9 ms·

The publishers will just make sure to produce a different textbook between different regions now. Just re-order the chapters a little and re-order some question

• greenyoda 14y ago
  The worst offenders are the professors who write their own textbooks (even though there are dozens of better ones already available) and then use them in their courses, making money off each student. Maybe there should be conflict of interest rules in universities. The heroes in this game are the instructors who are creating open-source textbooks.
  • kyrra 14y ago
    I had a professor that created his own textbook that he taught out of. His lectures were him writing the textbook on the whiteboard. This was a good 1.5 hour nap every tuesday/thursday.
    • fabriceleal 14y ago
      I also had a couple of professors that did the exact same think for a course. Most of the professors gave away the slides of the course, and even more additional material; these ones gave nothing but a bunch of literally useless tables and charts, completely worthless for the exams. Needless to say, this textbook was the only and obligatory literature for the course.
  • slaxman 14y ago
    I don't think it is wrong for a professor to recommend his book for his course. But it is definitely wrong for him to force his students to use them. We had a lot of profs in college who had written books and recommended them. But if you attended the classes you really didn't require the textbooks in the first place.
    • fnordfnordfnord 14y ago
      1. If I go to the trouble of writing a textbook, I'd do it because I felt there was something lacking in the other available texts/materials. 2. There is really no way to force a student to do anything. Disclosure: I list some printed texts and reference books as required on my syllabi. I do this because I give open-book, open-note exams; but I do not allow the use of electronic devices (except pocket calculators).
      • slaxman 14y ago
        Very good point. In fact, I have noticed the exam same issue while teaching. We need to refer multiple books. There is no book which covers the entire course in an understandable manner. One has to then resort to writing his own notes for the class.
  • mbreese 14y ago
    I had a prof who wrote his own textbook and it was one of the best I ever had. It was sold at a little more than cost, so he made like $1 from each of us. It all depends on the prof and the content.
    • freehunter 14y ago
      My biology prof did this, with the exception that she had written a workbook and our homework was filled out on the pages. This meant we were paying for paper to turn our homework in on and the book was unable to be sold back.
      • joezydeco 14y ago
        I think this is how more textbook publishers are going to go. My wife bought a "textbook" for a language class and it was, and I kid you not, 300 loose pages with binder holes punched in them. See, it's a textbook AND a workbook! And sure, some of the pages were workbook pages. But there's no way any bookstore would buy that back as soon as the shrinkwrap was broken.
      • HarryHirsch 14y ago
        Departments do do that - usually because they are short of funds and the money raised is used to fund consumables for lab classes. The university cannot raise a surcharge for certain classes, but they can sell equipment (read: course workbook) for that class. It's iffy, but still on this side of fine, no one makes a profit of it. There is no excuse, though, for having to sign up for an account with a commercial publisher for exercises that are a part of your grade in that class. Normally you would pay a bunch of TAs to administer and grade the tests, but the university is too short of funds for that. So they outsource the grading to a commercial entity.
  • zacksjoden 14y ago
    In maths at my local community college the teacher made lesson plans for the 3 latest editions of the book, allowing students to be able follow along with whatever one they had/could afford.
    • fnordfnordfnord 14y ago
      I do that too. Unfortunately, the college bookstore (B&N) buys up old editions and has them shredded.
  • sib 14y ago
    I had a professor who was a co-author on the textbook that we used in his class. It was the "standard" work in the field, so it would have been ridiculous to use a different one. Nonetheless, he acknowledged the potential conflict, gave us an accounting of his earnings per copy (well under a dollar per), and bought food for the class out of his own pocket. Good solution, I thought.
    • ScottWhigham 14y ago
      I'm upvoting your comment for your professor. Please serve as proxy and go deliver the upvote to him. He sounds like "good people".
    • abraxasz 14y ago
      Had a somewhat similar story. Took a class whose instructor had written the reference book in the field. We used his textbook, but instead of having us buy it, he gave out free photocopies of the preprint for the yet-to-be released newest edition.
