No more high cost textbooks!

Pearson is dropping prices.

https://www.vox.com/recode/2019/8/2/20750863/john-fallon-pearson-education-textbook-digital-aida-teachers-kara-swisher-recode-decode-podcast

Cengage is leading the pack with unlimited text for a flat fee. https://www.cengage.com/unlimited/
Great news for students. Let's make education affordable again.

 

Good ideas but should be more radical. All texts should be electronic, and should be not more than $10 per course to reward authors. Free is even better if the text is open source.

 

I would have to agree. In my humble opinion, text should come with the tuition/fees we pay as students.

 

I hate to be that guy, actually I don't so I'll be that guy. Nothing is free. If a school was going to do this, they'd just increase their cost by $500 to cover that. Youd have no idea and you'd be happy with free textbooks. It's actually not a bad strategy. It's like on Amazon when you want to buy something for $10 but don't want to pay the $2.99 shipping. Then you see the same thing for $12.99 with free shipping. Since the shipping is free you decide to get it.

 

This exactly what my statement is saying though. Tuition already increases every year, might as well just increase it to the point to minimize the amount of transactions we students do. Include the textbooks in the cost of attendance.

 

I don't have a huge problem with this. The fees already pay for some many things that students will never use. You have to pay the athletic fee even though you'll never use the gym or play intramural sports. I guess they could just include a textbook fee and give them to everyone. At least that's something that people should theoretically benefit from and use. However, I'm a big on getting costs down and only paying for what you need. My first semester freshman year I paid for every single textbook. Total ended up being a little over $500 if I remember correctly. I barely used them. I then spent 7 more semesters finishing up a bachelors degree without ever buying another textbook. I also finished two masters degrees with only buying one textbook (only bought it because it was the most interesting class and subject matter I knew I would study). Basically what I'm saying is that all the information you could ever possibly need is available for free online. In the 21st century we don't really need textbooks to study from. Everything that you can find in a textbook, you can find through a google search.

 

Of course if somebody wants to ignore intellectual property... there's a least one Chinese university library website out there that has pretty much the entire recent (last few years) e-book catalogs of many prominent academic publishers available for quick free download if you know where to go. The site's in Chinese, but the vast majority of the book titles are in English. Oxford UP, Routledge, Ashgate, Harvard UP, U. Chicago... many of them.

A more ethical thing: Many academic papers on any conceivable subject are available on the internet. Use Google Scholar to find lots of them. Or look at personal websites of scholars of interest to you. Many professors have lists of publications with links to downloadable copies of their published papers.

And there are things like this (these selections are heavily biased towards my own interests, but others can find their own own selections addressing their own interests by searching):

For almost any conceivable topic in the sciences:

https://www.frontiersin.org/research-topics

The University of Pittsburgh philosophy of science preprint server (it has conference proceedings and all kinds of stuff like that too). This site is really extraordinary.

http://philsci-archive.pitt.edu/

New Dictionary of the History of Ideas (all 3,132 pages of it)

https://archive.org/details/NewDictionaryOfTheHistoryOfIdeas

Kimball's Biology Pages

http://www.biology-pages.info/F/FallTerm.html

Astrobiology Magazine. (Many magazines and journals have their content online.)

https://www.astrobio.net/

For example -- Aestimatio - Critical Reviews in the History of Science

https://ircps.org/aestimatio

National Digital Science Library

https://nsdl.oercommons.org/

Openstax. From Rice University, these people have very good creative-commons introductory level textbooks in many subjects. Equivalent to those vastly expensive things that students are often told to buy and just as good.

https://openstax.org/

Thousands of philosophy papers here:

https://philpapers.org/categories.pl

The extraordinary Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy

https://plato.stanford.edu/contents.html

And the equally useful Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy

https://www.iep.utm.edu/

Digital Commons Network. Millions of items from almost 600 mostly academic libraries on almost any conceivable subject. This is the place to go if you want to find unpublished doctoral dissertations.

http://network.bepress.com/

As for me, after I completed by DL MA around 2000, I was very interested in doing a Phd. My motivation for participating on Degreeinfo was primarily to find a suitable program. (That's why I took such an interest in the California Approved schools, since they offered me more options.) But... over the years I've found so much free material that I could never read all of it in my lifetime. (And every year, there's lots more.)

All without the aggravation of pleasing professors or completing dissertations. So I'm quite happy assigning my own readings these days.

 

There are many cases though where new textbooks are entirely unnecessary. College Algebra, Calculus, Chemistry, Physics, and on an on. These subjects haven't changed in forever and it's hard to understand why there needs to be a new $150 textbook every year. In my view it's really just a scam and more schools are shifting away from this needless expense.

 

Older editions of college textbooks are often available for extremely very low prices at used book stores. Some of the San Francisco used bookstores had bins full of them out in front of the store, probably not caring very much if anyone just took them. (They were headed for a landfill otherwise.)

When I was taking calculus, they insisted that we all buy the newest edition of the text. It was almost word-for word identical with earlier editions, the only difference being new problem sets. (Our homework and part of the grade was the problem sets.) And the newest edition cost an absurdly astronomical amount.

So I would buy an older edition of the same text for a buck or two, then borrow a classmate's copy of the current edition and photocopied the problem sets. Worked great. I'm sure the professor knew what I was doing since the older edition had a different colored cover, but he didn't care.

 

Had some interesting conversations with a few publishers recently. We’re now exploring a heavy transition to open educational resources, wherever possible.

 

Just as an experiment, using Google search, Google Books, and playing with cache, I was able to make use of nearly the entirety of several books for free. In one class, I was able to find considerably more key terms through this method than I was able to do using the school's own internal book search engine. I imagine many other people have figured out how to do this. When that yielded few results, I used AbeBooks. In many cases I was able to get $150 books for $10 or less which of course isn't free but sure is cheap, and the grade quality of the books was remarkably good.

 

You're such a nerd

 

Just curious . . . who is "we?"

 

Hahaha, I know

 

Wait... you don't hear the voices? Er... I work at a community college. I've been working with my departments for almost a year now, to eliminate questionable textbooks and software licensing fees. It's been quite worthwhile, and already has brought significant savings that was directly passed on to the students.

 

Thank you, I'll reach out to him next week. My greatest challenge, is that I'm in the Engineering & Applied Technology realm, which has significantly reduced open educational resources. In many cases, I've simply switched to utilizing factory manuals, video demonstrations, etc. In other cases, we've spent hundreds of hours of essentially volunteer work, modifying OER materials to be suitable.

 

Here's a story about OpenStax

https://www.edsurge.com/news/2019-10-24-how-a-university-took-on-the-textbook-industry