agoWhen I was at university, I bought about 300€ worth of textbooks. In total, for the whole 5+ years. Math books we used were about 30-40€ each, the IT books maybe up to 50€. More often than not you didn't need any book at all since the professor put up his lecture notes as PDF or you could just copy it in the library from his handwritten notes (that was back in the early 2000s where the Internet was not quite as it is now)
- efitz 3y agoStates should mandate that public universities use open textbooks. Federal government should make open textbooks, open journals, and FRAND licensing of patents mandatory as a condition of subsidies and other largesse like student loan guarantees.
- bo1024 3y agoThat’s a good idea, and it should be paired with grants or some other compensation/support for people who develop those open books.
- GartzenDeHaes 3y agoState colleges already receive and enormous amount of public money. For 2024 in Washington State, "For higher education, the budget makes significant investments across the state, totaling $1.2 billion." https://senatedemocrats.wa.gov/mullet/2023/03/20/senate-introduces-capital-budget-proposal-with-major-investments-in-housing-higher-education-environmental-protections-and-more/ https://senatedemocrats.wa.gov/mullet/2023/03/20/senate-intr...
- pessimizer 3y ago> State colleges already receive and enormous amount of public money. So do the roads. Are you making a case that it's too much or too little?
- mhb 3y agoYes. We should determine who has the ability to write books and then provide for their needs.
- mlinksva 3y agohttps://sparcopen.org/news/2023/congress-introduces-bill-to-tackle-college-textbook-costs/ https://sparcopen.org/news/2023/congress-introduces-bill-to-...
- WhereIsTheTruth 3y agoWe are gate keeping access to knowledge/education too much, I wonder if this has any effect on the rate at which a society evolves, how many smart minds didn't make it due to lack of funds, perhaps one of them could have revolutionized the battery tech?
- aio2 3y agoTake my word for a grain of salt, I think it's just trying to control who can access what. Richer get more stuff.
- bvan 3y agoTextbook prices in North America are just plain criminal. The racket is exacerbated by the requirement by profs to always be on the latest edition, even though there is no material change in content. It is a disgrace.
- ttul 3y agoIn engineering school in the 1990s, a Taiwanese student in our school would order all the books in Taiwan and then their mom would ship a huge box to us in Canada. It costs 50% less than buying the same books in Canada. Textbooks are a racket.
- adhesive_wombat 3y agoI bought an Indian copy of a microelectronics textbook on eBay, replete with a dire warning on the back cover about not selling it outside the subcontinent. The only difference was the paper is thinner and the diagrams aren't two-tone, they're greyscale. Luckily, however, electrons do seem work the same on all continents. That said, we weren't required to buy any books at all and and books we were required to read were kept at the library in the "core" section, so there'd always be a number in the building, not lent out. As it turned out, in retrospect, I don't think any specific book was ever actually "required" to be read. I did buy a few books (about 10 over 4 years), including a copy of Stroud's Engineering Mathematics so old it recommended logarithm tables (otherwise it was perfectly serviceable). I bought those because I actually wanted them to keep and I still have nearly all of them.
- AHOHA 3y agoAlmost everything in North America is criminally priced with almost zero regulations, and all political parties are responsible for that: wanna buy a house, enjoy your 70y mortgage, wanna study, enjoy your student loans and expensive textbooks, oh you actually got sick, how rude?? Pay a hefty price or enjoy your 10hrs waiting time in the ER, Restaurants?! Pfft, pay the inflated prices for garbage food and don’t forget the 15%tip and credit card costs is also on you!! Gas is expensive? Yeah sorry despite the trillions we didn’t invest much in public transportation or bike/walking infrastructure. And so on.
- Robotbeat 3y agoGas is insanely cheap in the US compared to almost any other developed country. Food is fairly inexpensive as well. Housing has major problems in part stemming from over-regulation via zoning, NIMBYism, etc.
