hckrnws

I came to America poor, and went straight to a public university, on scholarship and no money to even pay for food (grad seminars and special events with free sandwiches and pizza is how I learned about things like quaternions as an undergrad). But as an eastern European hacker, i had a complete disregard of copyright, I also grew up in the 90s when hacker ethos included strong anti-authoritarian elements. No way I was going to pay those ridiculous book prices.

So first thing I did was setup a DC server (direct connect, early 2000s p2p sharing protocol) with a friendly grad student on university infrastructure, where we shared books, encouraged other students to upload books, we also built a dyi book scanner (there's one popular design that comes up first on google). the bookscanner at some point had a near 24/7 utilization, and people were coordinating time slots by dc messages. the room with the scanner (which is also where the DC server was) turned into a kind of unix room/hackerspace, because there was always somebody there working on something only vaguely related to university courses as such.

reminiscing on things like that always makes me realize just how much hacker culture has changed, to a significant extent as a result of societal pressure. I was extremely lucky, because when the handful of us got inevitably discovered, what followed was a series of meetings with department dean and university heads, lots of stern talking, which basically ended after they were convinced that they put sufficient fear of god in us. I'm particularly grateful to one networking and os professor who showed up to every single one of those meetings to advocate on our behalf. said professor had a significant contribution to computing in general, was strong supporter of old school hacker ethos, and is just all around great guy.

only a few years later aaronsw was thrown to the wolves by the cowards and bureaucrats (but I repeat myself) at MIT over his JSTOR downloads, which in my personal perception of history was the end of this kind of "oh captain my captain" university hacker culture.

Oh man, back in my university it was the teachers themselves who provided the pirated materials. In Humanities it was the full scanned books, in STEM at least they always scanned at least the exercises so it wouldn't be necessary to get the specific edition.

Sometimes this is done via course pack, which is handled by the university/library/bookstore. The course packs aren't free, and the cost goes to printing the materials and also royalty payments where necessary.

Some profs may electronically distribute materials separately, which would likely sidestep both of these costs.

Yes, about 1990 one could show up at a copy shop on Rte. 1 in College Park, Maryland, mention course number and section, and get a fat stack of photocopied material. I believe that I purchased the ones I did during the last year or two such such packs were available: after that, the publishers leaned on schools to make the professors stop providing them.

I finished my undergraduate in 1998 and graduate school in 2000. Our university was still using photocopied course packets (that we purchased in the campus bookstore) that entire time.

The only course packet I can remember buying in grad school (social work at Howard) was for data (which makes me chuckle given where I'm posting this). The packet had a ton of articles and that material was in addition to a text book or two, as I recall.

A part of me really wants to see this kind of thing revived by projects like IPFS, but somehow it just isn't happening. If IPFS had been a thing in the early 2000's, the first thing to be uploaded would have been porn, followed closely by music, movies, video games and textbooks.

I think its too new and cumbersome to use for that, everyone is just used to torrent now.

It’s arguably less cumbersome than torrents, but yes, the “new” and “alternative” aspects of IPFS certainly seem like limiting factors.

If I were trying to make IPFS remotely popular, I’d start by hosting the same kinds of things that made http, gnutella, and BitTorrent popular.

Indeed. Earlier on, it was definitely a thing we pie-rats were watching. I mean seriously... A bittorrent-git repo where nobody could ever kill a hashed content? Fucking hell!

And there's big problems. The biggest was that the privacy branch of 'IPFS over Tor/I2P" was dismissed outright from main branch. Handwaving aside, the biggest reason was it wouldnt make the creators money. Filecoin would. Other problems is that it's a memory and network hog. Like mucho hog.

But right now, IPFS is one of the most invasive protocols I've seen. That fucking thing will splatter your: public IP, all your private IPs, VPN IP, and any others as part of the dHT for your machine and any content hashes' associated to your machine. Even for deanonymized networks, this things nutzo.

Ananymize it better, easy support for Tor and I2P, and deemphasise the shitcoin, and it would definitely be a thing.

>demphasize the shitcoin

There are no words to express how much we are in agreement. I would argue the problem it is trying to solve is largely nonexistent, at least to the extent that data storage hasn't been a limiting factor since the early 2000's. Even more frustrating is the fact that the PL folks occasionally admit this, though it seems to be done unwittingly. I recall a keynote speech from the CEO himself in which he states that high-capacity storage is so ubiquitous as to make Filecoin a viable economic sector for developing nations. The contradiction in that statement is hopefully obvious.

browsers should be able to natively resolve an IPFS uri and CID

especially given the way they are used.

That great guy sounds like a great guy. Wish I knew someone like them.

Here's a weird idea. Bundle materials into tuition expenses.

It incentivizes the right people with the power and market participation to optimize for the right thing. Presumably, teachers and departments would have to justify costs from a materials budget to an admin forcing real downward pressure on the textbook market.

The current state of textbooks acts like a surprise fee(dark pattern) where you purchase a product(education via tuition) and choices are made for you(textbook selection) that you have to pay for in order to pass the class(see the realization of tuition). That's fundamentally broken market mechanics.

The folks in charge of making the market decision(which textbook to use) should be the same ones paying for it. We have a term for this pattern - moral hazard, and we shouldn't be surprised when students continue the same pattern of behavior when the system continues unchanged.

Freshman year, first semester, I paid $1100 for books, and then we only actually used one of them more than slightly. I still have them all. One of them was a Discrete Mathematics book that cost $250. We used it twice to do a "reading assignment" and since the class was only taught by the teacher who wanted this book just this one semester, the school store wouldn't buy it back at the end of the semester. It still creaks when I open it.

I was a first generation college student, my tuition and living expenses were funded mostly by a scholarship (covered all of my tuition and about 30% of living expenses) and a private student loan covered the remainder. My cash flow was strictly negative and the surprised $1100 bill right at the start was extraordinarily unappreciated and the fact it went to such comically little use was just spitting in your face.

So the subsequent 7 semesters I paid $0 for books, which still left me with an average cost of books at $137/semester. Ridiculous.

> Freshman year, first semester, I paid $1100 for books, and then we only actually used one of them more than slightly.

This really bothers me.

Universities hold themselves up as virtuous. Then students hire them to provide to provide an education. Instead of being agents for the students, the students are instead treated like a captive market. There is a very real conflict of interest in universities profiting off textbooks they "require" while being hired to provide a class. I really don't get how any of this is acceptable.

Then you get required to take an ethics class as part of your degree.

It's complete bullshit

You can now comfortably afford to hire a staff of PhD students to tutor you 1on1 in every subject you want to learn more cheaply than going to a university. So where the FUCK is all that money going?

> So where the FUCK is all that money going?

Please be aware that higher education is a massive dumping ground for the lowest-performing segment of the politically-connected managerial class, who are too cowardly and lazy to run for elected office, and too stupid and impulsive to make it in industry.

Academia is perfect, for them: a gigantic stage for demonstrating moral superiority and hiring friends, with no fundamentals that matter at all.

Totally agree. I only had one professor who had any idea how things work in the industry, and she went back to it within a couple years. I'm not saying there's no value at a university, but most of it is a waste of time and money.

Administrators, to stop us academics from doing our jobs too productively.

>That pretty much answers the question of why we don’t have teleportation devices or antigravity shoes. Common sense suggests that if you want to maximize scientific creativity, you find some bright people, give them the resources they need to pursue whatever idea comes into their heads, and then leave them alone. Most will turn up nothing, but one or two may well discover something. But if you want to minimize the possibility of unexpected breakthroughs, tell those same people they will receive no resources at all unless they spend the bulk of their time competing against each other to convince you they know in advance what they are going to discover.

https://thebaffler.com/salvos/of-flying-cars-and-the-declini...

We don't have teleportation devices or antigravity shoes because making those things is not possible, and you can't make impossible things possible by throwing money at them.

And of course this becomes worse if you're using other people's money. If you're throwing your own money at an impossible task, you'll run out (or your investors will run out). If you're collecting the money as taxes and then throwing it at the impossible task, you can waste as much of it as you want. If you're telling people "do this impossible task or I shoot you", you end up doing a lot of shooting and not much teleporting.

You sound like a paid shill for big gravity.

That doesn't seem like a remotely good reason to pay loads of money to administrators in Antigravity Logistical Inclusion Tracking while the PhD students in quantum gravity can't afford rent.

[dead]

Have just checked financials of one of the providers. It appears that at least 50% of it goes to Sales General and Administrative expenses. Those don’t include educator salaries, buildings, or material. Those are all “admin” expenses.

Oh and another 14% gets invested - buildings and securities.

Tearing down buildings which millions of dollars were spent on, to put up new buildings which they spend millions of dollars on.

Often the old buildings were not that old at all! They just no longer project the kind of prestige the university thinks is needed to persuade students to enroll.

Middlemen. Our economy has become increasingly more parasitic in all spheres.

I don't buy that. Middlemen typically exist to solve some existing market inefficiency, or they exist through corruption and regulatory capture. The latter is a huge problem, but it's not THE problem. Ballooning administration seems to REALLY be the problem all over the place. But... Why is that?

Because there is no competition, and demand has massively outstripped supply. If you want to make money in academic management, you need to build an organization to manage and then justify a high salary to do so. And this is what happens. Huge staffs doing nothing but justifying the boss’ salary have appeared at universities over the past few decades.

I always thought the tech revolution would mean cutting of traditional middlemen

books and libraries and radio and tv and internet will revolutionize education - people said.

It was either a joke or schools and universities have an incredibly tight grip on their market.

Picture what illusive product one can make in those settings. You can have insane prices, the only limit would be what people can afford. The maximum price then becomes maximum debt. While at the same time you can rush out a product that is complete crap, borderline believable but only for the ones who make the relevant decisions.

