7 ms·

Honestly I don't know how i feel about this. As a recent grad i know full well how high prices are for text books, i would do everything possible to prevent hav

Honestly I don't know how i feel about this. As a recent grad i know full well how high prices are for text books, i would do everything possible to prevent having to buy them. I personally thing the requirement to always have a new textbook(that years version) is more ridiculous then the prices they charge. I don't know where that requirement stems from, but in my opinion it is the real problem. But with that said I don't see this ruling lowering prices, if anything it will increase the prices in the other regions where the prices were previously lower. There is no kind of magic bullet with these kinds of things, companies are not going to just lower profit margins, they will always try to make it up somewhere.

pkfrank 14y ago
Potentially relevant bit from the Higher Opoprtunity Education Act's textbook provision: http://content.efollett.com/HEOA/library/HEOATextbookProvision.pdf http://content.efollett.com/HEOA/library/HEOATextbookProvisi... Provision C.1.c: Publishers are required to provide [to the professor or other book chooser]... >A description of the substantial content revisions made between the current edition of the college textbook or supplemental material and the previous edition, if any. I'd like to see this information made public in a reliable manner. It's well and good that the professors should be enlightened about the relevant content changes, but the spirit of the HOEA is to make textbooks more affordable and purchasing more transparent. If that's really the end-goal, then forcing publishers to make that information public and consumer-facing should be the true requirement. Until students have that, they're beholden to the professors (who may have ulterior motives) when making the purchasing decision.
milesskorpen 14y ago
The new text book thing isn't a requirement — but (a) professors get copies of the new books for free and (b) the publishers make just enough changes between editions to make it hard to use old versions (different question, vocab words, etc.), so that teachers prefer all students to have the same version ... and this is only an option for the new books. Text books are somewhat irrelevant however — the Court upholding the first sale doctrine is fantastic, and hopefully will open the doors for lots more exporting / importing.
HarryHirsch 14y ago
Publishers are merely exploiting the highly school-like nature of university education in the US. When I was in university, over in Europe, a long time ago, on the first day of lectures the professors would wheel in a cart of textbooks, saying these are suitable texts, go and pick the one that suits you best. But in the US, students demand that their education is like high school, with a set text and all, and if the exercises in "Physics for Biologists", 9th edition are on a different page from "Physics for Biologists", 8th edition they complain. This is the root cause of the continuous revisions to undergraduate texts.
- tjr 14y ago
  Taking university multi-variable calculus (in the US), I grew disappointed with the explanations in the prescribed textbook. They happened to be renovating the math department building that year, and some staff were dumping out old "evaluation copies" of various textbooks. I sorted through a pile of them until I found one that I liked better, and used it for the remainder of the class, doing similar problem sets to the ones assigned.
  - NegativeK 14y ago
    Were the problem sets graded? I'm assuming that, if they were, you did both. If you didn't, what was the grader's response?
    - tjr 14y ago
      No, the problem sets weren't graded. I suppose had they been, I would have used one book to read from and the other to do problems out of!
- thedufer 14y ago
  > students demand What? I've never heard this particular demand (and I just graduated from a US college). Sure, students might complain about having the wrong edition - but only when lecturers assign work by page number, so that it becomes impossible to do it with the wrong edition. Do you have any evidence that this is the students' fault?
r00fus 14y ago
Or, publishers will take pains to make the Thai version incompatible with the American one (a much better implementation of region-coding). If this case went the other way, it would have had all sorts of negative impacts to used item markets. I'm relieved the business-friendly supremes didn't cough up another loss for the consumer.
- akiselev 14y ago
  It seems to me that this SCOTUS has actually had a pretty good track record on civil liberties and these underdog kind of cases (Citizens United notwithstanding)
  - saraid216 14y ago
    IANAL, and I haven't studied the issue, but from what I do understand, Citizens United made a lot of sense from a strict legal perspective. That is, corporations have always been persons under the law, and they were just affirming that. The issue, really, is more that they also affirmed the usage of this detail as a loophole because they were faced with either (1) negating a crapton of case law that depended on corporate personhood (any court case with a corporation as plaintiff or defendant, for instance) or (2) legislating from the bench. So they went with option 3. The solution as I see it would have been to say that monetary expenditure doesn't constitute speech and is thus subject to regulation. If people want to propagate political messages free of charge in order to get around the regulation, I think I'd be okay with that. That feels like a legislator's turf rather than a judiciary's turf, but I'm not entirely sure; the dissent's opinion didn't seem to suggest this solution, so I might be completely off-base or it really is a legislator's turf thing.
    - akiselev 14y ago
      I only mentioned the Citizens United case because it's popularly reviled. I see no problem with the ruling as far as precedent goes (although I have qualms about the general rights without responsibilities that corps get) and I don't think it has really changed that much. Except... the commercials seem to get more and more interesting. The SCOTUS certainly has an idealogical split (as in conservative vs liberal) but the categories are far more nuanced than just Republican or Democrat and I think they've been doing a decent job.
readme 14y ago
The ruling is important because it's about "first sale" rights. It's about whether I can tell you what to do with my product, after it's left my hands and entered yours. Economic effects and hypotheticals aside. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First-sale_doctrine http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First-sale_doctrine

