As Camicao points out, textbook prices are outrageous. On one level, that's understandable: textbooks often cost more to produce, and have a much smaller potential audience, than most general books. Publishing isn't really a high-profit business to begin with, either. However, it's still insane to have to spend $250-$350 each semester, as I did, just on books. Depending on your classes and where you go to school, you can spend a lot more than that, most of which you'll never recover, even if you're lucky to be eligible for book buyback (which hardly gives you anything).
But, as you all know, I'm a textbook fetishist. There's just something about them (the paper, the covers) that I find intoxicating. And the alernatives are simply unattractive. E-books and professor-provided .pdf files (Camicao's suggestion) just aren't practical, in my view. You either have to sit and read them off a computer screen (which is impossible; your eyes would burn up) or print the whole think out. Now, I don't know about you, but I wouldn't use MY ink to run out a couple thousand pages, which is what it would add up to if a semester's worth of books were all online. And using school labs would be very problematic. One, I'm sure the other kids trying to print things out (not to mention the poor printers themselves!) wouldn't appreciate waiting for my 250 pages to spit out. Two, I'm sure schools would soon crack down due to the cost of paper, ink, and maintenance.
So, basically, at this moment, I see no option but to buy the textbooks.
2 comments:
Hi Frank-- you make some good points here. I love books too. It's all a contradictory not. Damned if you damned if you don't. But I'll tell you what...I'll settle for expensive textbooks that are really good, as opposed to the crap they often sell in my area for 100$!
Another option is for profs to self publish textbooks through iuniverse.com and such. I don't want to make a profit off of my students, so that would have to be resolved in an ideologically satisfactory way, and in a way that does not create a conflict of interest, but it would be cheaper than going with major companies.
Yes, it's a very complex issue. If you're going to pay a hundred bucks for a textbook, it SHOULD be good. Of course, not all of them are.
About profs self-publishing... I don't know about that. A lot of profs have no interest in/no ability to create a textbook. You could do it with English, where you would just be collecting together works of literature, but astronomy? math? history? I'm not sure it would work very well.
Anyway, thanks for stopping by and commenting!
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