    • koenigdavidmj 14y ago
      Tadayoshi Kohno at UW?
  • claudius 14y ago
    Isn’t it quite common nowadays for lecturers to just type up their lecture notes and make them available online (for free, obviously)? At least that’s what happened at the last two universities I attended, with other lecturers in the same department possibly reusing said notes. A few of such notes even made it to arXiv. Of course, they will still suggest looking at some textbooks, but only on the rare occasion that they don’t want to include a proof or more information in the notes themselves - and then these books are naturally available in the library’s reference holdings.
  • nutmeg 14y ago
    My university had a rule that textbooks written by the instructor had to be provided at cost. The instructor had hard copies available from the local print shop. In another case, our professor contacted the author of the book and got cheap locally printed and bound copies. Something like $15 vs. $180.
  • SeanLuke 14y ago
    This is far too unkind. Professors rarely make more than a pittance on their textbooks. They nearly always write textbooks because they need a textbook in a certain area and there isn't an adequate one. It is an extremely demanding task with little payoff. The ethical error the professor has made is not in making money off the student (he's not) but in choosing a publisher which charges ridiculous prices without thinking about how this impacts on his own students.
  • neilc 14y ago
    The worst offenders are the professors who write their own textbooks (even though there are dozens of better ones already available) and then use them in their courses, making money off each student. I think you are seriously overestimating the financial gains such a professor would make. I've taken several classes with profs who teach from their own textbook; the profit per book sold that a prof receives is usually minimal (either because the book is sold for near cost or because the publisher takes most of the profit). In fact, most such textbooks (essentially just rigorous lecture notes) are downloadable for free anyway. If you want to make extra money as a professor, writing a textbook and then forcing it on a single class of students is about the least effective money-making scheme I can think of.
    • nitrogen 14y ago
      I had an intro EE class where the professor required students to buy practically unreadable handwritten notes from the university copy center. The price breakdown on the copy center receipt: $1.50 for the copies, $8.50 for royalties to the professor. Later on I took MITx's prototype 802.11x online course, where I learned far more and managed an A. In that case the professor actually cowrote the textbook, but there was a free online copy for the online class, and the textbook was actually good. Edit: in another case, another course at the same university used a custom printed textbook sold exclusively by the university for well over $100, that was just a few chapters from one $15 book and the complete contents of another $20 book bound together.
      • chaz 14y ago
        100 students x $8.50 is only $850/semester. Even if the class was 500 students, that's still not an overwhelming amount of money for writing a book. If you're teaching classes that large, you're probably making more money on the lecture circuit and become advisors/consultants at companies.
        • vlahmot 14y ago
          So the students should pay that cost? That is absurd. The school should either pay the teacher more or lose them. The financial burden of keeping the professor there should not be placed on the students outside of their tuition.
  • megaman821 14y ago
    I have had several professors who taught course requiring their own textbooks. In every case though, the textbook was made available at printing cost or given away for free at a cost to the professor, since they also felt it was a conflict of interest to profit off their class requirements. I would definitely drop a class where a professor started a semester by doing something so ethically gray.
  • potatolicious 14y ago
    I had a prof that did this. Except he sold his book through the school printhouse for $25, when the competing alternatives where all $200+. It was hand-bound by some poor soul in the printing office and was clearly churned out with a laser printer, but it got the job done and saved everyone a bundle. If the prof made some money off of this, I'm fine with that.
  • khuey 14y ago
    At the university where I studied, the one course I took where the professor literally wrote the book had the book on sale at cost at the university bookstore.
  • kd0amg 14y ago
    Maybe there should be conflict of interest rules in universities. Where I studied (undergrad, at least), there were conflict of interest rules -- professors were not allowed to collect royalties on books they use in their classes.
  • driverdan 14y ago
    I had a professor who wrote one of the books used in his course. It was sold at cost and he complained about the price (something like $15), wishing he could decrease it.
