Bump this.

EDIT - don't bump this. Why would you need an account to download pirated shit? LOL absolutely pathetic.

Textbook prices are outrageous, I am not paying for a £60 textbook that I will only use for the question banks

> £60

Boy, wouldn't that be nice. A standard calculus book costs $200 in America. Or, £178 (RIP pounds)

A chemistry textbook of mine was 600 USD- brand new because the version published that year was required.

That really stung.

Why doesn't students pull their funds for 1 book and then scan it and use that electronic copy? (and may be return/resell the physical book)?

That's not a bad plan from a cost perspective, though scanning a 200+ page textbook is reasonably complex, and very time consuming.

it's doable cuz most unis have nice scanning equipment u can use for free in the library. i have literally made over $1000 in a semester scanning a textbook nobody had PDFed and reselling it electronically. it wasn't even offered in digital format by the publisher.

I am in the stage below higher education (equivalent to SAT's), meaning most pupils don't have jobs or have only been in work for a few months (A National insurance number is given at 16 and is needed to enter work), we have 3 / 4 subjects on average and 2 books per subject which is about £420 in total, however the UK is pretty facilitating to low income households and provides them with grants to afford the costs, we do have a school library meaning we can take out books, but we have to return them within a short window of time and we cannot write on them which makes them redundant for some subjects.

Am a pretentious whiner?, Yes. Will I keep on pirating textbooks? Yes

RIP Liz Truss & the £

Am I the only one who believes the high textbook pricing are reasonable given the small consumer base?

I don't know, because Openstax charges $0 for an arguably smaller audience than that of higher priced options, so you can't get much lower than that.

How much does it cost to make a textbook and have a few editors? There are on average about 20 million college students in the US and for core books and common fields there are tens or hundreds of thousands of students taking those courses every semester. 50,000 students can easily cover the authoring and editing of a textbook and still reap a massive profit with a small fee of $20 per book.

'textbook' covers a lot of ground--it could mean something widely used in a lot of schools, or something hyper-specialized. It could be a book that needed a lot of editorial and production work, or none at all.

Yes.

reasonable ends when books that don't need to change have yearly editions... IE: math books. Math hasn't changed in centuries - core pieces of it. Yet, for some reason, you need 2022 Math Unchained with an Access Code to attend a class and the only changes are... perfunctory changes to the 2022 version? Good thing the costs are attached to your tuition so no only do you pay hundreds for the materials but you get to pay interest on the college loans for decades to come!

No thanks.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/education/battle-over-c...

using the word "consumer base" to describe a population of people doing what today is apparently the bare minimum to have consistently good material conditions in this society seems insane to me

I can't believe that societies allow education to be so profit-driven and motivated. It's so blatantly classist.

No, their content is shit and everything I've touched has 90's era VHS to digital transcriptions or half-assed attempts at interactive stuff which isn't integrated into the core. They're also limited to textbook format even when you have the ebook/online version, and the latter comes with absolutely atrocious UIs.

I can get college lectures at various levels for free, I can get a variety of interactive programs for free (or make them myself). Not to mention for a lot of the classes I've had, the textbook was not necessary at all - but I was dumb enough to buy a couple before I got wise.

They have a market cornered and it's bullshit and their service is repugnant, they need the air taken out of them.

idk but i don't. cause the expensive textbooks are not the $40 ones my upper level classes have. they're the $200 intro class ones where 1000s of students take the course from a single school and there's some shitty online access code bs paired with it.

also, it is def not "reasonable" to repeatedly re-release editions just to make old ones useless.

i usually enjoy reading the $40 upper level ones a lot more btw.

^ this is not the correct link

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