Given that the cost of a chemistry or math text in the US has broken the $200 limit, and the same damn things cost half or less in Europe, this is not a good situation.
Never let it be said that someone, who is so minded, can't make a bad situation worse. News comes of one Joseph Henry Vogel at UPR Rio Piedras, has received a patent on the idea that students could be required to pay a large fee to participate in on line discussion forums if they did not buy the book, or take a substantial hit to their grades.
Motivation for a faculty member doing such a thing, well how about if the faculty member writes a book. Too obvious, Eli thought, so the Bunny went and RTFP. Blather, but then the rubber hits the road
One suspects that the teacher/professor will only accept the diminished academic freedom implied by requirements (1), (2), and (3), because he or she perceives that the system will enhance academic freedom in other key areas of concern, with the gains outweighing the losses. In particular, a percentage of the net royalty income such as, for example, 50% generated from textbooks sold by presses using the system, collected in the US and Canada may be dedicated to litigating tenure disputes from both within and outside the university walls. The job stability afforded by tenure is the wellspring of academic freedom.Eli rather suspects that Joe Henry anticipates a problem considering
Toward this end the royalty income may be distributed as follows (assuming that the total allocated income is 50% of the royalty income): 10% for actions challenging post tenure-reviews, 10% for actions challenging tenure decisions, 10% for unionization of non-tenurable professors, 10% for actions challenging grant decisions by private foundations (with these monies being allocated to an organization such as American Association of University Professors) and 10% for dissemination of news regarding academic freedom (with this money being allocated to an organization, such as The Chronicle of Higher Education or similar institutions dedicated to academic freedom and/or development of the faculty community).Everyone appears to have missed those little goodies.
Sadly, the publishers (and their reps) also do a darn good job of hiding prices from us academics. It's horrifying. This fall, I'm telling my students: spend $150 on a new book, or get the old version ($50) and spend a couple hours matching up the page numbers with a classmate. (Not to mention the on-campus bookstores who don't want to sell old versions, because they don't carry the same profit margin.)
ReplyDeleteCosts are further inflated by all the bundling that goes on. CDs that are never opened, websites never touched, and more--all for an additional $25-50. In my experience, these extra resources haven't been worth it, either.
This ceaseless, ever more invasive and comprehensive chiseling is endemic here in the US and a mandatory feature of a investment community that severely punishes any company unable to produce compound increases in gross sales and/or profit year on year, forever.
ReplyDeleteNewsflash: Magic doesn't work; curvy profit slopes have to come from somewhere. Ironically, among the "investment community" is your own retirement fund, happily gobbling up your municipal government, your fire and police protection, your child's educational funds, your own job, pretty much everything about civilization that you like.
Publishers are just doing what we tell them to do: snap their fingers and somehow make profit appear where none was previously possible. If we hurt ourselves enough by insisting on the impossible maybe we'll scale back our demands.
It doesn't help when there's another layer of less mindless, more focused and truly expert greed running the whole show.
Given the time lag between generating a textbook chapter, getting through the edit/review process, and physically printing the things, it seems that there would by many fields where the things would be pretty obsolete by the time they were put in use. So couldn't some group of professors start putting material online in a secure site, charge a nominal annual subscription, and cut the traditional publishers out altogether? The peer panel in charge of approving content could be large, so that no one person would have more than a chapter or two to keep up with, and updates could be loaded every term if you wanted. OTOH it has the disadvantge that you do updates without the benefit of hindsight, maybe there is something to be said for letting new papers with new findings "ripen" for a while before being allowed entry into the Sears & Roebuck catalog, um , I mean the textbook.
ReplyDeleteLooking back through your archive on this subject sheds some light on my own experience around twenty years ago, when I taught chemistry at a new university in the Middle East.
ReplyDeleteThe British consultants had recommended for the first year intake an A-level textbook which was reasonably focussed but turned out to be much too linguistically dense for students who had Arabic as their first language and were mostly learning English on the job.
So under my direction some of us teachers put together a set of reading materials specifically designed for the 2-year foundation course, written to match the low educational background of most of the students and the need for basic English.
Move forward four years and (as you get in these places) a substantial intake of new temporary staff, mostly from the US, including the new head of department. Out without discussion went all the carefully prepared materials, and in came a huge general chemistry textbook published in the US, intended to last the entire 5-year course, and which the students were expected to lug around all day along with all the stuff for their other courses.
I didn't stay around long enough to see the effect on the new student intake, but I understand it was not good.
The fellow who wrote the following has a way of being worrisomely prescient:
ReplyDeletehttp://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.html
Horatio recently looked at a college chem book that his niece was using and noticed that most of the (very basic) chemistry (including a section on the atmospheric greenhouse effect) has not changed since Horatio took chemistry a loooong time ago in a galaxy far far away.
ReplyDeleteIf Horatio recalls correctly, the book cost around $25 or so in 1977.
So, the cost has increased by a factor of nearly ...what, 8? (Horatio took math a long time ago too so you might want to check it)
granted, Horatio's book did not talk about Higgs (or even Elis) Bosons, but the impact of that on basic chemistry is probably minor anyway (not $175 worth of added value, at least)
With all the information available on the web, it's really questionable whether textbooks are even needed any more, at least for basic courses (in chem, physics, biology, calc, etc).
