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It's not without hypocrisy, that a company in the educational book publishing industry can complain of unfair business practices, while knowing that the industr

It's not without hypocrisy, that a company in the educational book publishing industry can complain of unfair business practices, while knowing that the industry is responsible for $200 textbooks. Textbooks that are not only $200, but where publishers have given kickbacks to professors to ensure they require a new version every 2 - 4 years, so generations to come will continue to pay $200. While this particular publisher, EDC, may only be publishing children's education books and not textbooks, it has to understand the absurdity of such a one-sided argument. I for one applaud Amazon, celebrate Amazon, for making it so I could afford to work myself through college buying cheap used textbooks rather than being forcefully impoverished by the publishing industry's duplicitous actions.

IBM 13y ago
Great straw man.
nashequilibrium 13y ago
In my first yr, the accounting 1 professor released a new book each year, so the book i got from a friend the yr before was useless and I remember being pissed about that. He would change it up, add new tutorials and change up the workbook that goes along with it. Nobody ever questioned it but we all thought that was not right.
dredmorbius 13y ago
Without absolving the textbook industry (prices are nuts, have been for ages, dig up Supreme Court Justice Stephens' essay on the topic from the 1960s/1970s), this is in some ways a problem of the market-capitalist system. It's similar to the issues of equitable pay, automation, labor displacement, and business models for the arts, music, newspapers, and publishing in general. Oh, and this little thing called software. In order to produce material, a certain amount of resources are necessary. The mechanism we've adopted for allocating those resources is the market. For much of present production, the fixed costs of production are high -- writing a book (particularly a textbook) is a large initial investment. Same goes for software. The marginal costs of production are low -- hell, you can download a 400 page text off of Project Gutenberg or stream a movie in a few seconds with a decent broadband connection. Amortize the costs of your laptop (a few hundred dollars for a basic model, a grand or two for high end), less for tablets or eBook readers), and a broadband subscription, and it's still cheap. Textbooks generally do have to be updated every so often, though annual revisions are pretty ridiculous, and much of the industry is a fat scam, especially where the professor teaches from his own text. Rental schemes, "authorization codes" (required to access other materials), and the like factor into this as well -- they're akin to various tack-on fees for air travel. And there's a whole burgeoning movement for producing DIY book scanners and the like (pretty fascinating, do a quick DDG search or hit up Fixyt.com for videos). One thing I've come to realize about many commercial opportunities is that they require a control and toll-taking point. Revision updates, exercise questions, registrations, rentals, and the like, all create an arbitrary tollgate. Great for the publisher, for the student, not so much. And the model requires that for a new or continued revenue stream, new books have to be published. I'm beginning to strongly suspect this is a market failure -- of externalities (the educational value of those books benefits more than just the reader) and perverse incentives. The question is: what's the better way? Online we've been experimenting with vastly democratized publishing, and the result is Upworthy, Buzzfeed, HuffPo, and numerous other viral sites, which with time are finding their way into my hosts file with '0.0.0.0' entries, and search-engine blocklists. It leads to what Clay Shirky recognizes as a problem, not of data overload, but of filter failure. There's also the problem within the publishing world, including academic publishing, of so much material being produced that not only is it not possible to keep up with it, even within a discipline or sub-specialty, but that good content is getting buried. That's the real tragedy of broken filters -- not the crap spewing everywhere, but the gold nuggets that don't float up.
- baddox 13y ago
  > this is in some ways a problem of the market-capitalist system. That depends on what you mean by "market-capitalist" system. In this particular case, the entire college textbook industry is made possible in part due to the government's enforcement of copyright laws, which isn't something I would consider to be part of a market-capitalist system.
  - deleted 13y ago
    [deleted]
- pseut 13y ago
  >Without absolving the textbook industry (prices are nuts, have been for ages, dig up Supreme Court Justice Stephens' essay on the topic from the 1960s/1970s), this is in some ways a problem of the market-capitalist system. The textbook industry is different, even from other publishing, since the book is chosen by the teacher, who gets the book for free. Whether a professor teaches from his or her text is largely irrelevant.
  - texthompson 13y ago
    >> Textbooks generally do have to be updated every so often, though annual revisions are pretty ridiculous, and much of the industry is a fat scam, especially where the professor teaches from his own text. > Whether a professor teaches from his or her text is largely irrelevant. If a college professor writes and teaches from a book, he's requiring people to buy it. That often gives him royalties, which is a perverse incentive. I wouldn't call this a fat scam, but it's probably relevant to the idea that the textbook industry has some issues. It might be worth distinguishing between college and public schools, where the burden of cost is on either the student or the public.
  - dredmorbius 13y ago
    Late followup (actually a repost -- first was lost in the Great HN Crash of Jan 2014), Stephen Breyer's article is "The Uneasy Case for Copyright". Apparently one of the most influential papers on the subject in the past 40 years. I can't find the original online, but Wikipedia discusses it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Uneasy_Case_for_Copyright https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Uneasy_Case_for_Copyright

