College and university textbooks are notoriously expensive. As a Toronto Star story from earlier this year explains, “engineering and medical textbooks are particularly expensive and can range from $150 to $300 for a single book. It’s not unusual for students in other areas of study to spend more than $1,000 annually on textbooks.”
So how is digital technology affecting on the textbook business? According to a New York Times story from this past weekend:
many educators say that it will not be long before they are replaced by digital versions — or supplanted altogether by lessons assembled from the wealth of free courseware, educational games, videos and projects on the Web.
That kind of free courseware may come in the form of “freemium” products, like the textbooks from Flat World Knowledge, a company profiled by Wired Magazine editor Chris Anderson in his recent book FREE. Flat World Knowledge publishes “‘open textbooks,’ free works that can be edited, updated, and remixed into custom course materials.” These open textbooks are free to read online, with printed copies and audiobook versions available as paid options.
Another way to get textbooks is to steal them. Like music, movies, and television shows, digital versions of physical textbooks are easy to share online with little regard for copyright. Though the world’s largest textbook BitTorrent site, TextBook Torrents, shut down last fall, you don’t have to look hard to find questionably legal copies of textbooks on various file sharing networks.
What about you? Are you a student (or the parent of a student)? Where do you get your textbooks? Would you consider buying a digital textbook?
August 11th, 2009 at 8:00 pm
My first resource for textbooks are friends who are a year or two ahead of me in my program (math); they're usually willing to lend or sell me their old textbooks. If that doesn't work, I hit the Internet for some comparison shopping.
I prefer to buy my textbooks rather than rent them. I have no qualms about buying used: I've bought from eBay, Abebooks, and Chapters. BigWords.com is a great source for comparing textbook deals.
Probably the largest single hurdle to buying textbooks online for Canadians is the fact that many of the bargain textbook stories (like eBay's Half.com) don't ship to Canada (or if they do, shipping can cost an arm and a leg). It's disheartening to turn up a wonderfully low price on BigWords only to find that the dealer won't ship to Canada. Still, I can usually manage to find my textbooks cheaper online than through the university bookstore.
Digital textbooks come in two flavours, and it's important to distinguish between them. The digital textbooks published to replace or complement existing "closed source" textbooks aren't going to be remarkably cheaper than their hard copy brethren. This may sound like student angst, but I do believe it's true that it's about the money, not the cost of production–as long as students are required to obtain these books for their courses, the publisher will charge as much as it can in order to earn a larger profit. Regardless of motivation, one thing is clear though: many of these closed-source textbooks come with digital locks. While locks can be circumvented, the legality of this is questionable (at least for now), which raises questions about accessibility, among other things. Until we get better copyright laws that address these issues, adoption of digital textbooks will remain slow.
The open source textbooks and courses you mentioned are a horse of a different colour. They're great in theory. In practice it's important to keep an eye on the quality of the material, of course, but in general the academic world has benefited through the use of open source and creative commons-style collaboration. The problem is that most universities aren't using or promoting them yet, either because there are bureaucratic obstacles to clear or the professor would prefer to sell the textbook he or she has written…. I suspect that open source courseware will become more popular as the next generation of professors and administrators hits the campus, since they'll be more familiar with the technology at their disposal.
On the subject of illegally acquire textbooks: never. I fully support the fight for fair copyright, which is why I won't undermine that by obtaining my textbooks (or other material) illegally.
August 11th, 2009 at 11:07 pm
In two of my units we don't have textbooks. Instead the lecturer uploads PDFs of book chapters and journal articles to the University's "Learning Management System". Students enrolled in that course can download, read and print articles at their own discretion.
Personally, I print one version which I bind and I upload another version onto my 'Evernote' account where I can read them on my iPod touch along with all my lecture notes.
But, this really only applies to the humanities and social sciences. Most of the other departments are too attached to their textbooks.
August 12th, 2009 at 4:58 pm
I don't know if things have changed….
I know that every year I was at York University I had to purchase NEWER versions of the same textbook. Why? We were told that the older (one year old) texts were outdated and needed updating.
The real truth: Professors had written these texts and where supplementing their "teaching" income by also selling "newer" textbooks.
Looking forward, as long as universities and professors who have tenure control the book lists of courses there will be little students can do.
Students can only hope that teachers, professors, assistants and the educational institutions themselves wake up in this century and adopt new and fresh ideas when it comes to texts.
