Re:Supreme Court sides with student in case over textbooks
by chaz on Tuesday March 19, 2013 @02:23PM
(#5402642)
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.
Re:Supreme Court sides with student in case over textbooks
by quasse on Tuesday March 19, 2013 @03:14PM
(#5402940)
You would be surprised how low some professors will stoop. My sophomore engineering graphics class required payment of $35 in royalties and $5 in copy fees (going by the standard rate of .10 a page) just to get a printed copy of the PDF course packet (required to pass the course). It wasn't bound or anything, we literally had to go to the privately owned copy center and fork over $40 and then wait while they printed it off and then handed us a stack of paper.
I know that there were ulterior motives on the professor's part because I specifically asked to just print it out myself and was told that the TAs had been specifically banned from allowing students access to the PDF version for printing.
This was a 300 person lecture taught twice per year.
300$352 is $21,000. Suddenly that looks pretty appealing to the professor who thinks he could use a new bass boat this year.
Re:Supreme Court sides with student in case over textbooks
by lotso on Tuesday March 19, 2013 @03:51PM
(#5403165)
Was any of the content copyrighted and therefore the cost was to pay for licensing that content? That was a common cause for the somewhat high prices for our course readers in college.
Re:Supreme Court sides with student in case over textbooks
by vlahmot on Tuesday March 19, 2013 @02:38PM
(#5402743)
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.
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.