Walled gardens encroaching on education.
Can you mention what system it is? There's a few thousand entrepreneurs on this site that might be interested in disrupting broken business models like that one.
There exist free alternatives at least for math but it's kind of a MS-office vs libreoffice situation.
I see it's available for $US6.61 used on Amazon now...
edit: had the price about $50 too high.
And by "they" you meant the faculty (professors etc) or college administration or some other office office? Just curious about it. I am from India and there are no fixed text books here (at least the colleges I know about - central Govt. funded). There are syllabi and you are free to study the course with anything you want - books, or no books. My college library solved textbook problem for almost 40% students and rest were solved by hands-me-downs from seniors, 2nd hand book stores (some of them have very capable xerox machines too), and then there's "online".
On a side note, I saw a video of some professor ticked off that students got a hold of a test battery from a publisher. This "get all the questions from the publisher" makes me think these folks don't want to put any effort into the class. What is the difference between a prestigious university and a community college given that level of effort?
The tuition bill.
False.
> The whole industry is a racket, designed to exploit kids in a situtation where they have no choice.
True. But your previous sentence does not follow from this. The bad actions of others do not justify your own bad actions, no matter how tempting it becomes to think otherwise.
Dunno. 15 years ago all the Ivy League libraries campaigned against Elsevier's pricing and achieved precisely nothing. We had to wait for Scihub.
Textbook publishers aren't really hurt by this as much as the legitimate textbook purchasers (your fellow students).
The solution isn't to pirate/steal the content. It's to vote with your feet before you go to a post-secondary that chooses expensive copyrighted books when there are free or very affordable alternatives.
Besides, voting with your dollars is a fallacy.
very true.
>Besides, voting with your dollars is a fallacy.
in an oligopoly such as education where the purchase and sale of goods/services is subsidized then the power of voting with your dollars is diminished. the core concept is not a fallacy, and is actually a good metaphor for market action.
the problem is that 18 y/o young adults are able to borrow far more money than they ought to be able to, creating a market of naive buyers with extraordinary buying power. its no surprise that some of them buy things like comparative literature or gender studies degrees.
>voting with your dollars is a fallacy What do you mean by that? Are you suggesting that companies will survive without any customers buying their product?
The only situation in which voting with your wallet doesn't work is when you have no choice. In this situation, the students do have the choice to pirate the books, buy used books, or bite the bullet and buy the book.
Definitly not true. Many classes require entering a code just to submit homework
Howso?
This was all the rage when I was in school, especially since our bookstore sold at retail price (or about 80% for a used copy) and _generously offered_ to buy the books back at the end of the semester for 3-10% of list price. College bookstores are a racket.
There are already business models that have started to chip away at this type of racket. Chegg and Amazon rentals are decent examples.
Sadly I'm unimpressed with the progress it has made. I'm convinced replacing expensive formally published textbooks with cheaper or freeware digital books is superior. The problem is with department deans and professors that hawk their own books in their courses.
After studying for a semester in Canada with textbooks, I did not see any added benefit to using textbooks.
In my experience I did get a couple of professors that weren't pleased when I didn't get the book(s).
One frustrating thing was professors assigning their own books. There were a couple of cases where much of the class was directly related to it, but otherwise it was for vanity/$$$.
1. Wait until classes start to buy textbooks. You want to have a chance to talk to your actual professor and hear what they say about the textbook and/or look at the syllabus to determine what, if any, readings are actually required from the textbook. In many cases, textbooks are chosen at a departmental level, so some professors may use them sparingly or not at all.
2. If you determine that the textbook is probably needed for you to finish the course, and there is an older edition available less than 5 years old, then buy the older edition. It will be available online on eBay, Amazon, etc. for a much cheaper price than the most current edition. In most cases, the reading content will be very similar, if not identical. Problems sets might change, but if you are assigned them, you can ask another student to take a look at their textbook, or borrow one from the school library. I started doing this my last couple of years at college, and never had any issues.
3. If you do buy a textbook, read it in its entirety. Remember that you are taking classes to learn, not to blindly follow a course syllabus. So read your textbook - all of it - even the parts that aren't assigned.