I see a docu one time about a semi-commercial chinese education formula. Each subject is cut up into tiny modules, seemingly as tiny as possible. One tiny booklet and 1-2 classes. You remember dependency hell? That was it, on steroids. The cert for the module, combined with others did give you access to additional modules and the bundle of coupons eventually turned into a more milestone like diploma but this wasn't the interesting part! You could take a different path after doing a module and become an instructor assistant, become an instructor and then become an instructor assistant instructor! If someone discovered a hard question there was always additional gray matter above you in the food chain.

They had people who could barely bang 2 rocks together TEACHING how to bang the rocks as if the universe revolved around it.

Others build a parkour tightly packed with modules one after the other. If they failed anything they got stuck eventually as you cant do C without A+B

The early adopters of the MLM program had their hands full assisting the teachers teachers teachers. It looked humbling to say the least.

edit: I forgot the part where one could start a business and continue to enjoy the advice from those you paid to teach you and the job offers listing specifically what modules were required.

You basically answered it: it's going to non-teaching administrative staff, facilities/construction, and other random expenses.

Some of the administrative bloat is for regulatory compliance, but most of it seems to be driven by the expansionist tendencies of bureaucratic organizations.

Oddly enough there actually seems to be less administrative/secretarial support for faculty, while student mental health remains a problem that doesn't seem to be addressed adequately.

Many big universities are basically hedge funds disguised as schools, these days

> Then you get required to take an ethics class as part of your degree

My state university ethics professor published their own book, and required an extra-credit assignment be turned in from a tear out at the end of the book.

Sounds like a lesson you will never forget - and you even share it with other people. In a sense, that is a good lesson and a job well done by the professor.

I hope this is parody

> Universities hold themselves up as virtuous.

That's just marketing. For a lot of degrees it's effectively a version of child care for people out of high school. That some people manage to learn something meanwhile almost seems accidental.

I kind of think that 2/3 of university students would be better served to instead do an apprenticeship in the trades. eg: Plumber, electrician, and similar

I'm not sure lecturers profit off textbooks. What you are witnessing is more likely indifference and hubris from the academics than a deliberate strategy to extract more money out of students. This doesn't make it less unethical, but unless it's a textbook they themselves authored, it's probably not a conflict of interest.

It’s in the interest of all professors collectively (including those who hope to be real professors someday) to prop up the problematic idea that a book ought to cost $400+ just because it’s a textbook, because professors write textbooks, no one involved in selecting books or publishing them has any incentive to keep the costs reasonable.

> no one involved in selecting books or publishing them has any incentive to keep the costs reasonable.

There is an difference in having no incentive to keep costs down and having an incentive to keep costs up. Some professors are simply indifferent to their students' plights. As far as these professors are concerned their students are just an inconvenient bleep in their oh-so-important life. Extracting money from them is not on their radar.

The vast majority of professors don't write textbooks. In fact there are probably a lot more profs who do care, and assign open books, or no books at all, than professors who make a living writing textbooks.

> difference in having no incentive to keep costs down and having an incentive to keep costs up.

Sure, but the only interested parties here presently are:

- students

- publishers

- professors (a few of which "author" or "customize" textbooks and stand to profit)

Students have zero power, publishers have every incentive to increase prices, and most professors don't get involved because like you said, it's not really relevant to them personally.

I agree that if a significant contingent of professors and lecturers essentially started boycotting the "textbook" industry, by using and contributing to "open source" books, or at least authoring or collaborating to author content that they give to their students at no cost, that would amount to applying pressure to the exploitatative business model.

I had a professor mention that they were apathetic to piracy of their own books because they received about a nickel per copy.

I studied a semester abroad (Erasmus) in Portugal and I was so surprised that the expectation there was to get the course book photocopied. The university had a copy room where you pay for a literal copied version of the book that someone made with a xerox machine.

In the 90s in the US, for more hard science and math courses, the course was taught against course notes that you needed to buy from one of the many print shops next to the university. This was spiral bound, often a couple hundred pages and costing 20-40$ because that is how much a short run print job costed. These were made by the instructors.

For courses where a book was required, you could check a book out from the reserve and photocopy the whole thing on one of the many high speed photocopiers on campus that all shared a linked card system, so you didn't have to use coins.

I graduated from a US university in 2018 and my favorite math course was taught by a professor who told us at the start that the textbook was just his course notes, which he provided a PDF for, and we were welcome to (and encouraged) use the text as open-notes in our exams so long as we had a printed version of the notes.

The class proceeded to be one of my favorite math classes, and it was so incredible to have a text that was deeply integrated to the course--because it was just straight up what he lectured from. I wish more of my courses had been that way.

There are teachers who care, and then everyone else.

I went to San Jose state university a decade ago. It wasn't unexpected to find that some books could be bought there similarly where you pay for basically a photocopy bound with a spiral binding.

This is how I did my entire CS grad (4 years full time) in Brazil.

Never got a single book.

I also remember an expensive discrete math book. I came home for the holidays and was doing some exercises when my dad found his copy from when he was at university. Most sections were word for word idential, but the problems were all different. His had a chapter on Fortran too.

I was told they scramble the order of problems so they can keep the books the same but force you to buy new editions in order to have the same problem numbers at what gets assigned.

Basically minimizing cost to extort more cash.

I had a class where the textbook did that. I always would get last year's books to save more than a few coins, but the professor of this class would go through the problems in-class, and they were all different from what was in my book. I went to his office hours to understand why the problems he went over were different from the ones in my book, and he immediately lectured "Ahhhh you must have bought an older book from the bargain bin. I require this year's book in my class and this is how I know who failed to pay for the correct book." The professor was the author of the book, of course. It was at that point it sunk in what a huge grift higher-education was.

I forgot the professor's name, but if you're reading this, fuck you, Dr. Shithead (and all the other Shithead professors who do this).

Incredible that this kind of corruption is tolerated in the credentials industry, most other industries would not tolerate someone making money from customers that way.

Can you imagine going to McDonalds and the guy won’t serve you your drink unless you buy a cup from his side business?

It's awful, and it's shameful but nobody feels shame anymore. The moral bar is "what can I legally get away with taking from the world" now. Nobody is even capable of feeling shame for their actions. It's just "bank account goes up" = "i'm right".

At my community college, the third semester of a three semester general physics course needed a new textbook, even though it covered substantially the same material. The prof explained why: his friends wrote this book. He was the only professor who taught the third course. That really prepared me for the experience once I transferred to a university.

  > failed to pay for the correct book.

maybe Dean is a coauthor and is getting part of royalties as well? Happens more often than you think

And thus was the start of a new pirate, and Dr. Shithead lost even more money.

I still remember my math teacher that specifically told us to get a certain version of the textbook, and the version he specified was 1 or 2 editions old. Ended up costing me something like $20 to buy used vs $100 new.

Many of my professors would mention the problem numbers for both the current version, and the previous version, to deal with that specifically.

I would have gone to the book store, fotographed the two chapters. - When I was a university student, our professor would copy relevant chapters and hand them to us (in Berlin). We would only buy those books we used extensively.

That happens in the Unites States as well, especially when the professor doesn't stand to profit from book sales (and/or the author is long-dead) and the amount of reading is relatively small. I received a number of these kinds of stapled "books" over my undergraduate years. This included some from the author of one of the books in question.

I'm not sure it's fully on the up-and-up given intellectual property laws, but life is full of gray areas. At the time piracy was not the option it is today (no libgen or torrent sites, Usenet wasn't much help, and the web was sparkly-new), so those breaks were very much appreciated — especially for my classes in Attic Greek, where the relevant textbooks were now rare (though once very common) and unlikely to get much use outside of the class. We did have to buy the Loeb editions of a bunch of original texts (Greek on one side, translation on the other), but I have no issue with that, and they were readily available on the used market. I still have them.

Wouldn't it be fair use if the class just copied content for those two assignments? It is using only small portion of the whole thing after all.

You need to five-whys this before suggesting a solution. Start by asking whether whoever was in charge of requiring the $250 textbook benefited personally from its purchase.

It's more likely they were lazy and conformed to the status quo. You know, the old never attribute to malice what is easily explained by ignorance.

Depends, I took economics modules at University, and that was the only subject where the mandatory course textbook was co-written by the module leader. Well, co-written is strong: they added ten exercise questions and some call out boxes to the default Pearson textbook. Naturally, it was 40% more expensive.

School and professor dependent. I had a few professors at UVA who authored the book being used in class.

I also had a few who made copies of the chapters they wanted from whatever books and had the library hold those copies for us. We would just check them out normally, make our own copy (or read, take notes) and return for the next person.

Is it more likely? The most overpriced books I was required to buy were the ones the professor wrote.

Maybe I'm misunderstanding, but this feels like it'll cause even more issues. Today, clever students can share books, buy used, share electronic copies, or skip the book entirely if they don't think it's necessary. With this system, every student is forced to buy their textbook indirectly through tuition, which will of course rise significantly based on the cost of a textbook for an average class.

It's kind of like meal plans: when I went to college, meal plans were priced horribly, but you were forced to pay for at least a base meal plan, even if you lived off campus. It was just another way for the college to make money off of students who had no other choice. When meal plan prices rose $100 in a single year, or the college eliminated the previous cheapest meal plan, it's not like any students are going to transfer over a couple hundred dollars a semester. But it still sucked. Seems to me like bundling doesn't solve issues, it just reduces transparency and results in more "hidden fees" that might not show up in standard tuition costs.

That’s the thing, any mandatory costs (textbooks, meal plans, etc) should be bundled into the standard tuition price. It needs to be bundled into the top line price that people are actually aware of when they’re making their “purchase decision” (where to go to college)

As OP notes, though, textbooks aren't mandatory costs. A few classes will actually use the books extensively. Most others will deliver all the information in the lecture, with the textbook being referenced in the syllabus and never talked about again.