August 13th, 2009 at 12:17 am
The concept of electronic publishing has been around for many years. Donald Knuth (then of Stanford University) had developed a system called TeX (pronounced "tech", and is actually spelled with the Greek letters "Theta, Epsilon, Chi" with the last letter pronounced "kai"). TeX was intended to be a device independent system of publishing scientific and mathematical texts. Marking up documents is similar to creating web pages in HTML and XHTML (the latter I use). The document begins with a declaration of what type of document is being prepared, what size and style the base font is, and which set of packages are being used to prepare this document.
The idea behind TeX is that the writer concentrates more on the content of the document and less on the formatting of the document.
After the document is written in TeX, the document is then compiled into a DVI, or Device Independent Image file. This is an encoded document that provides the basic structure and formatting information. If you try to view this using a text editor, it will not make sense to you.
Of course, the TeX system needs a set of fonts to work with to render the document. Hence, Donald Knuth wrote METAFONT (yes, the spelling is all caps) to create scalable fonts used by the auxiliary programs used to convert the DVI files into something we can use. Each character in every font is compiled separately by METAFONT to generate the needed font files. As a result, the actual compilation and publication takes a significant amount of time to process.
The auxiliary files I am talking about do the actual typesetting work reading the DVI files in, then laying out pages to be published. The output for these programs can be a PostScript file, a LaserJet image file (in Hewlett-Packard's PCL language for early Deskjets and LaserJets), or another format for typesetters and/or printers.
The TeX system was developed in the mid 1970s, and over the years has improved to the point where any type of publication can be created, including PDFs and even websites.
Much of the TeX system contains packages made of macros, or shorthand code written in TeX. The most famous package available for TeX is LaTeX. LaTeX is Leslie Lamport's ongoing work making TeX simple to use.
TeX is included with every major Linux distribution, including PCLinuxOS, and there are a few editors that make publishing with TeX easy, including LyX, Kile and TeXmacs.
Thanks to TeX, and the PDFTeX implementation, publications can now be converted to electronic books with ease using technology that is over thirty years old.
August 15th, 2009 at 6:33 pm
The price of textbooks has always been a big problem for me… Especially because of the greed in the education system. Every year a new edition has to come out of the book…. No new information, just rearranged so that students have to buy the newest edition, and not a used book.
I think digital replacements will be similar… the companies that publish the books will surely charge ridiculously high membership fees to access the info contained in the book.
Textbook torrent sites are a savior to struggling college students.
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August 16th, 2009 at 11:31 pm
A few years back when I was in university, it wasn't unusual for me to drop about $1000-$1500 on textbooks in a year. Most of those textbooks were barely needed, profs would refer to them possibly a few times, and the worst part was they would be "outdated" before you had a chance to sell them. Profs would be pushing textbooks written by themselves as well. My brother was lucky in that, he was taking math and computer science. So although he had just as many required texts, there is only so many ways to cover theorems and algorithms. By the final year, he was just googling for all the information, and didn't pay a cent for books.
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August 17th, 2009 at 5:59 pm
I think eTextbooks would be a good idea. For some courses. For example, in literature or history classes, and the like.
But for Maths and Sciences? Forget it. you need to be able to flip back and forth, looking for formulas and the like. As well, display of images can still be an issue.
Plus, you still need to get the publishers to cut down the prices. Paying $100-plus for a text book you can resell next year is one thing, versus paying $80 for a file that you can't pass on just isn't worth it. If they can get the prices down, they'll get more people flocking to e-textbooks.
Now one thing that would be a great addition is to have the textbook on paper come with a CD-rom with supplementary materials for laptops and ebook readers. The handy notes for during classes, and leave the textbook home for studying.
August 17th, 2009 at 7:44 pm
The supplental CD-ROM idea makes more sense than trying to extract money out of students who already pay four times the cost of tuition today than back in the 1980s. Hardcover books are also permanent when it comes to the information in the sense that once you obtain the information, it is not like the publisher can revoke or otherwise repossess the knowledge because you did not obtain the latest version of the document.
Besides, has either the Harper or the Obama administrations dealt with the high cost of a secondary education?
August 21st, 2009 at 1:24 am
I've been very lucky as many of my professors are very understanding of student budgets, and will often either purposely choose less expensive books (I've never paid over $40 for a book for my concentration classes), or use an alternate method to distribute readings. For example, many of my courses have readings from articles that can be found on archive sites like JSTOR, which are free for students who attend universities with subscriptions.
I'm also lucky in that even though I have had many courses where the professor is the author of the course material, the books were provided at reasonable prices, and often we got several chapters in PDF form for free as they waited for all of us to be able to purchase the hardcopies.