- AHOHA 3y agoYou might argue that the gas is cheaper, but it isn’t cheap, additionally, when it increases (and it will), US pretty much have no other options except cars. Food isn’t cheap either and constantly is getting expensive (1), and I’m not even touching the subject of its bad quality. (1) https://www.nerdwallet.com/article/finance/price-of-food https://www.nerdwallet.com/article/finance/price-of-food
- Robotbeat 3y agoUS grocery store food isn’t really any more expensive than Europe and actually is cheaper. The price of milk for instance is cheaper than the European average. https://www.numbeo.com/cost-of-living/country_price_rankings?itemId=8 https://www.numbeo.com/cost-of-living/country_price_rankings...
- PeterisP 3y agoThe actual cost of gas is actually about the same in US and other western countries, with the major difference being that in almost every other country you pay a hefty extra tax on gas on top of that cost - above and beyond usual sales taxes, often more than the actual gas cost - as means of reducing emissions and/or funding roads. So yes, US has cheaper gas at the pump, but it's not because of market efficiency but because of the differences of government policy to encourage/discourage gas consumption.
- diamondfist25 3y agoWho needs textbooks when Chatgpt, YT, open course, khan academy, gives u education for cheap?
- r3trohack3r 3y agoDRM is also frustrating for textbooks. I’m fine buying books, I have a “trophy case” in my office of unopened books because I like holding onto physical copies and supporting the creation of books that I find valuable. But I don’t want to lug around 40lbs of paper everywhere I go. So I get a DRMless pdf copy of the book too. I’d get the OReily subscription in a heartbeat if I could read it on the device of my choosing. But I can’t so I don’t. I want to download the ebook to the ereader of my choice (ReMarkable) where I have instant access to my entire library, the ability to markup the document without defacing it (notes are separate layers), and the ability to add blank pages for notes between the real pages (this will damage the binding of a real book). Books are objectively inferior for studying unless you need to rapidly flip between pages. And I’m going to optimize for my own time and efficiency every time.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- renewiltord 3y agoWe'd just buy one copy and everyone would get a photocopy or (later, when tech was better) scan.
- nborwankar 3y agoMeta question - why do we need the latest version of a text book every year. None of the undergraduate fundamental subjects change every year. It’s a racket - problems and some content are modified a bit and moved around making last year’s text book obsolete for page numbers and problem numbers. There really ought to be a set of 100 or so STEM textbooks that cover all the basics and are open source made available freely with source globally. All it will take is one billionaire to decide they want to do this and buy out rights or commision new content.
- rocketnasa 3y agoI propose that students should write the textbooks and pass them on to the next class, who in turn edits and writes more of the same textbook. Using a tool like a Wiki that keeps complete history of every addition, edit, delete to the content of the teaching material. And, of course, with citations and references. Start with the old textbooks in the school library and teachers editions and give writing assignments for new original writing that becomes the teaching material for the current class and future classes.
- danpalmer 3y agoTextboox pricing issues seem to be so country/subject specific. UK, Computer Science, 10-14 years ago. I was given 5 core textbooks on day 1 of my course – Java, C, 2x Maths, Communications. Probably about £200 worth. After that there were no required books. There were recommended books, of which the university library had copies of all of them with policies that meant they were always available to read but couldn't be loaned out because they were core material. On top of that there were subject reading material that no one used and made no difference. I never once heard of a textbook being part of an assessment - like using questions in the book. I seemed to have been very lucky, both CS often requiring fewer textbooks and the UK not having quite the same culture of exploitative companies. But it does illustrate how unnecessary the process is. Maybe students need to strike on buying textbooks.
- benjaminwootton 3y agoI took something close to CS at a similar time, and remember spending £X00 a year on textbooks and being pushed to buy latest editions. It might be institution and course specific and I always had my suspicions that someone was making a commission somewhere along the line.
- vasco 3y agoBack when I was in uni all the students bought books, sometimes second hand or indian versions or pirated them at copy shops. Meanwhile me and a few friends got access to all the books for free by hanging out in the library every day. It's not something that would scale to everyone but I always found it amusing. Ended up buying a total or 4 books for a 5 year EECS course, and that's because I wanted those as keepsakes, for nostalgia reasons.
