DailyDirt: Those Who Can, Write Textbooks…
from the urls-we-dig-up dept
Textbooks are surprisingly expensive items. The classic example is an introductory math textbook: where the math hasn’t changed significantly for over a hundred years, but the price of the newest edition seems to suggest that there should be a lot of new material added to the book. Sure, there’s a used book market — and even rental books nowadays — but the trend of rising textbook prices has some students and faculty questioning some of the publishing industry’s practices.
- The Supreme Court upheld that anyone, particularly Supap Kirtsaeng, can buy textbooks in Asia and re-sell them for a nice profit in the US — thanks to the first sale doctrine. Kirtsaeng won his case, but he didn’t get his copyright-holding opponents to pay for his legal bills. That could change, though, if the Supreme Court decides in his favor again. [url]
- There are some obvious problems when professors try to use cheaper textbooks as teaching materials — including pissing off the authors who might be in positions of authority at the school. Should academic freedom allow a professor to chose a different textbook from his/her colleagues? Will the racket of monotonically increasing textbook prices continue? [url]
- The ‘Integral House’ in Canada is up for sale — once owned by math professor James Stewart. The calculus textbooks authored by Stewart have raked in many, many millions from college students over the years, but if you have a few million yourself to spare, you can buy this math-inspired house (which looks like it comes with a library of math books). [url]
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Filed Under: academic freedom, education, integral house, james stewart, oer, open educational resources, open textbook, supap kirtsaeng, textbooks
Comments on “DailyDirt: Those Who Can, Write Textbooks…”
"Out of print" textbooks
When the author of a textbook sign away his rights to get published, the publisher often deliberately chooses to withdraw the book within approximately 2 years, and bar the author from any alternative publishing of the work. This also makes fewer books “recoup”, and trap the author to the publisher.
Math textbook have exercises that artificially change from year to year. This forces students to buy the latest issued book to be able to follow explanations of how to solve these problems.
Re: "Out of print" textbooks
A public pool of exercises, open sourced, should solve this issue. You can use the same books and get the exercises elsewhere. We will get to end the monopoly for sure. But for now you are right, students are getting shafted.
Re: "Out of print" textbooks
Just thinking out loud, but I wonder how publishers could prevent authors from re-publishing their work, as you suggest, using freshened up exercises? If this practice works for producers to generate new sales, surely it would work for authors too…
Re: Re: "Out of print" textbooks
Note that the way that publishers get new sales is by shuffling the contents, re-ordering chapters, examples and problems. This makes it very difficult for students to use older copies, as the page numbers etc. do not match those being used by the teacher.
The publishers do not need or want new content, and when they do, they just continue with their tricks to make for new sales.
Re: Re: Re: "Out of print" textbooks
What happened to the practice (I experienced in the 1970s) of having a main textbook in hardcover but the exercises were in a paperback volume that changed each year? That way the hardcover – at least for math books – could be used for a number of years but students would have to buy the paperback volume each year?
Re: Re: Re:2 "Out of print" textbooks
The publishers can make more money if students have to buy all new textbooks. It’s greed pure and simple.
The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation with Rice University and others created OpenStax Textbooks as an open source and cheap set of college level textbooks. Though adoption appears to be pretty slow.
https://openstaxcollege.org/
Should academic freedom allow a professor to chose a different textbook from his/her colleagues?
Absolutely. The learning institution itself should include many alternatives even if they are not from their own professors. It’s a matter of style. Some teachers are more comfortable with one method or another, there usually isn’t a ‘one fits all’ in these cases.
Is this why many universities force most profs into Adjunct positions – in order to financially arm twist them into requiring the latest expensive texts?
wow – i took several classes with James Stewart. He was an amazing teacher and his textbooks were beautiful in their simplicity. He would often draw parallels to music noting the matching of the integral sign with the ‘f’ sound hole in the violin and cello. Very sorry to hear he passed away last year.
One gets reprimanded, the other gets $$
I know that one about textbooks is somewhat old, but I’m still amazed by it. I mean, it’s hard to imagine more of a conflict of interest for the department chair to mandate his own book.
I know at my university they had signs saying to call if we spotted this kind of “fraud, waste, or abuse.”