Posted on 08/25/2012 3:40:38 AM PDT by Cincinatus' Wife
Campus bookstores hate the idea, and even some college students are skeptical of the new effort by a former California lawmaker to help them save money on textbooks for hundreds of classes on nearly every campus from Alabama to the Yukon Territory.
It's a free price-check that lets students compare textbook prices and rentals, and buy from the source they like best.
The new online tool comes from former state Sen. Dean Florez, president of the 20 Million Minds Foundation in Sacramento, which lobbies for low-cost textbooks and is behind legislation, SB1052, to create a low-cost digital textbook library in California.
The idea seems a winner, with textbook prices rising 8 percent on average in just the past year - faster than the cost of food, clothing or even housing, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
But Richard Hershman of the National Association of College Stores says that Florez's attempt to get students to buy textbooks from alternative sources is unfair to nonprofit campus bookstores that "will run the risk of insolvency."
Not all students are wild about the price-check tool either because the site does not yet include Amazon, and it doesn't always compare the same editions.
Florez says his foundation is working on both issues.
"We expect to continually improve the site as we move forward by adding additional vendors, plus a new feature that takes the real-time price at any third-party site and features it as best price at that particular time and place," Florez said.
(Excerpt) Read more at sfgate.com ...
So, just cough it up. Academia and marxist publishing monopolies thank you for your continued support.
Correct. When you can find the same book for much less, word gets out. At Iowa State we had a public non profit and a private store. The private store was usually cheaper, while the university store had more inventory.
Correct. When you can find the same book for much less, word gets out. At Iowa State we had a public non profit and a private store. The private store was usually cheaper, while the university store had more inventory.
“That’s what happened to the free government laptops in the schools.”
Exactly! If you watch that “Pawn Stars” show on cable TV ( Filmed in Detroit) you will see them pawning laptops on most every show. Since they pass them out to the ‘po’ kids in school, there is little doubt where they come from.
some subjects have no excuse for changing the book every semester. Calculus? How often is there a new research breakthrough in calculus?
If a stick and some flat ground was good enough for Pythagoras, it’s good enough for me.
All kidding aside - college textbooks are way overpriced.
Back in undergrad, we had to buy the “latest edition” of the math texts. Why? The math hadn’t changed from the last edition, but they reordered the practice problems. So when the prof assigned homework, you’d be doing the wrong ones.
They are going digital, and the prices are not dropping too much. But, some of them have caught onto the digital wave and are even offering rentals. I have either had digital or digital rentals for the last year. This session I did find a used book for $5 (wrong edition, but I compared it to the current edition, not much difference).
Auburn University Bookstore already does this, including Amazon.
Simply go to
http://auburn.verbacompare.com/
I just looked up the first course and section [ACCT 2110]. The bookstore is currently sold out, but students can RENT it OR order it from Alibris, AbeBooks, Amzon, etc new or used. Prices range from $57 to $197.
Very convenient!
We are still debating on an ebook reader. We are recreational readers and books have become quite expensive UNLESS you wait for the $8 mass market paperback, combine them in Amazon’s 4-for-3 promotion w/free shipping and any Amazon or Discover card points.
However, I have recently seen new releases, especially of fiction books of over 500 pages by well-established authors, sometimes listed as _more_ for the Kindle version than for the dead tree version.
Text books have been a major scam for the last 40 years and the schools have been in on it but the government will not investigate because . . . . the schools are the government.
A system that is a scam deserves to be foiled. I would not be at all surprised if some enterprising youngster would not form a pool, buy the $200 textbook, disassemble it, scan it and share it with members of the syndicate for use on their Laptop or whatever. Would this consumption and copying not be for “personal” use and not for resale for profit?
Back in the day it was not at all uncommon for us to buy one textbook and share it and copy the problems for distribution. That was a long time ago when copying was less convenient than now. Of course the group of us also had an office on campus where we based our efforts. It was a “found” space way up in an attic and furnished with stored desks and chairs. A wonderful cooperative arrangement done under the radar screen. There were six of us, we worked in the labs, and it was great to be undergraduates with the equivalent of grad student privileges. Our profs who also used the labs turned a blind eye to our activities and seemed to enjoy the whole proposition.
Textbooks have always been a profit center for academicians and academia. Doesn’t it seem a little unethical to charge usurious prices to a captive audience?
Why should common knowledge be a profit center based monopoly?
Open source is the way to go for these subjects.
Textbooks are horrendously over priced and the sale of the books is the biggest racket in the print industry.
When I was in college I remember scraping together whatever money I could for a semester’s worth of books that usually ran around $300 to $500 THEN. One semester I remember a tab of $650. The state college bookstore also kindly included two or three credit card applications in the bag after purchase.
They used to buy our used books back after the semester...for $5 per book...and then resell them to others for more than ten times that amount. If I had the internet back then I would have scoured the country for discount, used, old editions or even some black market copies.
College bookstores are state-sanctioned ripoffs. More often than not one could have managed through the semester without more than a few of the books, which the professors wanted us to buy and then referenced for maybe one week of work.
Thank the Greenies & the spotted owl for the price of paper causing constant price increases.
That, along with new information on any particular topic.
I think that soft-covered ‘Supplements’ to any textbook would be far cheaper than totally reprinting the books.
Thousands of books are thrown into the landfills each year by major cities school districts.
Similar things have been going on for some years. There are websites that have full free copies of texts to download. Just like the original version of Napster and many others, the publishers try to shut them down as soon as they find them.
There are also sites that will give or sell you solutions to all the problems in math and science texts for high school and college.
There are sites that will sell you a term paper and even a Masters or PhD thesis.
You can get anything you want at Alice's Restaurant. I mean on the internet.
College store manager here- will not go a rant right now, except to once again note how stupid lawmakers are.
The Higher Education Opportunity Act has required all Universities to post online the textbooks being used for classes the past three years. If you did not see yours,it’s probably because the lazy professor never bothered sending his book order in.
The past two or so years, there have multiple sites that you can go to that have accessed booklists from stores online sites without permission and posted comparative prices for each class at multiple sites. Many stores now actually post the comparative prices right on their own website-we hate losing the sale, but if the student clicks in from our place and purchases, we get the affiliate income. Plus we now have some amazing purchasing tools that let us purchase en masse from marketplace sellers with one click, lowering our cost of goods and allowing us to pass savings to the students for the books we can acquire in that manner.
As for digital, it is coming, but slowly. Students are pretty savvy,but until the faculty making the decisions are totally comfy with digital - a lot of the lead faculty still are not at ease with email-it won’t be a deluge.
In short,the stuff that lawmaker is talking about has been around at least a couple of years. Typical lawmaker.
Yeah, someone got rich there until the kids figured they would just leave out the middleman and sell direct to other kids.
Same here. Saw that happen many a semester. I remember one class I took that required a new and very expensive book (first printing). We used the first two chapters of the book and no more.....
Printed books are much easier to use - you can make notes in them, you can buy older editions, you can sell them when you're done, you can read them in sunlight sitting under a tree and printed books don't spy on you and watch which pages your reading and tell your professor how much time you spent with their book.
The most evil thing is the phenomenon of online homework. Under the guise of automated teaching, students are charged to do their homework. The online homework access for a 6 week class I recently took was $168. Every move is then monitored and it's non-transferrable.
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