- gnicholas 3y agoThere is one company in this sector that is innovating on price, Perlego. They use a Netflix-style model where you pay one monthly fee and can access all of the textbooks in their catalog. At roughly $18/mo, it is significantly cheaper than buying/renting individual textbooks if 2 or more or your textbooks are in their catalog. They’re not as well-known as redshelf or vitalsource, but their content largely overlaps. I only became aware of them because they approached my startup about licensing our technology, but since then I’ve been using their platform to read various nonfiction books (they have about a million titles between textbooks and nonfiction). I think they have a good shot at changing how students pay for books, and as their library grows their model will become even more attractive to students.
- ralferoo 3y agoSafari books used to be good last time I used them a decade or so ago, but it seems they're not even keen to share their price on their own website nowadays until after you've signed up for a free trial, and googling it now seems very expensive compared to Perlego. But for technical books, they used to have a massive selection.
- analog31 3y agoOne of my relatives attends a public university that rents textbooks to students. At the end of the year they're returned. If a new edition comes out, the university eats the cost. As I understand it, some of the books are available as downloads, and in other cases teachers accept the use of old editions.
- mauvia 3y agoCopying textbooks is explicitly legal in India as part of case law, as "fair dealing". This was decided in 2016 and involved Oxford University Press and Cambridge University press, so the opponents were pretty powerful overall. https://www.thehindu.com/news/cities/Delhi/University-copying-books-for-teaching-is-not-copyright-violation-Delhi-HC/article14984190.ece https://www.thehindu.com/news/cities/Delhi/University-copyin... Wiki article because the hindu is paywalled: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/University_of_Oxford_v._Rameshwari_Photocopy_Service https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/University_of_Oxford_v._Ramesh...
- pessimizer 3y agoFascinating. Was this the basis for Sci-Hub's optimism in India? https://news.careers360.com/sci-hub-scihub-libgen-alexandra-elbakyan-lawsuit-india-delhi-high-court-du-sol-delhi-university-iiser-jnu-mit-iit-science-research-elsevier https://news.careers360.com/sci-hub-scihub-libgen-alexandra-...
- mauvia 3y agoThe photocopy court case is mentioned in that article as a "small precedent", yeah. Though I can't speculate on how the sci-hub case will actually go since the main reason copying was allowed for students according to the arguments was that before photocopiers existed, they were expected to copy the things themselves.
- ghostpepper 3y agoA few of the best profs at my school had their own "textbook" that was basically custom-written and only covered the material covered in their course. 40-60 pages, $20-30, and 100% relevant
- dehrmann 3y agoI'm surprised that will how many people and institutions should be interested, there aren't more textbooks with a Creative Commons license. For anything non-specialized in a mature field, it doesn't make sense to have so many equivalent options all priced at $150. Calculus is calculus.
- downrightmike 3y agoI like these: https://openstax.org/ https://openstax.org/
- EliRivers 3y agoIt's been a little over two decades since I first attended university, but I recall that very few of the courses had a textbook. The lecturer wrote notes, be it on paper to hand out or on the boards to be copied and annotated. Now and then a reference was made to a textbook for further reading or for some specific proof or some such, but in no way was any course taught from a textbook in such a way that you simply needed the textbook. This was at a university in London, reading Physics. I wonder how unusual (or not) that is? Is the heavy textbook emphasis a US thing, or is it more common? (About a decade later I read Maths with the Open University, which is basically the student on their own for six years learning some trick mathematics; a couple of those modules definitely taught from textbooks, although by no means all of them; some of them again simply provided notes and explanations and problem sheets generated by the university)
- Barrin92 3y agoI went to university in Germany a decade ago (for CS) and I had the exact same experience. On the first day we got a usb stick with a linux distro for programming assignments and every course was essentially done with the expectation that if you attend the lectures you can pass the exams at the end of the semester. Book recommendations were sometimes given but basically always classic textbooks you can just borrow from the library. I honestly struggle to understand why students would even participate in these textbook extortion rackets.