I'm an auditory learner who only ever used the books when there were homework problems out of them. I saved a ton of money in college by getting good at guessing which types of classes/professors would actually require the book, and I would not have appreciated seeing the books bundled with tuition.

I'd love for this to be a standard across ALL pricing, not just tuition. Any costs that I am required to pay should be put into the base price that is advertised.

The European Union broadly believes in this and to my understanding the situation is broadly 'better' here than in North America.

E.g. If I shop for plane tickets and I see a flight advertised for, say, 92 EUR I know that the price includes all taxes (sales taxes and airport taxes). Credit-card processing fees are (I think) no longer permitted.

It's not a perfect system - there are still the 'optional' extras (hold-bags, seat-bookings, insurance) extras on top of the price (and sometimes dark patterns to make you pay for them).

In a related matter, in the UK (not sure about the EU) there are advertising regulations which cover 'from' prices. I believe here if you advertise a price as 'from XXX' (e.g. 'flights to Berlin from 50 GBP') then at least 10% of the inventory needs to be available at that price. So no having a single seat on a 150 seat plane available at an artificially low price.

You might have chosen the worst example; the US regulations at ticket time are better for the customer.

The US "DOT requires airlines and travel agencies that display ticket prices to advertise the total price that a consumer must pay to purchase a ticket. Wherever an airfare is advertised, such as on a website, in an email, or during the booking process, the fare price must include all applicable government taxes and fees, and any mandatory carrier-imposed surcharges." Furthermore, if you're buying a ticket with an US segment 7 days or more from departure directly from an airline, the airline must typically "allow passengers to cancel their reservation within 24 hours and receive a full refund without a penalty."* This is something not afforded to customers on an intra-Europe flight.

https://www.transportation.gov/individuals/aviation-consumer...

*They can also offer a 24 hour hold free of charge, but the only airline that I know of that opts for this still allows the 24 hour cancel even after the hold.

That is a report that you can get / ask for - it is known as the cost of attendance. There is still some variation. For example, if you are a local you may not be required to live in the dorms and have a meal plan as a freshman.

Price of Attending an Undergraduate Institution - https://nces.ed.gov/programs/coe/indicator/cua

(summary per state) https://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d21/tables/dt21_330.20.a...

(by year) https://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d07/tables/dt07_320.asp

It should be made easier to find, but its not particularly hard to find.

https://financialaid.wisc.edu/cost-of-attendance/

> Your cost of attendance (COA) is an ESTIMATE of the expenses you might encounter while attending UW-Madison. Your COA includes more than just tuition and fees – see below. Most programs’ COAs are based on a full-time, nine-month enrollment period, unless otherwise noted. Although the actual cost of attending UW-Madison varies depending on your particular spending habits, the university bases your financial aid on your estimated COA.

but just like tuition, the overall price seems to be increasing across the (college) board, especially for the prestigious schools. this purchase decision stuff is not working.

And can pay with a low interest rate loan.

for the next 15 years.

>Today, clever students can share books, buy used, share electronic copies, or skip the book entirely if they don't think it's necessary.

I went back to college in the early 2010s. Even then it wasn't uncommon for a text book to come with a license code for an online learning module that was both required for classwork and non-transferable.

So yes, I could share the book, buy a used copy, or rip a PDF from an ebook, but that doesn't get me into the online class module that my professor is requiring for class, because that's hosted by the textbook's publisher and I don't get access unless I buy the book new.

I ran into this issue in the most unexpected of classes.

I took some vehicle repair courses as electives and there was an online module despite the majority of class time being spent in a shop environment doing actual work on vehicles.

It was ridiculous.

I spent a lot of time in undergrad researching to find the books cheap online or buy the Indian paperback version that is only hardcover in the US. The oncampus bookstore gave peanuts when you sold it back and some profs were oblivious and would just require the newest version when the older version would work.

There needs to be a minimum amount of content that has materially changed in order to call it a new edition. Moving questions around and adding a word here or there is not cool.

You have a fair point, and that’s that tuition is another item where customers frequently don’t even shop on price. Many students decide on school with only a vague idea of price, some are on scholarship so they don’t pay, some are not that sophisticated with money so they just ignore the price and take out expensive loans for whatever they tell them to pay.

But the main reason why the idea would help is that colleges set tuition based on what they think the market will bear. The actual cost of the books though would be the school’s problem. Administration might actually pressure professors to NOT use custom self-authored editions that cost $200 more. Also, if the books are included, the school would want to buy used ones from any students who didn’t want to keep them, since it would save the school money. So they would be incentivized to tell professors to not switch to the yearly “new edition” which just resizes a few callout boxes each chapter in order to screw up the pagination, and randomly shuffles the exercises.

* note: I’m imagining here that tuition is set to a fixed amount for everyone just as it is today, not that everyone’s tuition is computed custom for them to include the books their particular professors picked.

How about a system like the one dutch highschools use. In that system, the students get the books from school at the start of the year and return them at the end of the year (the school owns the books). That way the books are for sure reused, and the price is reduced.

American high schools use the same model. It's only at university where you are expected to buy your books.

Ah, I didn't know that, well then, if people are already used to this system. Clearly it is the easiest solution then.

That's a bad idea; tuition is directly subsidized by student loans.

A better approach would be to allow student loan debt to be treated like any other debt during bankruptcy proceedings, as it was previously. It was only after bankruptcy protection was withheld from students that the student loan crisis and skyrocketing tuition became problems.

It's not like people used to file bankruptcy on graduation day just to screw over the system, so the changes to bankruptcy protection weren't actually addressing a real-world problem. Their only purpose is to shield institutions that are intentionally giving out bad loans.

Once that's done, sure, add textbooks to tuition. That way the university / student loan agency is taking on the risk that the book isn't worth potential future increases in the students' earnings.

Great idea, but that would lead to lenders making risk-based decisions on who gets what loans, and that would be politically untenable in the United States.

I may be a pessimist, but tackling the systemic issues that make loaning a bunch of money to an HBCU student much riskier than loaning a bunch of money to a Stanford student isn't what would happen. The demand would be equal outcomes (loans to all) without addressing why there's any disparity to begin with, which would lead to demands of some kind of guarantee the lender wouldn't be screwed over, which pretty much leads us back to where we are. Defaulting on a loan if you don't matriculate is a rational choice, especially since by definition those declaring bankruptcy aren't sacrificing much (they are almost certainly not in a position where bankruptcy would hugely impact their life in their 20's).

There would be pamphlets published on how to shed this debt. It would be a disaster for the lenders. Purely public funding probably can't work either, because to control costs you'd need to ensure students are prepared for higher education (likely via testing like everyone else in the world), and tests are already politically problematic in the United States.

It used to work this way until recently, and none of the problems you describe were real issues.

It’s difficult to argue impossibility in the face of an existence proof.

Student loan is very different from most (all?) other types of debt - the collateral is inside the debtor's head. In other types of loans creditors can put a lien on some type of property - cars, houses, business, etc... For student loans there is no such recourse. Student loans lost bankruptcy protection in 1976 [1]. Student loans became a crisis way later than that (I went to undergrad + master in late 90's, early 2000s and nobody was fretting about student loans. First I heard somethign about it was in the aftermath of the 2008 Financial Crisis). I think student loan crisis is a combination of out of control tuition prices, low financial education on the debtors' side and predatory marketing techniques on the creditors' / colleges' side.

[1] https://www.tateesq.com/learn/student-loan-bankruptcy-law-hi...

The student loan crisis is a cost of living crisis. The rent is too damn high. Room and board fees are a major portion of the total bill that everyone seems to ignore.

> It's not like people used to file bankruptcy on graduation day just to screw over the system

There used to be a social contract, where your country provided you with certain guarantees, and we felt some obligations in return. This was one of the main ideas of the Enlightenment, and also the founding of the USA. We abandoned that decades ago. Neoliberalism erased all "American values." The only American value left today is greed.

In that lost time, you're absolutely right: people would not have just bankrupted their loans on graduation day. College used to be affordable. The country provided for its people. There was a guarantee of a basic standard of living. You could raise a family as a single income household with just a high school diploma.

These days, no one can afford kids anymore. You need to have a Master's degree just to afford a crappy one bedroom apartment downtown. If you fall down, there is no rock bottom. Skid Row in LA has been described by the UN as more deprived than anything they saw in refugee camps or Brazilian favelas. US tent cities are gross violations of human rights. The decadent ruling class openly mocks the idea that human rights even exist in the first place, only pretending to acknowledge such things when manufacturing consent for war with Russia. You have no right to life, no right to liberty, no right to the pursuit of happiness. You will own nothing, and you will be happy (or else).

In this Brave New World, where the social contract has long been shredded and there's no such thing as society anyway, absolutely everyone would declare bankruptcy on graduation day if they could. Just like all the criminal business owners walked away from $4 trillion of fraudulent PPP loans they didn't need. Just like Jeff Bezos takes every legal tax deduction he can find and more, despite not needing them. I would declare bankruptcy on Graduation Day. You would, too. You would have to be an imbecile not to. In this world, you take what you can get as long as it's legal. If you find a loophole in the system, you exploit it unapologetically.

JFK's most famous quote was widely applauded at the time: "ask not what your country can do for you, but what you can do for your country." The underlying implication there is, the country already did a lot for its people back then. Half a century later, all these years of all take and no give, it's about time we started asking the reverse. America's Human Resources are all tapped out. No more blood left to draw from these stones. What has this country ever done for you? When has it ever given you a single dime back, in return for all the taxes you've paid? Even universal healthcare is too much to give for them, but they'll give Ukraine everything and more. They'll fund their universal healthcare system, their pensions, and all the things the oligarchs have stolen from us. The child tax credit cut child poverty in half overnight, but American oligarchs are demons, they enjoy seeing kids going hungry. It's good for business or something.

