Posted on 02/01/2005 12:02:04 PM PST by Ol' Sox
At least for college, you can't buy a used CD-ROM that has already been highlighted and underlined.
Unless you are a Prof that has authored one. Then you get to rewrite a paragraph once every year, and then issue a new "revision" forcing students to buy new instead of used.
What would be the benefit to the publisher to put the books on CD? I can not think of any...
Yeah CDs would not work, however E-books on a Palm or PDA device would. They already have security built into the Ebook program.
Computer monitors aren't as easy to read as books, eye fatigue could be a problem. Also notes are harder to take on a computer.
Nope. Haven't even read that many. But I did buy them in college. You tell me what ground breaking events in the field of calculus occurred that caused me to have to buy a new book half way through the undergrad calc series? The chapters were rearranged, the examples changed, and the homework problems changed, but please correct me if I'm wrong, but the underlying principles of calculus haven't changed much in the past hundred years or so. Yet every 2 years they issue a new edition of the basic Calculus text written by the same authors and published by the same publisher.
Let me guess, you have written a textbook. Have you been approached by the publisher to issue a revised edition yet? You will.
Too easy to duplicate. The cost of textbooks is obscene. I don't think a publisher is going to sacrifice that kind of profit to put it on a medium that can be reproduced for twenty-five cents on a home PC.
Good point. I always appreciated the college professors who tried to make it less costly for us on textbooks. Some even used their own funds to provide materials. Most of the material I use in teaching my class (first grade) is my own.
I do think it would be nice somehow to find a way so that textbooks weren't so heavy for those in middle and high schools.
What I'm talking about are freshman and sophmore level courses, entry level, where the content hasn't varied significantly in quite a few years. My daughter teaches math at the college where I teach. I decided to take a trigonometry course, just to shake off some rust. The cost of the text, which was about 300 or so pages, was $125. This was in 2003, and the text was a 2003 edition. I asked the textbook publisher how often this text was revised. He said every two to three years. I found a previous version of the text, and the graphics and assignments were changed slightly, but other than that, the only real change was to alter the text so that the page numbers didn't match. It was strictly a change made to prevent resale of used books. Entry level trigonometry simply doesn't change enough to require a new version of the text every two years.
The "scam" is implemented on several levels, and has several components. The first is that the companies which produce the texts know that in a two to three year period, text sales will go down because of the supply of used texts on the market. Therefore, they revise books that do not need revising, simply to keep sales up. There's nothing wrong with this, except that the student is caught in a monopoly situation. Specific texts are required for specific courses. Many of these courses are required for specific majors. Therefore, the student MUST buy this book, no matter how ridiculously it is priced. Second, the college either runs the bookstore or leases it to an entity that runs it for them. The markup on the book after it reaches the bookstore is generally exhorbitant because, once again, the college has a monopoly on resales. Very large colleges, like the University of Texas, where I went, sometimes have competing private bookstores, but smaller colleges generally have the field to themselves.
I've noticed that college professors (no offense) are frequently totally indifferent to the cost burden on the student. Many instructors I talk to have no idea how much the textbook they assign costs the student and do not consider text pricing at all when selecting assigned books. I KNOW that there are texts for basic Trig that cost less than $125. But, like medicine, the people making the decisions simply do not consider the price when selecting the text. Students frequently complain to me about classes where the instructor requires several textbooks, sometimes each one costing $100 or more, and make no assignments out of some of the texts.
Some instructors assign their own texts to students, although I know several colleges that prohibit this practice. I've heard rumors of textbook manufacturers kicking money back to deans to assign specific texts, but I've never seen this actually happen. According to what I've heard, department heads, who decide on texts for multiple sections are generally the targets, because most colleges don't allow individual instructors to select a text, but require all sections to use the same one. I don't think I've ever heard of individual instructors getting kickbacks, but book publishers are a lot like pharmecutical sales reps, and I will admit holding up some manufacturers for Powerpoint presentations, instructor texts, and test banks.
Scam was probably not a good word to use. Inefficient, overpriced, and done with total indifference to the needs of the students would be more accurate. It's not one big thing, it's a bunch of little things. As a professor, you may be able to shed more light on it, but that's how I see it.
With colleges having internet homework and assignments, text book assignments that are downloaded will come. The cost will be as high as authored books but the students will be saved a trip to the book store. In the uncontrolled market copyright and duplication issues will remain, but people are likely working on it.
I'm already working on turning my course into a hybrid, with the assignments available on the net, etc. It's a LOT of work.
I commend you for the effort, it will help a lot of students, whether they need it or not.
My son is in college and I have seen some courses that used the internet well, others who are still back in the dark ages.
The original CD question brings up something that our college has been struggling with. I've been pushing big time for us to get rid of dedicated computer labs and go to a wifi system with single high grade ethernet drops in each classroom and using something like the Apple "classroom on a cart", where a wireless system and twenty or so laptops can be rolled in and used during the class. Other colleges I've spoken with are looking at trying to develop some system where every student has a laptop. One of the big barriers for me, as my texts are available as CDs, is that we frequently work from the text in class, and probably less than 15% of my students have laptops. Most of the computer interfaces on books on CD also tend to be pretty clunky. However, I've probably got about 2/3rds of my reference material for my classes on some form of computer retrieval system now. It will come, but the biggest barrier now is that the instructors can't assign a CD unless everyone in the class has a laptop. Particularly in the high school and middle schools, this isn't practical for government schools. I know that quite a few of the higher end private schools have a laptop on the required supplies list, along with notebooks, pens, etc.
I have a better idea. Have kids do their school work at school, so they learn to use their time wisely, and don't grow up to be workaholics. Many years ago I had a friend who went off to a good British boarding school (her parents were British). They had to do all their studying in a study hall during a scheduled time called "preps". They were not permitted to take school books back to their dorms with them at the end of the day.
Somehow info presented on a screen just isn't as readable or coherent; it is usually poorly designed (ugly) and overly terse.
For starters.
--Boris
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