- mo_42 3y agoI was in Germany as an exchange student (in 2012). In the library, they had copying machines that photographed from top and processed the images so they looked like perfect scans. You would just go there with a book and USB drive, turn pages for a while and then you had a copy of that book. Needless to say that we distributed the copies. So it was only necessary when we couldn’t find the exact version. The libraries usually had several copies books. For some courses, professors also just uploaded PDFs of entire books in the learning platform. There was also an on-campus shop where you could buy the printed slides for an entire course for a few Euros. I still have one of them for nostalgic reasons because I was intensely studying the math in there. By the way it was beautifully done by the professor's team in LaTeX.
- systems_glitch 3y agoVirginia Military Institute's math department decided they'd solve it by just writing their own open source books: https://www.vmi.edu/academics/departments/applied-mathematics/affordable-textbooks-apex/ https://www.vmi.edu/academics/departments/applied-mathematic... My wife is a professor there and wrote their APEX precalculus book several years ago (why precalculus is needed for college students is another matter). The print price was raised this year but is still well under $20. I think I paid around $350 in 2005 for the text we used for 1205/1206 at VT. VMI also does outreach to help other schools adopt their books and transition from whatever they'd been using. Excellent use of public funds IMO.
- Blackthorn 3y agoTruly representing the best of what academia can offer right there. I thank your wife and the entirety of VMI for serving the public good, unlike those universities just paying lip service to it.
- systems_glitch 3y agoThanks! I've let her know about the positive reception here. I get the impression that, although she likes doing the work and believes it's an essential cause, it's often thankless, especially outside VMI.
- deepspace 3y agoIn my first year, our chemistry and physics professors both authored their own textbooks for their courses. It was in the days before copyleft and open source, but the physics prof ran a print shop in his backyard, hand-bound the textbooks and sold them to us at cost (which was about 10% of similar published books). The chemistry prof, in contrast, contracted with a publishing house, and made sure to make a few changes every year, including re-numbering the exercises to discourage buying and selling of old textbooks. The (expensive) textbooks came with accompanying lab-books, which cost almost as much as the textbooks themselves. Lab assignments were only accepted on pages torn out from the official lab books.
- alphanullmeric 3y agoIm glad HN is on the same page about piracy: it’s not stealing if you still have the thing I’ve “taken” from you. If only everyone was consistent enough to apply that logic to AI.
- NoMoreNicksLeft 3y agoBasic ethical principles should make it acceptable. We live in an age where you no longer need a printing press to manufacture and distribute books. And public universities already get enough of my tax dollars that they should be publishing the text books required for their clases. For free. Public funding equals public availability and ownership. When a university demands a $300 book from some private publisher, it amounts to fraud and all involved should be investigated, prosecuted, and convicted of federal felonies. Stop the grift. What the fuck are we paying professors for, if not to write the written materials they deem requirements to learn the curriculum they teach? Get to work motherfuckers.
- r9550684 3y agoI came to America poor, and went straight to a public university, on scholarship and no money to even pay for food (grad seminars and special events with free sandwiches and pizza is how I learned about things like quaternions as an undergrad). But as an eastern European hacker, i had a complete disregard of copyright, I also grew up in the 90s when hacker ethos included strong anti-authoritarian elements. No way I was going to pay those ridiculous book prices. So first thing I did was setup a DC server (direct connect, early 2000s p2p sharing protocol) with a friendly grad student on university infrastructure, where we shared books, encouraged other students to upload books, we also built a dyi book scanner (there's one popular design that comes up first on google). the bookscanner at some point had a near 24/7 utilization, and people were coordinating time slots by dc messages. the room with the scanner (which is also where the DC server was) turned into a kind of unix room/hackerspace, because there was always somebody there working on something only vaguely related to university courses as such. reminiscing on things like that always makes me realize just how much hacker culture has changed, to a significant extent as a result of societal pressure. I was extremely lucky, because when the handful of us got inevitably discovered, what followed was a series of meetings with department dean and university heads, lots of stern talking, which basically ended after they were convinced that they put sufficient fear of god in us. I'm particularly grateful to one networking and os professor who showed up to every single one of those meetings to advocate on our behalf. said professor had a significant contribution to computing in general, was strong supporter of old school hacker ethos, and is just all around great guy. only a few years later aaronsw was thrown to the wolves by the cowards and bureaucrats (but I repeat myself) at MIT over his JSTOR downloads, which in my personal perception of history was the end of this kind of "oh captain my captain" university hacker culture.