It will take another generation or two before your theory is true again -- that people wouldn't just declare bankruptcy to start adulthood at zero. You'd need to fully rebuild the social democracy that has been systematically destroyed piece by piece ever since black people got human rights in the 1960s. Even if we got FDR's Second Bill of Rights enacted tomorrow, young people have been completely broken by this Hellworld we've raised them in. They've been forced to ritually practice their own deaths on every equinox in these truly disgusting school shooter drills every year of their lives, since they were in preschool. Part of rebuilding that underlying social democracy would have to be making public university free again. There's no way around it. Either it's free again via declaring bankruptcy on graduation day, in some sort of quasi-baptism in the civil religion, or it's via direct funding as it was before higher education was desegregated. Honestly, I kinda prefer the graduation day jubilee. It begs the question, why don't we just reset all the debt? It would delegitimize the entire system of debt that enslaves the human race.

Most of the professors I've had taught the course entirely with free materials. I think they went out of their way to avoid having students spend money. A top-down policy forcing all students to buy textbooks sounds like a way to take control away from these professors in order to further enrich the school and the publishers at students' expense.

I don't view textbook costs as a "dark pattern", they're an honest signal from the professor to the students. A professor who makes a $250 book mandatory and then barely uses it sends one kind of signal. A professor who goes out of their way to hunt down (or even scan) and provide free PDFs for all required readings sends another. Students receive these signals and they're reflected in professors' online ratings. To the extent possible (which is a large extent for some highly flexible programs, such as mine), students will go out of their way to drop and swap classes to avoid unpopular professors, further incentivizing faculty to keep these ancillary costs down.

> A professor who makes a $250 book mandatory and then barely uses it sends one kind of signal. A professor who goes out of their way to hunt down (or even scan) and provide free PDFs for all required readings sends another.

My memory may be fading away, but what I remember is that many professors provided their lecture in a kind of written form (written by them or their assistants, not copied from books), at cost to copy. No book required in addition.

A lecture that follows a book seems weird. Why a lecture, just read the book?

These expensive books are usually for mandatory, introductory classes. I don't know if the students have that much choice here.

A prof being greedy or thrifty or uncaring about textbook isn't strongly correlated to teaching ability.

Or, universities should forbid any teacher from requiring the purchase of any book

Having it as a reference? Sure. Requiring its purchase for a semester, as in, your grades will depend on it? No no

Exactly, lets take it a step further and forbid selling (teaching) things you don't own.

If I desire to charge people to teach them what an array is I must provide the explanation of the array myself.

If the book is really to good to skip a teaching license must be acquired that names the specific chapters and their purpose. The rights holder doesn't have to sell by chapter but if anyone wants to make a more specific version at a better price they can.

Ideally work towards a single book for each year with a wiki for educators to debate changes and updates.

This is indeed a nice idea, unfortunately the university (mine) gets kick backs from the book store. At the beginning of every semester every faculty gets an email asking us to 'encourage' students to buy their materials at the book store. Every semester I do what I always do and tell the students that the ($250!) book will not be used in class (although mine is just one in a sequence and the book is chosen by the whole department for the whole sequence) and give a half a dozen references to (excellent) free online books. Even then some students for whom the class is the terminal one in a sequence buy their books. Must be human nature at play. On a different note, as a flight instructor, when a future student asks me what to bring to the intro flight, I usually say 'lunch', since I provide everything else, including headsets. Yet half of them bring $500 worth of useless gadgets and expensive books (not, strangely enough, headsets) to 'be prepared'.

Bundled prices and and a lack of price visibility often promote extortionate pricing, bribes, etc.

The value of the current arrangement is students can't ignore the prices.

I'd bet a nice lunch that if books were part of tuition, the net dollars flowing to publishers would increase.

Why would schools send money to publishers that they can hoard for themselves?

Because you only fight so hard to reduce costs that you can just pass through.

Schools -- assuming willingness / ability to spend $ on education is fixed -- are already losing $ that could have gone to them to publishers.

When I studied my engineering degree (not in the US) at a pretty high-ranked institution, textbooks were rarely used. I think I only actually purchased and used one, and it was approx $50 (brand new, used was cheaper). Often a course text was set, alongside the instruction of "don't bother to use it" (!) One prof did use his own book (the only time I saw this) for teaching, and had uploaded the book as PDF chapters (searchable text format, no less) to the online course page.

I therefore have a double-take when I read about people spending upwards of $1000 for books in a semester - I just can't imagine what that course would be like, or how students would feel with that kind of teaching that is presumably very heavily reliant on the book.

> Here's a weird idea. Bundle materials into tuition expenses.

As a former textbook seller, professors will exploit this for profit by publishing their own textbook at inflated prices and collecting a nice reward. This does happen in some places (or did, I'm out of the industry).

Imagine if every state or country developed their own open source curriculum, instead of allowing publishers to exists as owners and gatekeepers of knowledge.

Couple of points, which as a former seller I suspect you know, but students often do not.

1) There is no best book for a subject. What suits a class in Elementary Statistics in one place or program might be all wrong for another.

2) There's a lot more to developing texts (or, as you say, curriculum) than people think. Besides a book, there are exercises and answers to the exercises. There are in class slides, perhaps programming components, and the elephant in the room is integration with the most popular LMSs. And all this has to be kept up to date.

It really requires money. At least in the US, I'm unaware of funding.

I'm an Open Text author so I'm sympathetic to your thoughts but it proves to be complex, IMHO

It's complex, but it's that what governments exist for? Solving large complex problems for the greater good?

1) Totally agree, there needs to be competition and humility to say, "Hey our regions Math book is inferior, let's use X".

2) Absolutely and I don't mean to dismissively hand wave away the hard work that will be required ("just code the app" is a good comparison) but rather trying to simply state another direction to take.

It requires money, but I think less than many suspect (without the publishers margins!). But the investment would pay for itself and would be a good _start_ to tackling the inflated costs of education.

I don't know if you are US, but at least here, I perceive it is against the current culture to do this. Love to be wrong, but I don't think so.

Northern neighbour :), so yeah, what should be done is unlikely to occur :(

> It incentivizes the right people with the power and market participation to optimize for the right thing.

But it doesn't. What incentivizes people in power right now is the AirBnB and TicketMaster fee schedules. That's why we have those things.

You can describe a better solution, one you could enact if you got into power, but you might never be allowed to get into power because you have that idea as a solution. The policy makes the power structure less than the power structure determines policy.

I would argue to you that piracy is the power structure answer to poor incentive structures in academia.

Do you think we would have experienced streaming as it is today without the piracy of old?

> Bundle materials into tuition expenses.

Unbundling who the money is paid to is part of the reason this happens. It's socially forbidden for professors, who are white-collar workers, to ask for tips, so making you buy a book you never use of which they get, say, 30% of the price is the only way they can divert more money into their pocket from that of the students. Just see it as a "mandatory service fee".

More like a principal-agent problem than moral hazard, but that's just me being pedantic, you're absolutely right.

Universities could solve these problems in many ways, including just having a price-cap on student textbooks.

That the problem continues isn't because the right tweak hasn't been tried but because university administrators allow this situation. The reason they allow the situation is both that they some material interest in it but also because the administrators and funders of the university operate with an ideology that sees markets inherently as a solution to problems.

The concept of using endless debt to pay an escalating price for privatized knowledge is the epitome of efficient use of resources in this view. And your idea of rebundling the costs certainly would change the regime if it somehow got tried.

I work in this field, and this is already a thing. It’s somewhat euphemistically called “inclusive textbooks” because the price is already included in your fees. The price is typically significantly lower than you would pay individually because they know that they’re forcing everyone to pay instead of just the subset of students who would choose to pay if given a choice.

I guess the question is whether the students as a group pay more over all. If not, it feels like a sneaky way for the school and textbook publishers to charge an extra fee for textbooks. It's a fee everyone has to pay, and which the schools control the rate of. And if not having to pay for it directly means that people stop paying attention, the price could slowly crept up to previous levels, and relatively few people would even notice. I mean, obviously no university would ever do something so greedy, so this is of course a purely theoretical proposition...

I imagine the overall revenue is greater than if students were given the choice to purchase or not. I've talked with recent college grads who purchased 1-2 textbooks during all four years, and who indicate this is common at their college. The discount given for "inclusive textbook" programs is substantial, but I don't think it is substantial enough to outweigh the fact that many students choose to purchase textbooks only once in a blue moon.

There are "new model" institutions that are doing that. I got my BSCS from Western Governors. Tuition covered everything. Books, certifications, etc. Any material I wanted beyond the course text was either available in their digital library or I would search for used to get a dirt cheap price on an older edition.

My partner is doing her degree now and her institution, in two cases... a math course and biology course, opted to use OpenStax text books. After looking through them, I liked them enough that I pick up the print editions for sub-$40 new and use them for refreshing things.

I went to University of Wisconsin-Platteville and they had a book center on campus with every book for every class. "Rental" costs were part of tuition (and something like $300/semester -- ridiculously low).

The idea of having to source these books is mostly foreign to me, though many of my friends went through it. I never did, and still do not, understand why this isn't a thing everywhere...

I attend a school that bundles books and a laptop into tuition. It's honestly a god send and when i want to keep a book i can just go online and buy a cheaper used version. Plus, the discontinued books get sold by the school for $2 each. Most of them are just management and accounting stuff I'm not interested but I've built up a pretty significant biology and chemistry library for less than $30.

And this is the cheapest college in the state for me. It really emphasizes how lots of the cost of college is just the fancy name on the diploma.

The bundle would be too hard to pull off IMO. How is my 100k of debt going to cover all these administrative employees, the new climbing wall AND some books?

Here's another weird idea, make everything older than 10yr free to digitally reproduce.