• caseysoftware 14y ago
  Don't even bother reordering the chapters.. just change a few of the homework/exercises listed in the book. A cursory check will confirm to people that they have the same version and then it bites them later on. At my undergrad, there were some profs concerned about files of old tests.. the obvious solution is to vary the test. The more subtle solution is to use the same test but switch which numbers are where. It still trips people's "I've seen this before!" feeling but if they try to memorize it, they're sunk.
  • usea 14y ago
    If the publisher did this, not only would they lose the sale at the higher price but they'd also cause confusion and mistrust among the students and teacher. There's zero upside.
    • caseysoftware 14y ago
      Make the variance by country and 99.9% of people will never know.
      • usea 14y ago
        I people don't know, they'll buy the cheaper book. You want them to buy the more expensive version. The publisher gets nothing by "fooling" people. They want people to know, so they buy the more expensive book.
• impendia 14y ago
  I am a lecturer in a math department. I also despise the textbook industry. Would you please recommend what I might do, subject to severe limitations of (1) time and (2) political clout within my department?
  • EvilLook 14y ago
    First, unless you are in a very specialized field, there are surely several books that cover the topic you are lecturing. In the interest of politics have an official book, but in the interest of time offer alternatives. Your students, or the good ones, at least, will be able to use whatever book they can fit in their budget, including previous editions. Especially if you're teaching calculus. Second, if you are grading homework then produce your own problem sets. You already have to do this for exams, which means you know what you expect your students to learn, so you may as well produce the problem sets as well. At the very least indicate what types of problems a student should practice on so they can follow along in the book they do have. Third, thank you for lecturing. I know that lecturers hate the raw deal with textbooks as well.
    • iy56 14y ago
      Having to support many different textbooks across different students is a recipe for chaos. Especially when the topic is something like calculus which can have such radically different treatments.
  • aspensmonster 14y ago
    Tell your students not to purchase whatever books the department head has been bribed into using in the coming semester. Instead, spend a few hours curating online resources that may serve as notes for students; better yet, just photocopy the handwritten notes that every mathematics teacher I've ever had seems to have for each lecture they give :-) Otherwise, Paul's Online Math Notes tackles Calculus and ODEs, and IIRC gives an intro to PDEs as well. The students collectively save thousands of dollars in exchange for a few hours of your time spent photocopying notes or otherwise googling for a resource that you approve of.
• darkarmani 14y ago
  > The publishers will just make sure to produce a different textbook between different regions now. Just re-order the chapters a little and re-order some questions/assignments. So even if someone ships in the foreign book it will be as useless as a previous edition. That's fine if they do that. That's what they should have be doing all along instead of trying to destroy the first sale doctrine using foreign distribution.
  • stephengillie 14y ago
    I've had professors who told us "If you have the regular textbook, read section 1 from chapter 4. If you have the international version, read section 1 from chapter 7", as they're the same chapter.
• shardling 14y ago
  >either through apathy or greed the lecturers have shirked their responsibility to their students. This "greed" idea is just not a thing. It's a meme that's repeated in places like HN, but not something that really exists out there in the real world. There'll be isolated cases, but it's not even a little bit relevant to a discussion of why textbook industry is able to extort students. In so far as profs. are responsible for "collaborating" with the industry, it's because of inertia, and a poor understanding of the alternatives. And probably also laziness. :)
• baddox 14y ago
  That's already what a lot of "new versions" of textbooks are. When I was in college studying Computer Science, students would often resell their textbooks to students from the incoming class, and whenever the department officially switched to the new version of the text, the teachers would quickly find the very small differences (slightly different page breaks, reordered problem sets, etc.) and include both versions in their assignments.
• wmil 14y ago
  There's a much simpler way. Use the health code. Include a useless, but harmless, insecticide in the paper of international editions to "fight bookworms". Then lobby to get insecticide books banned domestically due to "potential health risks".