- psychomugs 3y agoThat great guy sounds like a great guy. Wish I knew someone like them.
- drowsspa 3y agoOh man, back in my university it was the teachers themselves who provided the pirated materials. In Humanities it was the full scanned books, in STEM at least they always scanned at least the exercises so it wouldn't be necessary to get the specific edition.
- theboogieman 3y agoAs a recent grad, I can speak on this a bit: My biggest problem with the current textbook industry (among many) is that each textbook manufacturer uses their own proprietary format for reading the books and doing assignments. Wiley and Sons uses WileyPlus which, in its original incarnation, used Flash until the very last day Flash was officially supported. Don't want a potential security hole installed onto your laptop? Too bad, transfer to a different school because this one has been bought out by Wiley and Sons. And the interface was absolutely horrid. If you were doing division in their math website and entered a "/", they never set up the Javascript to state you were typing in a textbox so Firefox would open the "search this page" prompt. This system made doing my homework more frustrating, not less. I dreaded doing math homework every day from age 16-20, not because I didn't want to learn, but because I was constantly fighting WileyPlus' "quirks" instead of just doing the math. All of these websites, not WileyPlus alone, also have horrible uptime. There were often times I had pressing homework to do and would be met with a "Servers are down for maintenence" screen. Since the textbook publishers cut predatory deals with the universities, professors are completely unable to switch to another publisher if these availability problems get out of hand. This leads to worse education outcomes, frustration with the professors who are constantly wrestling with the website, and students being forced to take out predatory loans to pay for these horrible books. I do not miss college.
- HomeDeLaPot 3y agoReading this makes me very grateful to my university math department for choosing WeBWorK: https://openwebwork.org/ https://openwebwork.org/
- LightBug1 3y agoTell a student not to pirate textbooks due to copyright while teaching them that chatGPT scans almost all available knowledge for free ...
- kgwxd 3y agoNo one should feel the least bit guilty for copying. It’s not unethical. If it’s a problem, just add the price of the book to the course.
- userbinator 3y agoI know an instructor who'd tell his students "I wrote a book for this course, and you can buy a hardcopy if you want, but there's a PDF floating around on the Internet if you don't think it's worth buying."
- andersa 3y agoSuper confused by stories like this. I went to university in Germany and any course materials we needed were provided to us as pdfs. They also had a service where you could print it out on a bunch of copy paper if you wanted a bit more tangible form, for basically the cost of paper and toner. My entire tuition likely cost less than American students waste on books. Don't you want people to learn?
- Randomizer42 3y agoIt is a business between publishers and universities. There is no mystery here.
- RecycledEle 3y agoChatGPT has made this argument obsolete. First, ChatGPT can generate textbooks that can not be copyrighted. Second, ChatGPT makes textbooks obsolete by replacing one-size-fits-all text with custom answers to questions. Source: I'm a teacher.
- cultureswitch 3y agoNot quite, as ChatGPT will also very confidently say something wrong within the first paragraph.
- RecycledEle 3y agoHistory books can also very confidently say something wrong within the first paragraph. When I graduated from high school they were throwing out history books. I picked up 3 consecutive editions of a US History Book from my favorite teacher. One said the US won the Spanish-American War, another said Spain won it, and the third said Cuba won it.