We cannot be funding things that are not truly new. I know that textbooks are well known for having multiple editions that pretty much just scramble the pages, but students should be able to map books around, and I bet that professors can also point out to the pages on older editions.

On the subject of morals and text books: In Surely You're Joking Mr. Feynman he talks about serving on a committee to select a new text book for a school.

""" A few days later a guy from the book depository called me up and said, "We're ready to send you the books, Mr. Feynman; there are three hundred pounds."

I was overwhelmed.

"It's all right, Mr. Feynman; we'll get someone to help you read them."

I couldn't figure out how you do that: you either read them or you don't read them. I had a special bookshelf put in my study downstairs (the books took up seventeen feet), and began reading all the books that were going to be discussed in the next meeting. We were going to start out with the elementary schoolbooks. """

So right away we see the text book business is bullshit because the peddler has an established business of helping others review the books, but as Feynman asks, how do you actually do that? How do you help someone read and review a text book?

Later:

""" Then I came to my first meeting. The other members had given some kind of ratings to some of the books, and they asked me what my ratings were. My rating was often different from theirs, and they would ask, "Why did you rate that book low?" I would say the trouble with that book was this and this on page so-and-so – I had my notes.

They discovered that I was kind of a goldmine: I would tell them, in detail, what was good and bad in all the books; I had a reason for every rating.

I would ask them why they had rated this book so high, and they would say, "Let us hear what you thought about such and such a book." I would never find out why they rated anything the way they did. Instead, they kept asking me what I thought.

We came to a certain book, part of a set of three supplementary books published by the same company, and they asked me what I thought about it.

I said, "The book depository didn't send me that book, but the other two were nice."

Someone tried repeating the question: "What do you think about that book?"

"I said they didn't send me that one, so I don't have any judgment on it."

The man from the book depository was there, and he said, "Excuse me; I can explain that. I didn't send it to you because that book hadn't been completed yet. There's a rule that you have to have every entry in by a certain time, and the publisher was a few days late with it. So it was sent to us with just the covers, and it's blank in between. The company sent a note excusing themselves and hoping they could have their set of three books considered, even though the third one would be late."

It turned out that the blank book had a rating by some of the other members! They couldn't believe it was blank, because [the book] had a rating. In fact, the rating for the missing book was a little bit higher than for the two others. The fact that there was nothing in the book had nothing to do with the rating. """

And so on. You can read the full story in the book Surely You're Joking Mr. Feynman or at https://www.rangevoting.org/FeynTexts.html .

> Bundle materials into tuition expenses.

This is a very very poor idea that binds advanced students to the standard of a place.

This is very elitist and will deepen the divide.

If you are a really smart individual in a bad college due to your socio economic situations, you need to be able to read what MIT students are reading and not your below average peers are reading.

That's exactly what we were doing at a previous employer. It was called "Equitable Access"

https://get.vitalsource.com/vitalsource-advantage/equitable-...

> It incentivizes the right people with the power and market participation to optimize for the right thing.

How so? At that point it's a small cost buried (read: hidden) in much larger cost. Who is going to go to the mat for "the kidz" if no one is going to notice the savings?

Sounds like we have to peacefully protest until Citizens United gets overturned so the publishers can't just out lobby/spend us. Then continue peacefully protesting to change the tuition/book cost structure.

Totally realistic set of goals, but until then I'll be pirating.

Don't try to externalize blame when it falls squarely on University Executives and Administrators.

Their primary focus seems to be empire building: Create as many admin positions under me in the Org Chart as I can get away with and extract as much money from students as possible to fund the growth of my empire.

This has been allowed to happen because they have essentially unlimited access to funding, no accountability and can make hand wave arguments about needing more staff (DEI, etc.)

The solution is gov loans for higher ed needs to be contingent on a given school having administrative costs be less than 10% of their budget.

So peacefully protest the University Executives and Administrators?

> It incentivizes the right people

Wrong, at least in my experience. Professors with published books wanted us to buy those books for their course. They would just pass the cost (from which they profit) back to the student if they were bundling, with no alternative to the student.

> Here's a weird idea. Bundle materials into tuition expenses.

I think that's how it's done in the UK? I don't remember paying out the wazoo for my course books. If I did have to pay it would have been some nominal amount.

Here's a weird idea, education should be free

> Bundle materials into tuition expenses.

Professors: OK, my book is now $10,000.

what ends up happening is Dean/Department head will publish textbook and will force entire university to purchase his textbook and earn $$$.

this is whats happening at some elite/Ivy league universities

Every once in a while it turns out that it's just a really good book. Gilbert Strang's books were like that. He actually revised them between editions. I mean some editions are totally reorganized. You could tell he did it because he thought the material could be better presented, not just because he could make more money on a new edition.

It’s so much worse than you think.

Many textbooks come with license keys specifically so you can’t buy used books anymore.

Students who do buy a used book are typically coerced into buying the license key to do digital homework, or whatever other reason.

When I was teaching during a graduate fellowship I accepted paper assignments for students who bought used books, or who shared books with other students. The Pearson representative complained and I was given a talking to by the graduate student dean about consistency or some such nonsense. Eventually I would be reassigned to teach classes that didn’t involve digital components.

We called it the textbook industrial complex.

I'm not sure the situation calls for such diplomatic language.

You are fucking with this company's fief.

There, that's what's really going on. They feel entitled to earning money and are pissed they need any customers at all to get it.

Public libraries are now paying more money per use for licensing fees than an individual would pay. Libraries are pretty much looking into the abyss, no more permanent copies of anything. All books a rented, they all have usage limits, typically some combination of date of expiration as well as number of checkouts - they the library must pay for another license.

It's beyond absurd. I'm not at all sympathetic to this business model. Meanwhile author percentages have gone down.

Digital is dramatically worse, except for the fief holders.

I do not think this is much of a metaphor, even. The whole paralegal system built around so-called intellectual property is conceptually analogous to the feudal system of banalités, private tolls, guild privileges and monopolies etc. abolished in the early days of the French Revolution. In the sense that it is a set of privileges invented, granted and enforced by the central state power to some private parties, allowing the latter to directly extract rent from the public.

By the way various feudal privileges were fascinating by the way in how Byzantine and random they were, of course from the modern perspective. At the end even the nobles supporting the Enlightenment were for ending them: some say also because they saw more money in free(r?) enterprise. I kind of doubt we'll live to see similar sentiment in copyright robber barons.

Yes, this is the right issue - it's their fief.

They're farming money off the students. Don't mess with the crop, even if you are the crop.

Is this the sort of sustainable business that our governments are encouraging?

The move to online or digital textbooks was supposed to drastically cut prices. No paper, no printing expense, no shipping expense, no storage expense, fewer bookstore employees to pay, etc.

What actually happened is textbook publishing houses like Pearson just leveraged the digital tecnology to make duplication or resale difficult or impossible, and kept all the cost savings to themselves.

This seems similar to a lot of "automation" concern - it helps consumers but you're still cutting a lot of jobs. I think we need a better social safety net before we can truly see the benefits of improving production chains. Otherwise you're mainly going to see people justifying existing jobs (as has historically been the case)

TaaS

Why wouldn’t the dean tell them to go pound sand? Does Pearson do anything for the university except extracting money?

I did more or less. I said I’m the instructor of record I can decide how I take assignments. Next thing was “paperless” complaints. I was “using too much paper.” After a little back and forth they got tired of me, handed me a degree and told me to leave.

I think what really irked them was other students found out and started demanding it from all the real professors and adjuncts and in other contexts. Then I was an actual problem not just a troublemaker.

"Then I was an actual problem not just a troublemaker."

Maybe I'm weird, but this sounds like the highest form of compliment.

Nope. I see it the same way. Perhaps we are both weird then.

This is why we’re on “Hacker” news :)

It's the other 99% that are weird, not us.

Indeed! Well Played.

It’s also a great quote.

Publishers have a sales force that courts and encourages (bribes) academics and administrators. They fund conferences and provide jobs (writing textbooks).

It's a patronage network that exploits young people.

> exploits young people.

And their parents. And the general taxpayer (via student loans).

because that Dean is likely responsible for receiving payments - maybe not personally, but to the school - from that same business.

Or that business simply gives small preferred publishing deals to the Dean's professors. Often these professors have their own books that are required for the class (and nobody else uses these books).

You end up with books that sell < 100 copies a year that would never be published from a market demand perspective but provide extra $ for the professor (which matters to the Dean for retention and salary).

I graduated from a large state university engineering school 20 years ago and this was the case so I'm sure it's only become more "enshittified".

FYI, this has been going on since at least the 70s. Assigned text of sub-standard quality in one of my classes had been recently written by a prof at a neighboring college.

It's a literal racket.

I think that high textbook prices is one of the many little signals we sent young people, for the last 3-5 decades, that we are not interested in creating a better world for them. Isn’t it interesting how little effort has been invested in mitigating the runaway cost of higher education? That we enabled college administrators to turn up the cost dial without speed bumps? No wonder why young people have become cynical: we exploit them at every turn.

Yes - why do students feel fine pirating text books? Because it’s blatantly obvious to even the most doe-eyed freshman that they’re being fucked by the textbook company and that the administrators and professors are at best complicit. Welcome to the university, now ignore all that crap on the marketing material and open your wallet - no, the 17th edition of “discrete math” isn’t acceptable, you need the 18th.

Especially because there's no way undergraduate discrete math has changed significantly since last year - the only difference is going to be shuffling the page and problem numbers around so you can't get away with using the older textbook.

Yeah it seems to be a very prevalent thing in the world.

We exploit 20 something year olds new found freedom and cashflows. This is the first time they are making money and are looking to be independent and "grown up" or "find themselves" so the market says "hey, I'll help you find yourself if you give me money."

