Students Find $100 Textbooks Cost $50, Purchased Overseas

New York Times ^ | October 21, 2003 | TAMAR LEWIN

[meyer]

Printed textbooks are a crock anyway. Bothe CD roms and the internet have made them completely obsolete.

Perhaps you enjoy reading off of a CRT or LCD screen, but I prefer the portable, markable book.

It would make far more sense for schools to pay a flat fee to the publishers for access to online textbooks, passing this fee on to students like any other fee.

It would be even more sensable if they were to stop rewriting textbooks unless the subject matter actually changed. There are far too many new editions out there that stifle the used-book market and keep prices artificially high.

$900 a year for textbooks? Any poor student could get an internet capable computer, used, for $200. And most colleges offer cheap or free internet access.

I agree that $900 per year is way more than what one should pay for textbooks, but I'm not in support of the computer as the solution. Competition among booksellers helps. Competition among learning institutions would be even better, if the liberals didn't have control of the major accrediting agencies.

[js1138]

All of you folks who want to write in your books sound pretty unimaginative to me. Online pages can be printed, not to mention excerpted to make a study guide. As for copyright, there would be no problem if the schools collected a per student fee. The publishers would be guaranted a fee for each student -- no resales of books. In return, science books could be kept up-to-date.

[Right Wing Professor]

It doesn't help the book printers image too well, when it becomes known that they pay college professors a "fee" to review their books. The fees range upward of $2500 per book.

News to me. Last one I reviewed earned me $200.

[r9etb]

All of you folks who want to write in your books sound pretty unimaginative to me.

Actually, I teach a class -- I find that it helps me to prepare lectures.

[js1138]

Ah, the teacher's edition. I have no problem with people buying books if they want them and can afford them. But it depends on how well suited the printed page is to the subject matter. Literature doesn't change, and history texts don't need to change often. But anything in the realm of science changes frequently, and even those parts that don't change could benefit from interactivity. Consider how much you learn on FR compared to how much you learn from a single newspaper. Science and math could have self-help forums.