First It Was Song Downloads. Now It’s Organic Chemistry

[flashl]

College students may be the angriest group of captive customers to be found anywhere.

NY Times

By RANDALL STROSS
Published: July 27, 2008

AFTER scanning his textbooks and making them available to anyone to download free, a contributor at the file-sharing site PirateBay.org composed a colorful message for “all publishers” of college textbooks, warning them that “myself and all other students are tired of getting” ripped off. (The contributor’s message included many ripe expletives, but hey, this is a family newspaper.)

All forms of print publishing must contend with the digital transition, but college textbook publishing has a particularly nasty problem on its hands. College students may be the angriest group of captive customers to be found anywhere.

Consider the cost of a legitimate copy of one of the textbooks listed at the Pirate Bay, John E. McMurry’s “Organic Chemistry.” A new copy has a list price of $209.95; discounted, it’s about $150; used copies run $110 and up. To many students, those prices are outrageous, set by profit-engorged corporations (and assisted by callous professors, who choose which texts are required). Helping themselves to gratis pirated copies may seem natural, especially when hard drives are loaded with lots of other products picked up free.

But many people outside of the students’ enclosed world would call that plain theft.

[madrchsod]

1. the price of college books at the community college level

could run as high as 33-50% of the actual tuition.a 100 dollar book for a 150-200 3-4 hour class?

[Heddi]

12. I went to a CC for Nursing School

ONE book was $350.

And I swear upon all things holy that the book was changed EVERY. QUARTER. so you 1) couldn't sell it back and 2) couldn't buy a used one. It was a total rip off. And that was just ONE book. Every quarter required a minimum of 5 books. Granted, many of them carried from quarter to quarter, like maternity, or pediatrics, but you always had to buy SOME NEW BOOK that was somehow so much better than the one they used 12 weeks ago, and so much worse than the one they'd use 12 weeks from now. They're SO AWFUL and need to be changed that the teachers didn't even have time to change the powerpoint and lectures to reflect the new content and books.

The decision to continue to buy new textbooks each quarter was made by the head of the nursing department who should not have been allowed to have a license to drive, much less a license to practice (I worked along side her at the hospital once I got my RN), much much less license to run a nursing program. She was the EPITOME of "ditz" and had not one compunction regarding the cost to students for Nursing School.

Before nursing school, I went to Cooking School. An English textbook I had to buy then (1997) was in the range $150 used. One of the cookign technique/recipe books I Had to buy was $275. I was spending MORE on books each quarter/semester than I was spending on tuition.

[Book Lover]

13. I would love to know the title and publisher of that book

because it is not, in my experience, possible for a publisher to put out a new book every 12 weeks.

[Heddi]

15. It wasn't the same publisher

It wasn't like, 3rd Ed this quarter, 4th Ed next quarter---they were completely different books by completely different authors. THAT's how they screwed you. If it were a case of older ed vs. newer, you could at least get by (in most cases) with the older Ed if that was all you had.

No, they had us by the short hairs by having COMPLETELY different books one quarter to the next that were in no way comparable to the book used the previous quarter.

[Book Lover]

16. Oh, I see

Sorry - obviously I was confused.

[DarthDem]

2. Loooooooong Past Time

. . . that this student textbook farce stops. I graduated from college in the early 90s and grad school in the late 90s - - anyone else remember the thrill of selling your books back, even if they were in near-mint condition, and getting 30 cents on the dollar because "a new edition was coming out"? And then, of course, the bookstore turns around and marks up your book for about 50%, at a minimum, over what you paid. F-ing outrageous and I'm glad that someone has found a way to fight back.

[ladjf]

3. Yes, it's illegal to download copyrighted material.

And it should be illegal to force students to pay $209.00 of a textbook that they are required to buy. Please tell me what is so special about a certain textbook that would justify a selling price of over $200.00? Is it 1500 pages? Does it have costly graphics? Is the author exceptionally gifted, more than other authors?

The book could be published on DVD. If it is needed during lectures or labs, access to digital representations could be provided.

Face it. If the students are required to spend several thousand dollars per semester for books, they are being "screwed". Just because the purveyors of textbooks are within their legal rights, doesn't mean that their avarice is ethical. Who do they think they are, oil or pharmaceutical companies?

No, I'm not an angry student. I'm an angry teacher with 35 years of experience in education.

[bluerum]

5. Sadly, many text books are poorly edited and contain many typos.

[donco6]

11. Textbook corps have to change.

They can bring the cost down by simply providing only digitized copies to begin with. No more hardbound books at all. I doubt they'd hear a squeak.

