Colleges Experimenting With Bulk-Buying E-Textbooks... And Forcing Students To Pay Up
from the bye-bye-used-book-market dept
We've pointed out in the past how the college textbook market is ripe for disruption. You have a market where books are ridiculously overpriced by publishers, knowing that students are often compelled to purchase the product. As book prices have continued to rise, apparently some universities are experimenting with bulk buying licenses to ebook textbooks and simply charging the students a fee. The schools all say they're doing this to reduce textbook fees -- and I'm sure they mean well. But the very fact that many publishers seem to be jumping on this as well suggests that they know damn well, in the end, this will work out well for them. First, it forces all the students to "buy" the books at full price. It wipes out the secondary market (which many students make use of in selling their books back), and even the case of the student who just checks the book out of the library. Also, we've seen in places like Canada how a simple mandatory student fee can start out low, and then suddenly jump massively. It's good that some universities want to lower book fees, and making use of ebooks is a possible solution, but mandatory fees seem ripe for abuse.Thank you for reading this Techdirt post. With so many things competing for everyone’s attention these days, we really appreciate you giving us your time. We work hard every day to put quality content out there for our community.
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Filed Under: ebooks, education, textbooks, universities
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If the universities don't pass the bill on to the people who are actually choosing the textbooks, the same market failure will continue and the publishers will continue to be able to exploit it.
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And no, I'm not pirating anything. They're just genuinely useless for passing the actual course (and I'll admit it, I'm far too lazy to read them through for the sake of knowledge). I bought several text books in my first few years, and never touched them (and resold half of them).
I'm saving a good $400 every 4 months.
Fortunately, I'm also graduating before my University gets any "bright" ideas.
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Text Books
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They've also got quite a bit of leverage over the publishers; having a particular book dropped from a university's syllabus because the publishers want too much money, when most people would regard the university as the ones doing the publisher (or the author) a favour by using it in the first place, would not make for good press.
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Social science courses are practically impossible to pass without buying or at least borrowing/pirating/googling the texts. You can't cite sources in papers if you haven't read them, much less have quotes and page numbers readily available.
Whereas if you take a lot of computer classes, those textbooks can often be entirely useless compared to your ability to google the topic. There's infinitely more instructional content about TCP/IP and programming languages online than there can be in any one textbook.
The only other issue of concern is if the instructor uses course material provided by the publisher of the text, rather than coming up with their own material. So you may take tests based on the text, with questions phrased specifically the way they are phrased in the text.
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Re: Text Books
It's more upfront and at least you wouldn't have to worry about ordering the text online weeks before the term or scouring the campus bookstore shelves for the possibility of a used copy of the book that everyone else happened to have overlooked when grabbing the books.
At least now with the Higher Education Opportunity Act, colleges are required to disclose which books will be required for each course at the time the student registers rather than waiting until the first day when the syllabus is distributed in class.
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Textbook DRM
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Ugh, terrible
One thing I've seen here, once, is when the university gave a grant to two or three of the profs in the math dept. so that they could take time time off research and write a few textbooks for the required math courses; those are still sold in the uni bookstore at price, (A little under $10 each; about 100 pages, softcover. Lots of reading suggestions because it doesn't contain stuff that wouldn't be taught in the course)
Why can't we do that more often? Obviously that's not viable for a lot of courses, (math is fortunate in that it never changes at the undergraduate level), but if you could do it for most of them, that would still reduce the cost of textbooks by a factor of 8 . . .
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Re: Text Books
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Re: Textbook DRM
On a somewhat related note, I wonder if the universities couldn't negotiate for a license to print X number of copies a year and hand them out to students in dead-tree format? It wouldn't be enormously expensive -they could be knocked out on an office laser printer and bound with those plastic spiral things whose proper name escapes me- and have most of the advantages of e-textbooks whilst still making it easy to hightlight and underline bits and scribble notes in the margin.
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Re: Textbook DRM
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The idea that future students would have no choice in the matter - indeed, that it would automatically be taken out of their expenses - sounds like a nightmare to me.
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Maybe...
The price in the article was about $35/class. That saves hundreds of dollars per semester, even compared to used books. It's also chump change compared to the cost of tuition.
I don't even see why you'd need DRM on the book. If a student is paying for an e-book anyway, why pirate it? And usually nobody buys these books unless they're taking the class - so even if it is pirated, the publishers won't "lose sales."
On the other hand, university bookstores will be royally screwed.
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Re: Re: Text Books
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Re: Maybe...
It is their turn.
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Why buy e-book from publishers?
In the age of e-books, it seems that having the teaching professors preparing teaching materials should be quite affordable. I mean, they have to prepare notes for their classes anyway, right?
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The last time a class I was in had an ebook option the ebook was unavailable 1 month after the course ended and could only be viewed from the publisher's website after logging in and using their incredibly crappy ereader.
Of course whether you wanted the ebook or not you had to pay $50 for the online homework so you were screwed either way.
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Books
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So how much do you charge for an infinite good?
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Course readers
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textbook expense and bookstores
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"I'm gonna teach you a lesson you can't refuse."
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3rd party billing
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Re: textbook expense and bookstores
Isn't FFA a loan to the student? If so, then the FFA isn't subsidizing anything - the student is paying for it albeit at a later date when they are saddled with an exceptionally high loan that is not forgiven in bankruptcy.
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ebooks
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