Young people have a natural sense of invisibility. "I can do anything I set my mind to" has been burned into their brains since grade school. The market turns this into "I can buy anything I want to."

It's like society says "Look, you're grown up now so you need to participate in the economy. Not only do you need to make money, but what's more important is you need to spend money so I can have it."

This is done around all key stages of life where insecurities can be exploited.

The wedding industry from wedding rings to venues, new babies, even interviewing for white collar jobs used to be accompanied with the need for a new suit.

Once it can be established something is important and to be revered, rent seeking knows no bounds.

All true and don't forget that even death you're not safe (the funeral industry is one of the worst offenders).

The American Way of Death by Jessica Mitford.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_American_Way_of_Death

The world burns hotter and more apparent everyday to the younger generation, those of us that survive are going to be extremely cynical for the rest of our lives.

Goal misalignment - education vs profit, and similarly health vs profit. Both discriminate against poor people by making their services too expensive to reach.

Absolutely. My entire university experience confirmed this: Structurally, the place didn't give a shit. Individuals in the system were great, but the system itself was primarily set up to extract from students while they are too naive to resist it, and indebt them to the financial system.

Virginia Military Institute's math department decided they'd solve it by just writing their own open source books:

https://www.vmi.edu/academics/departments/applied-mathematic...

My wife is a professor there and wrote their APEX precalculus book several years ago (why precalculus is needed for college students is another matter). The print price was raised this year but is still well under $20. I think I paid around $350 in 2005 for the text we used for 1205/1206 at VT.

VMI also does outreach to help other schools adopt their books and transition from whatever they'd been using. Excellent use of public funds IMO.

In my first year, our chemistry and physics professors both authored their own textbooks for their courses. It was in the days before copyleft and open source, but the physics prof ran a print shop in his backyard, hand-bound the textbooks and sold them to us at cost (which was about 10% of similar published books).

The chemistry prof, in contrast, contracted with a publishing house, and made sure to make a few changes every year, including re-numbering the exercises to discourage buying and selling of old textbooks. The (expensive) textbooks came with accompanying lab-books, which cost almost as much as the textbooks themselves. Lab assignments were only accepted on pages torn out from the official lab books.

Yeah we had lab books like that at VT. Might as well have been a spiral bound notebook, the lab steps were often amended/replaced with a handout by the particular TA running the section.

Truly representing the best of what academia can offer right there. I thank your wife and the entirety of VMI for serving the public good, unlike those universities just paying lip service to it.

Thanks! I've let her know about the positive reception here. I get the impression that, although she likes doing the work and believes it's an essential cause, it's often thankless, especially outside VMI.

I studied law for a few years in Denmark and I remember the insane amount of money required to purchase all the books on the curriculum

Most of them were written by the professors who taught the course and every year or two, they'd reshuffle the contents of the book to make it harder for students to follow the course by purchasing used copies from the previous year

Most of the time only a small part of the books were actually part of the curriculum. It wasn't unusual to spend $100-$200 for a 700 page book only to later realise only 50 pages from it would actually be part of the curriculum. It seemed to me the page count had only been boosted to inflate the sticker price

I can understand why students turn to pirated copies when they realise they're just viewed as cash cows by the teaching staff

In Brazil the university libraries are expected to make available every book that is necessary for a course.

That makes for a lot of very interesting behaviors, like compiling "exercise equivalence tables" between different editions of a book, and students having a culture of self-organizing around the library sharing availability.

I believe if I had to buy all the books I used, the cost would be similar to rent.

I've never seen "exercise equivalence tables" in the US - that's a great idea! I suppose if pirated PDFs are accessible, this isn't necessary any more.

I quit a mandatory econ course, in my engineering track, because the teacher insisted that we buy their 200$ textbook. I switched class to his competitor.

The recent strategy I’ve heard of is to release new version of books with special online codes needed to access other content. That way, the students can’t even purchase used books.

That's how it works for many courses now.

A strategy I thought was fair at my school was - the main text is free, but you can pay for extra practice problems written by the professor for like $50.

That seemed fair to me since I know these adjunct professors aren't making anything for the amount of time they spend.

What subject is this that doesn't have thousands of practice problems available for free online or in a $10 used book?

Almost everything in North America is criminally priced with almost zero regulations, and all political parties are responsible for that: wanna buy a house, enjoy your 70y mortgage, wanna study, enjoy your student loans and expensive textbooks, oh you actually got sick, how rude?? Pay a hefty price or enjoy your 10hrs waiting time in the ER, Restaurants?! Pfft, pay the inflated prices for garbage food and don’t forget the 15%tip and credit card costs is also on you!! Gas is expensive? Yeah sorry despite the trillions we didn’t invest much in public transportation or bike/walking infrastructure. And so on.

Gas is insanely cheap in the US compared to almost any other developed country.

Food is fairly inexpensive as well.

Housing has major problems in part stemming from over-regulation via zoning, NIMBYism, etc.

You might argue that the gas is cheaper, but it isn’t cheap, additionally, when it increases (and it will), US pretty much have no other options except cars.

Food isn’t cheap either and constantly is getting expensive (1), and I’m not even touching the subject of its bad quality.

(1) https://www.nerdwallet.com/article/finance/price-of-food

US grocery store food isn’t really any more expensive than Europe and actually is cheaper. The price of milk for instance is cheaper than the European average. https://www.numbeo.com/cost-of-living/country_price_rankings...

The actual cost of gas is actually about the same in US and other western countries, with the major difference being that in almost every other country you pay a hefty extra tax on gas on top of that cost - above and beyond usual sales taxes, often more than the actual gas cost - as means of reducing emissions and/or funding roads. So yes, US has cheaper gas at the pump, but it's not because of market efficiency but because of the differences of government policy to encourage/discourage gas consumption.

The market for gas/oil is already relatively extremely efficient so there isn’t much space left for cutting prices in that regard

> Food is fairly inexpensive as well

Really? I admit that this is anecdotal, but as an American when I studied abroad in Europe I was consistently pleasantly surprised by how much less expensive eating out was. In particular I felt like it was much more affordable to get healthier food at restaurants compared to the US, and also much cheaper to get alcohol drinks at restaurants. There were a few exceptions (Copenhagen, Paris) but even major cities like Rome, Munich, & Barcelona had pretty well priced restaurants (which included tip).

I’m talking groceries, not eating out. Eating out in cities has high costs due to high cost of living in cities. Average wage of a waiter or waitress in the whole of New York State is $23/hour (including tips), vs about $8-10/hour in Spain/Barcelona. So no doubt you’d have a cheaper experience eating out in Europe, the wages are much lower! And this is also why it’s bad to use eating out as a benchmark, because it’s dominated by labor costs and by its very nature (and sociocultural expectations), it’s labor-intensive. So as overall wages increase, so will the price of eating out. So Americans, with our much higher average wages, are able to get a much better deal eating out in European nations with their lower labor costs.

But actual food (grocery) prices tend to be overall higher in Europe than the US. Milk (easier to compare than most things) costs $1.03/liter in the US compared to $1.14/liter in France, $1.35 in Italy, $0.96/liter in Spain, $1.28 in the UK, and $1.85 in Norway. https://www.numbeo.com/cost-of-living/country_price_rankings...

They're probably talking about groceries, not restaurants.

[flagged]

> 15%tip

You mean 25% tip, minimum -- according to many POSs!

Where can I get one of these 70 year mortgages?

Canada, of course!(1)

(1) https://vm.tiktok.com/ZMYEGwwSD/

Wow...tiktok is blocked for me at work...is that fixed rate or ARM financing?

My impression is the Canadian government only backstops mortgages up to 25 years, so (without having seen the video) I would guess it's some kind of ARM.

Here’s the video https://files.catbox.moe/rpp5fp.mp4

DRM is also frustrating for textbooks. I’m fine buying books, I have a “trophy case” in my office of unopened books because I like holding onto physical copies and supporting the creation of books that I find valuable.

But I don’t want to lug around 40lbs of paper everywhere I go. So I get a DRMless pdf copy of the book too.

I’d get the OReily subscription in a heartbeat if I could read it on the device of my choosing. But I can’t so I don’t.

I want to download the ebook to the ereader of my choice (ReMarkable) where I have instant access to my entire library, the ability to markup the document without defacing it (notes are separate layers), and the ability to add blank pages for notes between the real pages (this will damage the binding of a real book).

Books are objectively inferior for studying unless you need to rapidly flip between pages. And I’m going to optimize for my own time and efficiency every time.

As a recent grad, I can speak on this a bit:

My biggest problem with the current textbook industry (among many) is that each textbook manufacturer uses their own proprietary format for reading the books and doing assignments. Wiley and Sons uses WileyPlus which, in its original incarnation, used Flash until the very last day Flash was officially supported. Don't want a potential security hole installed onto your laptop? Too bad, transfer to a different school because this one has been bought out by Wiley and Sons. And the interface was absolutely horrid. If you were doing division in their math website and entered a "/", they never set up the Javascript to state you were typing in a textbox so Firefox would open the "search this page" prompt.

This system made doing my homework more frustrating, not less. I dreaded doing math homework every day from age 16-20, not because I didn't want to learn, but because I was constantly fighting WileyPlus' "quirks" instead of just doing the math.

All of these websites, not WileyPlus alone, also have horrible uptime. There were often times I had pressing homework to do and would be met with a "Servers are down for maintenence" screen. Since the textbook publishers cut predatory deals with the universities, professors are completely unable to switch to another publisher if these availability problems get out of hand. This leads to worse education outcomes, frustration with the professors who are constantly wrestling with the website, and students being forced to take out predatory loans to pay for these horrible books.

I do not miss college.

Reading this makes me very grateful to my university math department for choosing WeBWorK: https://openwebwork.org/

When I was in school, if we could find a way to take a course without buying a full price book we would. Piracy was a no brainer — it opened doors to all kinds of learning. I’m hugely thankful to the cracking teams that made some textbooks free and helped me learn Photoshop for $0 as a student.