While I realize it can be difficult in fields such as math, engineering, and hard sciences to take this kind of approach, I just want to point out that it is possible RIGHT NOW to teach many courses using free or low-cost texts if the professor just gives it a little forethought.
August 22nd, 2009 at 3:14 pm
I am a 'new' University Prof. (but a long time educator). I am all for the open source movement. I try to keep costs for my students to a minimum. I found an excellent text that I was going to use, however, it would cost over $150 for a soft cover book, it was good, but not that good! If I ever get the time to write my own, it will be open source… University Education costs enough without adding several hundred for texts. The only problem with digital ,I see, is that it is (for me, anyway) more difficult to read/mark up etc. I still love to hold a read a real book.
August 22nd, 2009 at 8:45 pm
Mike,
Open source books do not only have to be read online. Here is an economics book written by a faculty member at Cal Tech available for free for anyone: http://www.introecon.com/ . Users have to simply download and print it. Printing will probably cost about 20 dollars. This is a good model for text book distribution. Many universitie have budgetary problems that they can resolve. Heard ot the crisis in academic libraries; this is a very real problem as some MedSciTech journals run into tens of thousands of dollars.
Universities have to respond to this by allowing faculty promotion to take into account time spent on open source texts like MaAfee at Cal Tech.
Good luck
Ali Ahmed
August 24th, 2009 at 9:27 pm
As a prof, I'm not sure I agree. It'll take longer for the ebook movement to 'take hold'. It's been my experience that my students, while young, aren't as tech-savvy as the media seems to portray.
Second, the real change in text books will be the print-on-demand services. I get textbook reps every semester offering tailor-made texts to my specifications. I pick the content / authors, and they run a limited press solely geared to my students. Other reps are trying to do a better integration of texts w/ web-services, which has been lacking and entirely a lost opportunity. Further, I could just as easily print my own damn text off of sites like LuLu.com and bypass the whole broken-down process altogether.
Ebooks aren't the future of textbooks, at least not in my view/experience. Print-on-demand will gain a strong footing, and ultimately, the content will be kept on the publishers servers for direct online access.
August 25th, 2009 at 8:39 pm
Universities may not be the first place to look for the leading edge of this revolution. In our school board all students have laptops from grade three onward. The first of those who have spent their entire education with laptops in class and at home will only reach university in another couple of years. Our students are accustomed to using technology (including answer machines) in all phases of learning, co-operating and creating. If material is available inexpensively or for free on the web they will use it and would find it illogical to pay for hard-copy. In high school math we have a few printed textbooks and each student is given a CD copy (licensed from the publisher). We have been using math workbooks, for example, on CD, that don't need to be replaced after each use. It is a huge saving and very flexible. These students have no problem reading material onscreen. In many cases they find it more natural than reading a printed book. It sure lightens the bookbag for the trip home.
August 29th, 2009 at 5:51 pm
Few thoughts: I would hope that Universities would never mandate the use of locked-down "closed-source" textbooks. All locks on content do is impose specific brands of access technology that have the right 'unlocking keys' http://flora.ca/own Schools should not be in the business of promoting specific technology brands, or closing down independent thought and participation. These locks do very little to reduce copyright infringement (and sometimes increase infringement), and do a lot of harm to students and other creators in the process.
Many of the schools really are in the way, including when it comes to fair copyright discussions. Rather than adopting Open Access methods the educational institution lobbiests (Including the Council of Ministers of Education) are asking for institutional exceptions to copyright. This is harmful not only to those institutions, but also to the general public who are part of life-long learning. I believe we should be eradicating educational exceptions, and adopting a more "fair use" regime where this fairness is not confined to specifically chartered institutions/corporations.
It is really hard to read this sector. You see the legacy institutions (both the schools and the legacy educational publishers) trying to entrench further in law and practise the way things were in the past (including abuses of technology), and you have some people trying to push things forward and harness new technology in positive ways.
September 16th, 2009 at 3:44 pm
Just looked at Flat World Knowledge and was very impressed. I look forward to returning as the site populates with more content… Thanks for recommending that readers check them out.
In the K-12 space, http://www.Curriki.org is an excellent place to find, share, mix and remix course content! I recently posted a larger list of OER resources that I suspect others will find useful:
http://boneducation.com/edtech-resources/open-edu...
Thanks!
Anna
Founder, Bon Education
Website: http://www.boneducation.com
Blog: http://www.literacyispriceless.wordpress.com