- morkalork 3y agoThere was a mathematics professor in Canada who wrote what became the standard calculus textbooks used in universities here (the violin ones). Anyways, one day a local paper did a little showcase of the house that textbooks paid for and now that I'm trying to dig up a reference to that article, I find it has its own Wikipedia page! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Integral_House https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Integral_House Suffice to say, I, nor anyone else, should not feel bad about pirating that series of books.
- downrightmike 3y agoThe final cost of the house was estimated at $24 million.
- csense 3y agoTo be fair, I used Stewart's calculus textbook and it was pretty good.
- greedo 3y agoOne of my early tech jobs was working for a startup that created dynamic/randomized questions to go on a CD stuck in the back of text books. The same tech was used to create randomized online tests to go with the textbooks. Our biggest customer was Pearson, and once I realized the impact on students I was pissed. Completely eliminated sharing of books, and even simple things like group solving of problems since each student had unique problem sets. Of course the same company fired me when I was fighting cancer, and then was acquired by Wimba. Oh and if T. Mack Brown reads this site, you can kiss my ass...
- Mountain_Skies 3y agoThe professor for the data compression class I took encouraged us to photocopy the pages from the textbook that we needed for the week. Turned out that he was the author and was very apologetic about the price of the textbook though he had no real control over it.
- jcutrell 3y agoI dislike the wording of this title. It’s not about being “acceptable” - it’s about it being _necessary_ to afford. Sure, maybe they could go hungry for a few weeks… but this is such a predatory practice that preys on the psychology of student loans. “I’m already paying 60k for tuition… what’s another $800 for 4 books.”
- pessimizer 3y agoAny price is too much. 99% of the time 99% of people in university are not learning anything cutting edge, they're learning old things to prepare them to learn new things. There are plenty of works out of copyright (or that never were in copyright) that can be used themselves, or that could be stitched together to create complete courses. This seems like a basic thing that governments should be doing, but governments never do anything that would "crowd out" rent-seekers, because they're the servants of rent-seekers. Maybe, if you're a multi-billionaire, use one of those billions to put together enough unencumbered material to fill a wide-ranging university program? Or if you're a university, while you're committing to open-access, make a commitment to your students that all of the materials that they'll need will be available freely, on the net, if at all possible? So many billions sloshing around, so many people claiming the problem is so complicated, when it looks very simple. It's as manufactured a problem as the idea that taxes are so complicated that the IRS can't figure them out. edit: and succinctly, > I think that high textbook prices is one of the many little signals we sent young people, for the last 3-5 decades, that we are not interested in creating a better world for them. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36186362 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36186362
- pessimizer 3y agoIn college, I used https://used.addall.com https://used.addall.com and one semester got all my books down to $35 with older editions. This only worked because people in class would share photocopies of the problem sets from the new editions. A couple of cool professors would also give exercise numbers for the last few editions; they had previously taught the class with those editions, anyway.
- acalzycalzy 3y agoIt’s not piracy when you’re pirating from a pirate
- i_am_a_peasant 3y agoSome books I pay for, some books I pirate, some books I do both because sometimes it's handy to have a pdf. But I mainly pay for books because it tends to be cheaper than printing them myself. If I were born as a westerner with my mom and dad being there always to catch me if I fall I would always pay for knowledge, sure. But I pretty much feel entitled to free knowledge. I will happily pirate a 200 eur math textbook, 200 eur for me is a lot more than for your average westerner.
- blindriver 3y agoProfessors and textbook companies are ripping students off. They are immorally trying to suck each student dry with exorbitant prices. I think pirated textbooks is 100% fair play and I support it 100%. Back in the 90s, copy shops across from the university would have entire books photocopied, and we could get them for $20 instead of $150. Some of the international students would go back home to Hong Kong or India for the summer and take orders on next year's books, because they were much cheaper in Asia. This is a racket that has been going on for decades but only got exponentially worse these days, and I completely support starving these robber barons of any revenue.