It must have been "acceptable" for a couple of decades. When I was in Uni. almost 20 years ago, we'd all share scanned books between us. Don't think I ever heard "Oh, no thanks - that's illegal"

Well that's extremely easy for publishers to defeat these days. Just make all the homework questions online and put a one time use code in the front and lock essential course material behind the purchasw of a _new_ book. Lots more publishers do this then was probably 20 years ago.

Culprits are always the instructors/professors who teach courses. Aren't they happy with their salaries? How much royalty do these instructors get from selling $200 textbook to their students? These professors should be ashamed of themselves in involving this scammy behavior, while at the same time these unethical/immoral professors ask their students to sign honor code.

I'm not a professor, just a full time instructor, but my salary is 40% what I'd make in industry. But it's worth it for the great health insurance and 4 months off per year. And for the fact that teaching is what I love.

The salary is frankly embarrassing to share with my peers in industry.

But not all of us take it out on the students. I find free books whenever I can for my courses. I even write books and let the students (and everyone) freely use them. If there are good for-profit books out there, I only use them if they're cheap and something useful beyond college.

I got it from Dad, who was also a teacher. He got tired of book prices and wrote his own. Students still had to buy it, but they could do so at cost at the college print shop. Dad made no money from it.

If only there were more teachers like you and your dad

Are you THE beej of the network programming guide?

Guilty. :)

Are you considering becoming a professor? Salaries for many US colleges and universities are much higher than most think.

Everybody's considering becoming a professor. What's your research portfolio look like? How much grant money can you raise?

Demand for those jobs is extreme. Meanwhile the ranks of tenured professors are shrinking as colleges make more use of contract teaching staff.

I think instructor is where I want to be. I'm focused on instructional excellence, and I think research and grant writing would get in the way of that. My dream job is actually working for a community college with a pure focus on teaching and learning, but the pay there doesn't justify that decision financially, sadly.

Anyone who is a full-time instructor at a university has a strongly considered becoming a professor, but weren’t able to get that job for whatever reason.

And even if you were a professor, if you’re not bringing big money you’re not earning a great salary either. Go look on Transparent California and see how much tenured faculty at a CSU are making.

Nah, almost never. That is usually forced by the university, publishers and, surprisingly, by the students and their parents:

Say the textbook used for the last 5 years costs $300 and now you want to switch to a different, cheaper book. Now you have to convince admin (why switch? The previous one works) and students (I pay $$$ tuition, why are you cheaping out on the book? Is it worse?).

> how much royalty do they get?

Basically nothing, so that is obviously not the reason and you should be ashamed of yourself for suggesting that.

I don't need to be ashamed of suggesting that. These professors should be ashamed of themselves for not taking this issue with their administration. If they can't stand for these issues, how can they teach future generations?

I see you have entirely avoided admitting you were wrong, then made up another accusation and climbed on a high horse. You obviously have no interest in solving anything, just in virtue signaling.

> Basically nothing

You might consider providing a more concrete example if you're going to throw shame around. This answer feels emotionally charged and incomplete.

> You might consider providing a more concrete example if you're going to throw shame around. This answer feels emotionally charged and incomplete.

Exactly what I am calling out. Thanks.

Textbook prices are so high that they create the impression among students that the publishers are stealing from them. Copyright provides publishers with a legal monopoly, which they exploit to increase prices. Whether we like it or not, piracy disrupts this monopoly.

Given years of abuse, the customer base that purchases textbooks has no patience for moral grandstanding. 'Lower prices or die' should be the message to publishers.

Professors and textbook companies are ripping students off. They are immorally trying to suck each student dry with exorbitant prices. I think pirated textbooks is 100% fair play and I support it 100%.

Back in the 90s, copy shops across from the university would have entire books photocopied, and we could get them for $20 instead of $150. Some of the international students would go back home to Hong Kong or India for the summer and take orders on next year's books, because they were much cheaper in Asia. This is a racket that has been going on for decades but only got exponentially worse these days, and I completely support starving these robber barons of any revenue.

https://torrentfreak.com/court-sentences-man-for-selling-pir...

[While this type of activity is clearly illegal, the sentence also has an ironic twist. A quick calculation shows that the fine and confiscated money amount to less than $20 per pirated textbook, meaning that buying them legally would probably have been more expensive.]

Won’t things like blanket student loan forgiveness or very cheap student loans make such moral hazards even worse? Publishers, college administrators, football coaches, etc. will try to extract as much as possible from the free student loans provided by the government.

Of course it would. There’s an argument that cheap student loans combined with need-based scholarships are one of the factors that caused college prices to balloon in the first place. Need based scholarships allow universities to charge everyone the maximum they’re willing to pay (“just give us your parent’s income and a ton of other data, and we’ll tell you how much you have to pay to go here!”)

> football coaches

The football team probably brings in enough revenue to pay the coach.

And now you know why there are substantial and significant oppositions to forgiving student loans. Not only is the notion patently unfair, it doesn't even address any of the actual problems and will just make them worse.

Since the vast majority of tuition is just stuffed into endowments, the repayment of funds from the scams should be taken from the endowments.

Hang on there. A legal hazard is not necessarily a moral hazard.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moral_hazard

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moral_hazard

Fair enough. In context, it seemed the commenter was referring to individuals engaging in copyright infringement.

There was a mathematics professor in Canada who wrote what became the standard calculus textbooks used in universities here (the violin ones). Anyways, one day a local paper did a little showcase of the house that textbooks paid for and now that I'm trying to dig up a reference to that article, I find it has its own Wikipedia page!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Integral_House

Suffice to say, I, nor anyone else, should not feel bad about pirating that series of books.

To be fair, I used Stewart's calculus textbook and it was pretty good.

The final cost of the house was estimated at $24 million.

I was in Germany as an exchange student (in 2012). In the library, they had copying machines that photographed from top and processed the images so they looked like perfect scans. You would just go there with a book and USB drive, turn pages for a while and then you had a copy of that book. Needless to say that we distributed the copies. So it was only necessary when we couldn’t find the exact version. The libraries usually had several copies books.

For some courses, professors also just uploaded PDFs of entire books in the learning platform.

There was also an on-campus shop where you could buy the printed slides for an entire course for a few Euros. I still have one of them for nostalgic reasons because I was intensely studying the math in there. By the way it was beautifully done by the professor's team in LaTeX.

States should mandate that public universities use open textbooks. Federal government should make open textbooks, open journals, and FRAND licensing of patents mandatory as a condition of subsidies and other largesse like student loan guarantees.

That’s a good idea, and it should be paired with grants or some other compensation/support for people who develop those open books.

State colleges already receive and enormous amount of public money. For 2024 in Washington State, "For higher education, the budget makes significant investments across the state, totaling $1.2 billion."

https://senatedemocrats.wa.gov/mullet/2023/03/20/senate-intr...

> State colleges already receive and enormous amount of public money.

So do the roads. Are you making a case that it's too much or too little?

Yes. We should determine who has the ability to write books and then provide for their needs.

https://sparcopen.org/news/2023/congress-introduces-bill-to-...

In engineering school in the 1990s, a Taiwanese student in our school would order all the books in Taiwan and then their mom would ship a huge box to us in Canada. It costs 50% less than buying the same books in Canada.

Textbooks are a racket.

I bought an Indian copy of a microelectronics textbook on eBay, replete with a dire warning on the back cover about not selling it outside the subcontinent. The only difference was the paper is thinner and the diagrams aren't two-tone, they're greyscale. Luckily, however, electrons do seem work the same on all continents.

That said, we weren't required to buy any books at all and and books we were required to read were kept at the library in the "core" section, so there'd always be a number in the building, not lent out. As it turned out, in retrospect, I don't think any specific book was ever actually "required" to be read.

I did buy a few books (about 10 over 4 years), including a copy of Stroud's Engineering Mathematics so old it recommended logarithm tables (otherwise it was perfectly serviceable). I bought those because I actually wanted them to keep and I still have nearly all of them.

Basic ethical principles should make it acceptable.

We live in an age where you no longer need a printing press to manufacture and distribute books. And public universities already get enough of my tax dollars that they should be publishing the text books required for their clases. For free. Public funding equals public availability and ownership.

When a university demands a $300 book from some private publisher, it amounts to fraud and all involved should be investigated, prosecuted, and convicted of federal felonies. Stop the grift.

What the fuck are we paying professors for, if not to write the written materials they deem requirements to learn the curriculum they teach? Get to work motherfuckers.

When I was a student, there were several alternatives to just photocopying the entire textbook (back then you couldn't download scanned versions). The university had a library with usually at least 5-10 copies of all the textbooks required by the courses, and 1-2 copies of books that were tangentially related to the courses. For the books expected to be in-demand because they were used by courses, usually the bulk of them weren't available to borrow, so they were in the library at all times. You could use it during the day, and take it to a study area to read and summarise the parts that mattered to you (the best way to learn), or photocopy parts if you were short for time.

There was also a second hand bookshop, where you could buy books for about 25% of the original price and usually sell them back to the bookshop for about 20% of the price at the end of the year, so they just got restocked most years and sold to the next batch of students needing it. This system only broke down when the course changed substantially, but in practice that was usually only about 1 of the 10+ modules each year.

In my 3 year course, I probably read about 100 relevant books cover to cover, bought maybe 3 full price because I knew I'd want to keep them for longer than the course, and kept 2 of the second hand books rather than selling them back.

Back then, I also had friends studying law, and they had to pay a fee at the start of each year, but would receive a pack each term that was several inches thick of photocopied case material. Presumably that was because they weren't predominantly reading to learn and internalise the material, but they needed to constantly quote specific sections at multiple points during their assignments, and so pretty much everybody needed the same material at the same time. But in that case, the university had permission to duplicate the necessary material.