[bluerum]

4. And requiring a $200 text book for a class is not theft? I tell you - when I

went to school the library carried a few copies of most textbooks. That was a cheap way out. Also, any bookstore in the town will have used copies of most books to resell to students. But this is exploitation plain and simple.

[jonmiller74]

6. I've always found it strange that Professors...

who are paid for they're expertise, require these expensive books to teach a course. Is there another relationship with the publishers other than getting a free copy?

[Igel]

8. It's not strange.

It makes sense. It's an efficient use of time.

Ol'ga Kagan put together Golosa, texts for a 1st/2nd year Russian sequence. I watched her and her TAs do it. It took years, starting as the occasional drill in class, then chapters and exercises that were tested on students and rewritten repeatedly for clarity and accuracy, some chucked and replaced. During the early stages, they were adjuncts to a main text. Finally all the bits and pieces were assembled, with a lot of work to bridge between the bits and pieces, to produce a text. TAs went through it and used it selectively, with a main text. It wasn't until the text was in pretty good shape--after another years' work--that it was the main text. Then the entire text was used, and re-arranged and rewritten as larger issues were worked out--part of chap. 3 might work better as a separate chapter later, for example. A final sabbatical gave her time to put the text in good shape for publication. That's a lot of work. And she knew her stuff, and was an excellent teacher. But textbooks have to be tried out, and using home-grown notes as the only text is a recipe for disaster the first few times. (Believe me, I had a class where that was precisely the case.)

I saw Vicky Fromkin complain about her linguistics text. She co-wrote it with Rodman, and it went through 3-4 editions over 20 years. As the field changed--new facts, old material fell into disfavor, new, trendier topics came along--it changed. But the 5th edition came out mid-term when I was her TA, and she was already under pressure to be working on the 6th edition. No longer driven by changes in the field, it was driven by the increased use of used textbooks. She resented it greatly.

My undergrad organic chem text ran to 1300 pages, with nifty drawing and sketches, and separate study guides and exercise/problem book. I can't imagine a new teacher making up something like that. Three guys with differing fields of expertise collaborated to produce and update it regularly, and it was edition 5 or 6. We could cover 20 pages per class, but only because we'd read it ahead of time and could refer to it. No way the instructor could have gone over all that the material without prior preparation, and I wouldn't want to have seen the first pass at the exercises and drawings.

Textbooks are good things. (Then again, I taught a Russ. lit class last summer with no textbooks: I lectured and provided commentary on authors and texts, and provided all the readings via scans on CD--public domain stuff, or scans made at the last minute as I worked out the details of the syllabus. I couldn't find a textbook that was suitable for a 7-week summer course, or a combination of textbooks that would work.)

[Realityhack]

9. Really?

You think the professor is their to read the book to you or something?

Textbooks provide one form of instruction while class *should* provide another. Without the textbook the professor would be forced to spend class time covering everything in the book. That would be a waist of perfectly good time.

[ladjf]

7. The college textbook scam is a legal "racket" and should be

dealt with. The problem is that college students don't have a great deal of political clout.

[Occam Bandage]

10. Things have a tendency to balance themselves out. Theft from theft,

light from light, True God from True God...

[litlady]

14. I tell my students to share, buy old editions or even risk not buying certain texts...

One of my assigned books was available as a hard copy or online for additional money with special features, however that online code expired after a year! Even worse, the textbook companies changed the edition on the teachers last year without even letting us know! We all had set lessons from the older edition but they refused to supply the bookstore with the old edition. I had to find out they had the new edition from one of my students the first week of class! This of course makes it so students cannot buy the old editions or use a friend's old copy etc.

The cost of textbooks is ridiculous. When I was in school, my textbooks ran me hundreds each semester, especially being an English major where most teachers assigned a dozen books per class or huge anthologies that ran $100 a piece. At the community college, my students paid more for the department-required books than they did for my class, and I, like most teachers, felt helpless. I have had many teachers compile course books of legal photocopies and use what is available so they don't have to assign such expensive books. I've even had some teachers try to put most of the work online if it is public doman. But in most science, math, business etc classes there isn't much of a choice.

If piracy becomes a problem, I doubt they will lower the prices to encourage students to buy those books. The companies will probably even raise prices because of supposed profit loss and make it even more difficult for teachers somehow. They will probably not let teachers copy chapters out of books anymore due to piracy concerns etc. Either way, I feel for the students and remember the frustration of spending hundreds of dollars on books I would use for one semester.