IBM 13y ago

Great straw man.

nashequilibrium 13y ago

In my first yr, the accounting 1 professor released a new book each year, so the book i got from a friend the yr before was useless and I remember being pissed about that. He would change it up, add new tutorials and change up the workbook that goes along with it. Nobody ever questioned it but we all thought that was not right.

dredmorbius 13y ago

Without absolving the textbook industry (prices are nuts, have been for ages, dig up Supreme Court Justice Stephens' essay on the topic from the 1960s/1970s), this is in some ways a problem of the market-capitalist system. It's similar to the issues of equitable pay, automation, labor displacement, and business models for the arts, music, newspapers, and publishing in general. Oh, and this little thing called software. In order to produce material, a certain amount of resources are necessary. The mechanism we've adopted for allocating those resources is the market. For much of present production, the fixed costs of production are high -- writing a book (particularly a textbook) is a large initial investment. Same goes for software. The marginal costs of production are low -- hell, you can download a 400 page text off of Project Gutenberg or stream a movie in a few seconds with a decent broadband connection. Amortize the costs of your laptop (a few hundred dollars for a basic model, a grand or two for high end), less for tablets or eBook readers), and a broadband subscription, and it's still cheap. Textbooks generally do have to be updated every so often, though annual revisions are pretty ridiculous, and much of the industry is a fat scam, especially where the professor teaches from his own text. Rental schemes, "authorization codes" (required to access other materials), and the like factor into this as well -- they're akin to various tack-on fees for air travel. And there's a whole burgeoning movement for producing DIY book scanners and the like (pretty fascinating, do a quick DDG search or hit up Fixyt.com for videos). One thing I've come to realize about many commercial opportunities is that they require a control and toll-taking point. Revision updates, exercise questions, registrations, rentals, and the like, all create an arbitrary tollgate. Great for the publisher, for the student, not so much. And the model requires that for a new or continued revenue stream, new books have to be published. I'm beginning to strongly suspect this is a market failure -- of externalities (the educational value of those books benefits more than just the reader) and perverse incentives. The question is: what's the better way? Online we've been experimenting with vastly democratized publishing, and the result is Upworthy, Buzzfeed, HuffPo, and numerous other viral sites, which with time are finding their way into my hosts file with '0.0.0.0' entries, and search-engine blocklists. It leads to what Clay Shirky recognizes as a problem, not of data overload, but of filter failure. There's also the problem within the publishing world, including academic publishing, of so much material being produced that not only is it not possible to keep up with it, even within a discipline or sub-specialty, but that good content is getting buried. That's the real tragedy of broken filters -- not the crap spewing everywhere, but the gold nuggets that don't float up.

baddox 13y ago
> this is in some ways a problem of the market-capitalist system. That depends on what you mean by "market-capitalist" system. In this particular case, the entire college textbook industry is made possible in part due to the government's enforcement of copyright laws, which isn't something I would consider to be part of a market-capitalist system.
- deleted 13y ago
  [deleted]
pseut 13y ago
>Without absolving the textbook industry (prices are nuts, have been for ages, dig up Supreme Court Justice Stephens' essay on the topic from the 1960s/1970s), this is in some ways a problem of the market-capitalist system. The textbook industry is different, even from other publishing, since the book is chosen by the teacher, who gets the book for free. Whether a professor teaches from his or her text is largely irrelevant.
- texthompson 13y ago
  >> Textbooks generally do have to be updated every so often, though annual revisions are pretty ridiculous, and much of the industry is a fat scam, especially where the professor teaches from his own text. > Whether a professor teaches from his or her text is largely irrelevant. If a college professor writes and teaches from a book, he's requiring people to buy it. That often gives him royalties, which is a perverse incentive. I wouldn't call this a fat scam, but it's probably relevant to the idea that the textbook industry has some issues. It might be worth distinguishing between college and public schools, where the burden of cost is on either the student or the public.
- dredmorbius 13y ago
  Late followup (actually a repost -- first was lost in the Great HN Crash of Jan 2014), Stephen Breyer's article is "The Uneasy Case for Copyright". Apparently one of the most influential papers on the subject in the past 40 years. I can't find the original online, but Wikipedia discusses it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Uneasy_Case_for_Copyright https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Uneasy_Case_for_Copyright