NRR: Can We All Agree College Textbooks are a Racket?

lolocaust wrote:

Compared to almost every other book in the world College Textbooks are the culmination of the most work and research, so they should be some of the most expensive books.

Nonsense. Undergrad textbooks in particular don't represent any more in the way of research or cutting edge knowledge than a work of popular nonfiction.

What is true is that sales volumes for college textbooks are quite low, so any fixed costs of writing and publishing are spread over a much smaller number of units. I can accept that, but I have a really hard time with the practice of constantly coming up with new editions that do nothing more than change a few problems and a paragraph here and there. All this does is kill the possibility of using used books. Nothing in an undergraduate calculus or physics text, for example, represents any recent advancement in knowledge.

Now, one dirty little secret is that many college textbooks are also published in low-cost "international editions" which have exactly the same content. They can't be sold in the US, but many of my grad school classmates would buy them at home in India and bring them back for school.

Boy, is there ever a potential for a great use of Kindle here. If texts were available on Kindle at a reasonable price, we could eliminate the fixed costs of printing, transport, storage and inventory costs that all conspire to inflate the cost of printed copies.

You would have to buy the large Kindle to accomodate illustrations,probably, but how handy to have all of your college texts on a single device.

captain no beard wrote:

Just throwing this out there... but you can always just download your textbooks for free. Lots of sites that you can do this from. My pref is gigapedia.org

^^^

This.

Thanks for the tips about free downloads, guys. I think a few of my books can be substituted that way. Unfortunately, I have two classes (calc and stats) that require the newest edition of the book including a "bonus cd" that will probably run me about 300 bucks total. If we use that CD for homework most nights, then fine, that's unfortunate but at least I'm getting use out of it. If, like several classes I've had, the CD gets used once and the book is never referenced except for assigning a few homework problems, I'm going to feel salted.

As for the guy who said I was a "whiny twat" I guess it's more accurate to say I'm whining on behalf of the taxpayers, since I'm paying for these books with a government subsidized loan. I don't mind working 20 hours a week on top of class and running to pay my rent and buy food, because I'm damn lucky to be in that position. I'm just frustrated with what I see as a ridiculous markup on textbooks that I'll use for three months and sell back to the bookstore for pennies on the dollar.

Forgot to mention (and sorry for the double post) but I also want to thank the college professor who said I was whiny (seriously) because you seem like you treat your students fairly, and provide a high-quality textbook to your students without mandating they pay 200 bucks for the new edition when the 30 dollar previous addition contains the same information.

BUY OFF AMAZON. and for general courses such as psych, get older edition books.

I purchased 3 books for $45. I'm actually going to make money on them. If I got them at the campus bookstore it would have cost me $350.

Here's what I used to do when I was in college:

I took a class, say Biology 101. Then, next semester, I looked up in the catalog where that exact same class was meeting. I went there on the first day of class, about 20 minutes before class was scheduled to start.

Then I announced to the students sitting there that I had a perfect copy of the book, unmarked, but used. The new price was $90, the used price was $70. I would tell them my copy was better than the used copies (because I never highlighted), and was $60. Very often, all the used copies were gone by the first day of class, and if so, I would announce that too.

I made most of my money back on textbooks I didn't want to keep. It worked for me.

The publishers (much like the music industry a decade ago) are desperately trying to hold onto their old business model because they are unwilling to embrace the change that is occurring in education. And even though they claim their new digital ebook editions are less expensive, go look at the prices, all of them are still above $70 and you only get them for 180 days.

I run a small, math textbook startup called the Worldwide Center of Mathematics. We are trying to innovate the textbook itself and the business model. We sell our PDF textbooks that are fully interactive for $10 or less to students. I encourage you to check out our website and especially are "Textbooks as a Service" business model, where students could get an interactive PDF textbook for $5 and printed textbook for only $30.

http://www.centerofmath.com

http://www.centerofmath.com/textbook.html

I worked for a wholesaler (Arkansas Books) in the '80s. It was probably even worse then.

Can you think of one big business in America that is not a racket?[quote]broke collegian wrote:

Center of Math wrote:

I run a small, math textbook startup called the Worldwide Center of Mathematics.

cool, good luck. I have a phd in electrical engineering, so feel I should have a much better grasp of some of the tougher math concepts...but we all specialize so much that anything not used regularly gets lost. if i get the time I'm going to go through some of your material here.

regarding the text book pricing: like other posters, i realized I could buy international editions online real cheap.