pkfrank 14y ago

Potentially relevant bit from the Higher Opoprtunity Education Act's textbook provision: http://content.efollett.com/HEOA/library/HEOATextbookProvision.pdf http://content.efollett.com/HEOA/library/HEOATextbookProvisi... Provision C.1.c: Publishers are required to provide [to the professor or other book chooser]... >A description of the substantial content revisions made between the current edition of the college textbook or supplemental material and the previous edition, if any. I'd like to see this information made public in a reliable manner. It's well and good that the professors should be enlightened about the relevant content changes, but the spirit of the HOEA is to make textbooks more affordable and purchasing more transparent. If that's really the end-goal, then forcing publishers to make that information public and consumer-facing should be the true requirement. Until students have that, they're beholden to the professors (who may have ulterior motives) when making the purchasing decision.

milesskorpen 14y ago

The new text book thing isn't a requirement — but (a) professors get copies of the new books for free and (b) the publishers make just enough changes between editions to make it hard to use old versions (different question, vocab words, etc.), so that teachers prefer all students to have the same version ... and this is only an option for the new books. Text books are somewhat irrelevant however — the Court upholding the first sale doctrine is fantastic, and hopefully will open the doors for lots more exporting / importing.

HarryHirsch 14y ago

Publishers are merely exploiting the highly school-like nature of university education in the US. When I was in university, over in Europe, a long time ago, on the first day of lectures the professors would wheel in a cart of textbooks, saying these are suitable texts, go and pick the one that suits you best. But in the US, students demand that their education is like high school, with a set text and all, and if the exercises in "Physics for Biologists", 9th edition are on a different page from "Physics for Biologists", 8th edition they complain. This is the root cause of the continuous revisions to undergraduate texts.

tjr 14y ago
Taking university multi-variable calculus (in the US), I grew disappointed with the explanations in the prescribed textbook. They happened to be renovating the math department building that year, and some staff were dumping out old "evaluation copies" of various textbooks. I sorted through a pile of them until I found one that I liked better, and used it for the remainder of the class, doing similar problem sets to the ones assigned.
- NegativeK 14y ago
  Were the problem sets graded? I'm assuming that, if they were, you did both. If you didn't, what was the grader's response?
  - tjr 14y ago
    No, the problem sets weren't graded. I suppose had they been, I would have used one book to read from and the other to do problems out of!
thedufer 14y ago
> students demand What? I've never heard this particular demand (and I just graduated from a US college). Sure, students might complain about having the wrong edition - but only when lecturers assign work by page number, so that it becomes impossible to do it with the wrong edition. Do you have any evidence that this is the students' fault?

r00fus 14y ago

Or, publishers will take pains to make the Thai version incompatible with the American one (a much better implementation of region-coding). If this case went the other way, it would have had all sorts of negative impacts to used item markets. I'm relieved the business-friendly supremes didn't cough up another loss for the consumer.

akiselev 14y ago
It seems to me that this SCOTUS has actually had a pretty good track record on civil liberties and these underdog kind of cases (Citizens United notwithstanding)
- saraid216 14y ago
  IANAL, and I haven't studied the issue, but from what I do understand, Citizens United made a lot of sense from a strict legal perspective. That is, corporations have always been persons under the law, and they were just affirming that. The issue, really, is more that they also affirmed the usage of this detail as a loophole because they were faced with either (1) negating a crapton of case law that depended on corporate personhood (any court case with a corporation as plaintiff or defendant, for instance) or (2) legislating from the bench. So they went with option 3. The solution as I see it would have been to say that monetary expenditure doesn't constitute speech and is thus subject to regulation. If people want to propagate political messages free of charge in order to get around the regulation, I think I'd be okay with that. That feels like a legislator's turf rather than a judiciary's turf, but I'm not entirely sure; the dissent's opinion didn't seem to suggest this solution, so I might be completely off-base or it really is a legislator's turf thing.
  - akiselev 14y ago
    I only mentioned the Citizens United case because it's popularly reviled. I see no problem with the ruling as far as precedent goes (although I have qualms about the general rights without responsibilities that corps get) and I don't think it has really changed that much. Except... the commercials seem to get more and more interesting. The SCOTUS certainly has an idealogical split (as in conservative vs liberal) but the categories are far more nuanced than just Republican or Democrat and I think they've been doing a decent job.

readme 14y ago

The ruling is important because it's about "first sale" rights. It's about whether I can tell you what to do with my product, after it's left my hands and entered yours. Economic effects and hypotheticals aside. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First-sale_doctrine http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First-sale_doctrine