And even on more advanced topics, the textbooks are sometimes inferior to what is available on the web.
So, if you are a textbook author or publishing house, the concern about how you are going to continue the gravy train to which you have grown accustomed is understandable
In the day and age of iTexts and kindles, this "patented" method seems awfully quaint.
ReplyDeleteThis might make the patent holder (Vogel) a few bucks for a brief time, but that won't last very long.
It's only a matter of (probably a short) time before most texts (or perhaps individual chapters from texts) will be made available for download for a price -- like iTunes.
Re the comment by VigiliusH,
ReplyDeleteThere already exists what you suggest at http://chemwiki.ucdavis.edu/.
Perhaps Prof. Rabett could contribute. Diagrams are needed for the section entitled "The Equipartition Theorem".
There are several other one author sites e.g.
http://theory.physics.manchester.ac.uk/~judith/stat_therm/stat_therm.html
http://hyperphysics.phy-astr.gsu.edu/hbase/hframe.html
Cheers, Alastair.
a web book
I find it funny that in all the discussions of textbook costs no-one has mentioned downloading pdfs for free (hint illegal). Or swapping them with a fellow student using a thumb drive. You can find almost all of them on a torrent website, even some of my engineering textbooks. Additionally, the homework solutions are usually on Cramster. We are now at a point where the available technology is making buying the book obsolete. I usually do buy because I like to keep them as a reference and I have a 'real job' and can afford to. But a lot of the students just lug around a laptop with 5 textbooks on there instead. It seems that the professors have not caught on to this?
ReplyDelete-Dirt Girl
We R Old
ReplyDeleteBadger badger badger cites Stalman's parable The Right to Read.
ReplyDeleteDo read it, especially if you're a person with a hand in dictating what books people must read.
Meanwhile the New York Times publishes an op-ed neatly illustrating the financial autoimmune sickness now afflicting the middle class in the US: How Pensions Violate Free Speech. In TIAA-CREF? Read it.
the Duke of Deniers, phd.
ReplyDeletewow, just wow. Who would have thought that caerbannog is a far lefty and a goth. This popcorn please post is the perfect entry to discuss what went wrong in caerbannog's childhood!
I can't wait to see the bannog raise his head again, I think any response I send him will consist of me posting that picture of him, accompanied by no words.
Cody and others, Eli has found that ALEKS is a reasonably good, unbundled homework system, which is something you need without markers and large sections.
ReplyDeleteOh yes, they pridefully announce that the system punishes procrastinators.
Twould seem to me that if you give some students x grade points for buying one copy of your textbook, then fair trade and equal protection laws would require you to give 2x grade points to student who buy 2 copies. And wouldn't it be simpler and less damaging to the trees to simply eliminate the book as a middleman, and just go directly to x grade points for y dollars?
ReplyDeleteBrian, careful. Another step and you'll be pointing out that if money is speech and we guarantee freedom of speech then people with more money are guaranteed more right to free speech than people with less money.
ReplyDeleteSnow Bunny says:
ReplyDeleteI have thought for many years (actually decades) that the textbook system is evil.
In college, I had a nearly unreadable biology text. Written by the professor giving the course, who happened to be head of the department.
Then there was my son's 8th math book, which couldn't give a sensible explanation of how to solve a simple linear algebra equation.
A friend of my visited a professor who wrote textbooks who had a gorgeous mansion in Florida, gated community.
My cousin checks math texts (she's well-qualified). Her task is to verify equations and examples. She does not judge the pedagogic value.
However, many elementary and high school texts do not receive any checking. Like the one that had the equator going through central Florida.
Plus excruciatingly boring...
Snow Bunny says:
ReplyDeleteI have thought for many years (actually decades) that the textbook system is evil.
In college, I had a nearly unreadable biology text. Written by the professor giving the course, who happened to be head of the department.
Then there was my son's 8th math book, which couldn't give a sensible explanation of how to solve a simple linear algebra equation.
A friend of my visited a professor who wrote textbooks who had a gorgeous mansion in Florida, gated community.
My cousin checks math texts (she's well-qualified). Her task is to verify equations and examples. She does not judge the pedagogic value.
However, many elementary and high school texts do not receive any checking. Like the one that had the equator going through central Florida.
Plus excruciatingly boring...
Not sure about for chemistry, but for physics, there are options to forcing students to buy a textbook: Physics 200, for which colleges and high schools can buy a "forever site license" for $200, about the same price as a single textbook.
ReplyDeleteIt's actually a very good text, written by a prof at Dartmouth (Huggins) who began teaching there 50 years ago and has written several other texts.
So, students, you can blame your professors if they choose a text for which you have to shell out hundreds of dollars for texts for intro courses.
At UC Davis (US), we are developing a project (The dynamic textbook project) that addresses making science (STEM) textbooks by faculty and students freely available (e.g., ChemWiki.ucdavis.edu).
ReplyDeleteThis is a daunting task and if anyone wishes to contribute, we are happy to have more hands (from students, faculty and experts).
Cheers,
Delmar