- turzmo 3y agoI’ve had professors share PDFs of copyrighted textbooks with the class. I doubt this was legally valid in any way. I personally love to buy textbooks because I think a physical book is easier to retain. Printing and binding a PDF at Fedex is usually a similar cost, and I’d rather have the nice physical copy decorate my bookshelf, like a hard-won trophy. I would make the argument that textbooks should cost more than novels because I can read a novel at a page per minute or two, but a textbook is probably more like a page per 30-60 (on average). Then again, many Dover books cost around the same price as novels. That being said, you might need to consult 3 or 4 different textbooks for a course, and on a student’s budget, this is absurd. Anybody that doesn’t have parents in the upper middle class and beyond will suffer. Science is an engine of social mobility for the intellectually gifted and nobody should feel bad for pirating textbooks. I think, like pirating journal articles, the only people that disagree with you are publishing companies.
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- wly_cdgr 3y agoIt's hardly news that most people find it easy to justify all kinds of lying, cheating, and stealing to themselves. To be charitable, young people are usually too oblivious/ignorant to fully appreciate why what they are doing is wrong, and there is also a ton of peer pressure to steal and cheat.
- miked85 3y agoI had many courses where I was told to buy a high priced textbook, coincidentally authored by the professor, which was never even referenced or used.
- teeray 3y agoOne friend I knew in college did the math and realized he could buy a really nice SLR and tripod for the cost of his textbooks one semester. He bought the camera, tripod, and books. Then he spent an evening each semester photographing all the pages of all the books, then returned all of the books.
- sizzle 3y agoI used to buy international paperback editions cheaply on these online mom and pop businesses. Saved like 50-75% on most titles. Hope students are still able to do this?
- LatteLazy 3y agoForgive my ignorance: what do student do with all these books? I did my U/G & Masters in Physics in Exeter UK. We used only 1 actual textbook (University Physics by Young and Freedman, about 45USD new). I bought 1 more by choice (Mathematical Methods in the Physical Sciences by Mary Boas) because I needed some help there and the lecturer was weak. But all the actual information I needed was covered in lectures, tutorials etc. Assignments were class specific and produced by lecturers. How does the US system actually use all these books?
- thiht 3y agoI did my Master’s degree in France and I’ve never has a single textbook to buy. All of our courses were made by the professors. They obviously didn’t rewrite them every year because… why? It worked fine. We had suggestions of text books if we wanted to go further, but they were all available for free at the university library
- ralferoo 3y agoWhen I was a student, there were several alternatives to just photocopying the entire textbook (back then you couldn't download scanned versions). The university had a library with usually at least 5-10 copies of all the textbooks required by the courses, and 1-2 copies of books that were tangentially related to the courses. For the books expected to be in-demand because they were used by courses, usually the bulk of them weren't available to borrow, so they were in the library at all times. You could use it during the day, and take it to a study area to read and summarise the parts that mattered to you (the best way to learn), or photocopy parts if you were short for time. There was also a second hand bookshop, where you could buy books for about 25% of the original price and usually sell them back to the bookshop for about 20% of the price at the end of the year, so they just got restocked most years and sold to the next batch of students needing it. This system only broke down when the course changed substantially, but in practice that was usually only about 1 of the 10+ modules each year. In my 3 year course, I probably read about 100 relevant books cover to cover, bought maybe 3 full price because I knew I'd want to keep them for longer than the course, and kept 2 of the second hand books rather than selling them back. Back then, I also had friends studying law, and they had to pay a fee at the start of each year, but would receive a pack each term that was several inches thick of photocopied case material. Presumably that was because they weren't predominantly reading to learn and internalise the material, but they needed to constantly quote specific sections at multiple points during their assignments, and so pretty much everybody needed the same material at the same time. But in that case, the university had permission to duplicate the necessary material.
- cainxinth 3y agoDigital homework systems, licenses, and school and professor mandates asides, I wonder how much of the actual content in textbooks is freely available on Wikipedia right now.
- SirMaster 3y agoI always bought used books from previous students from the semester before me, and then sold them after I was done. The cost in the end was pretty miniscule as the loss in value of a book across 1 semester was pretty tiny.