I’ve had professors share PDFs of copyrighted textbooks with the class. I doubt this was legally valid in any way.

I personally love to buy textbooks because I think a physical book is easier to retain. Printing and binding a PDF at Fedex is usually a similar cost, and I’d rather have the nice physical copy decorate my bookshelf, like a hard-won trophy.

I would make the argument that textbooks should cost more than novels because I can read a novel at a page per minute or two, but a textbook is probably more like a page per 30-60 (on average). Then again, many Dover books cost around the same price as novels.

That being said, you might need to consult 3 or 4 different textbooks for a course, and on a student’s budget, this is absurd. Anybody that doesn’t have parents in the upper middle class and beyond will suffer. Science is an engine of social mobility for the intellectually gifted and nobody should feel bad for pirating textbooks. I think, like pirating journal articles, the only people that disagree with you are publishing companies.

If educational institutions had any morality or integrity, they would use their large staff and student body to write public domain textbooks. Undergrad textbooks do not contain any new or novel information.

We had paperback editions which were a fraction of the cost of the US editions.

Some years ago, to prevent US students from using these versions, most publishers changed the page numbering, some content and the problem sets.

When I taught algorithms, I had 2 or 3 textbooks students could buy if they really wanted them, but there was no required textbook. I provided students with detailed slides and lectures notes covering the course material. I would try to find a handful of websites and videos I had vetted covering the topics using the same terminology as we used in class, or with a note explaining the difference.

Not only did it mean students were not stuck with a surprise bill for a book they'd rarely use, but it also meant I had more freedom to teach what and how I wanted. Since I was teaching it with a focus on being a day-to-day developer, I put in my own section on await/async style coding and optimizing chains of dependent asynchronous calls. It was one of my favorite sections as it was exactly the sort of thing I would actually do in my job.

The professor for the data compression class I took encouraged us to photocopy the pages from the textbook that we needed for the week. Turned out that he was the author and was very apologetic about the price of the textbook though he had no real control over it.

I support this kind of piracy. If society thinks education for kids is important, they should make it easy for kids to get that education.

One of my early tech jobs was working for a startup that created dynamic/randomized questions to go on a CD stuck in the back of text books. The same tech was used to create randomized online tests to go with the textbooks. Our biggest customer was Pearson, and once I realized the impact on students I was pissed. Completely eliminated sharing of books, and even simple things like group solving of problems since each student had unique problem sets.

Of course the same company fired me when I was fighting cancer, and then was acquired by Wimba. Oh and if T. Mack Brown reads this site, you can kiss my ass...

It's really not like most people really consider piracy a crime anyway. Most people have pirated something at least once, it's basically a ubiquitous 'crime'. The war on copying has failed.

Meta question - why do we need the latest version of a text book every year. None of the undergraduate fundamental subjects change every year. It’s a racket - problems and some content are modified a bit and moved around making last year’s text book obsolete for page numbers and problem numbers. There really ought to be a set of 100 or so STEM textbooks that cover all the basics and are open source made available freely with source globally. All it will take is one billionaire to decide they want to do this and buy out rights or commision new content.

Any price is too much. 99% of the time 99% of people in university are not learning anything cutting edge, they're learning old things to prepare them to learn new things. There are plenty of works out of copyright (or that never were in copyright) that can be used themselves, or that could be stitched together to create complete courses.

This seems like a basic thing that governments should be doing, but governments never do anything that would "crowd out" rent-seekers, because they're the servants of rent-seekers.

Maybe, if you're a multi-billionaire, use one of those billions to put together enough unencumbered material to fill a wide-ranging university program? Or if you're a university, while you're committing to open-access, make a commitment to your students that all of the materials that they'll need will be available freely, on the net, if at all possible? So many billions sloshing around, so many people claiming the problem is so complicated, when it looks very simple. It's as manufactured a problem as the idea that taxes are so complicated that the IRS can't figure them out.

edit: and succinctly,

> I think that high textbook prices is one of the many little signals we sent young people, for the last 3-5 decades, that we are not interested in creating a better world for them.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36186362

I propose that students should write the textbooks and pass them on to the next class, who in turn edits and writes more of the same textbook. Using a tool like a Wiki that keeps complete history of every addition, edit, delete to the content of the teaching material. And, of course, with citations and references.

Start with the old textbooks in the school library and teachers editions and give writing assignments for new original writing that becomes the teaching material for the current class and future classes.

It's been a little over two decades since I first attended university, but I recall that very few of the courses had a textbook. The lecturer wrote notes, be it on paper to hand out or on the boards to be copied and annotated. Now and then a reference was made to a textbook for further reading or for some specific proof or some such, but in no way was any course taught from a textbook in such a way that you simply needed the textbook. This was at a university in London, reading Physics.

I wonder how unusual (or not) that is? Is the heavy textbook emphasis a US thing, or is it more common?

(About a decade later I read Maths with the Open University, which is basically the student on their own for six years learning some trick mathematics; a couple of those modules definitely taught from textbooks, although by no means all of them; some of them again simply provided notes and explanations and problem sheets generated by the university)

I went to university in Germany a decade ago (for CS) and I had the exact same experience. On the first day we got a usb stick with a linux distro for programming assignments and every course was essentially done with the expectation that if you attend the lectures you can pass the exams at the end of the semester. Book recommendations were sometimes given but basically always classic textbooks you can just borrow from the library.

I honestly struggle to understand why students would even participate in these textbook extortion rackets.

Textboox pricing issues seem to be so country/subject specific.

UK, Computer Science, 10-14 years ago. I was given 5 core textbooks on day 1 of my course – Java, C, 2x Maths, Communications. Probably about £200 worth. After that there were no required books. There were recommended books, of which the university library had copies of all of them with policies that meant they were always available to read but couldn't be loaned out because they were core material. On top of that there were subject reading material that no one used and made no difference. I never once heard of a textbook being part of an assessment - like using questions in the book.

I seemed to have been very lucky, both CS often requiring fewer textbooks and the UK not having quite the same culture of exploitative companies. But it does illustrate how unnecessary the process is. Maybe students need to strike on buying textbooks.

I took something close to CS at a similar time, and remember spending £X00 a year on textbooks and being pushed to buy latest editions. It might be institution and course specific and I always had my suspicions that someone was making a commission somewhere along the line.

I'm surprised that will how many people and institutions should be interested, there aren't more textbooks with a Creative Commons license. For anything non-specialized in a mature field, it doesn't make sense to have so many equivalent options all priced at $150. Calculus is calculus.

I like these: https://openstax.org/

There is one company in this sector that is innovating on price, Perlego. They use a Netflix-style model where you pay one monthly fee and can access all of the textbooks in their catalog. At roughly $18/mo, it is significantly cheaper than buying/renting individual textbooks if 2 or more or your textbooks are in their catalog.

They’re not as well-known as redshelf or vitalsource, but their content largely overlaps. I only became aware of them because they approached my startup about licensing our technology, but since then I’ve been using their platform to read various nonfiction books (they have about a million titles between textbooks and nonfiction).

I think they have a good shot at changing how students pay for books, and as their library grows their model will become even more attractive to students.

Safari books used to be good last time I used them a decade or so ago, but it seems they're not even keen to share their price on their own website nowadays until after you've signed up for a free trial, and googling it now seems very expensive compared to Perlego. But for technical books, they used to have a massive selection.

Copying textbooks is explicitly legal in India as part of case law, as "fair dealing". This was decided in 2016 and involved Oxford University Press and Cambridge University press, so the opponents were pretty powerful overall.

https://www.thehindu.com/news/cities/Delhi/University-copyin...

Wiki article because the hindu is paywalled: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/University_of_Oxford_v._Ramesh...

Fascinating. Was this the basis for Sci-Hub's optimism in India?

https://news.careers360.com/sci-hub-scihub-libgen-alexandra-...

The photocopy court case is mentioned in that article as a "small precedent", yeah.

Though I can't speculate on how the sci-hub case will actually go since the main reason copying was allowed for students according to the arguments was that before photocopiers existed, they were expected to copy the things themselves.

Guess what? You do not need to buy textbooks if you have a smart professor that cares and isn't into the racket.

You can use 15% of a copyrighted work for educational purposes. That means you can pick and copy chapters from different books to cover the course material. All free!

I wonder if you can use 15% from each "edition" (since they're all basically the same anyways).

No. The law generally doesn't stand for "aha, but what if I ..." tricks.

It's an interesting question though. Because the publishers will invariably argue that each edition is different. If the editions are different, then surely you can get 15% of each.

They only argue that they are different for face-saving reasons ("we're not milking you, honest!"). There's no legal reason they need to be different.

How would you be able to pick and cover specific covers without buying the book?

The library, potentially. The other option that I've seen is that the professor buys one copy of the books and then copies the parts they want so they can distribute to the students.

Oh, okay.

The teacher/professor would be able to buy the book and can then copy and hand out the parts they are actually using for their classes.

A smart professor is the one who wrote the book they sell to their own class.

Right. Not only does that bastard Gil Strang keep updating with new editions, he also is the publisher!

We are gate keeping access to knowledge/education too much, I wonder if this has any effect on the rate at which a society evolves, how many smart minds didn't make it due to lack of funds, perhaps one of them could have revolutionized the battery tech?

Take my word for a grain of salt, I think it's just trying to control who can access what. Richer get more stuff.

Forgive my ignorance: what do student do with all these books? I did my U/G & Masters in Physics in Exeter UK. We used only 1 actual textbook (University Physics by Young and Freedman, about 45USD new). I bought 1 more by choice (Mathematical Methods in the Physical Sciences by Mary Boas) because I needed some help there and the lecturer was weak. But all the actual information I needed was covered in lectures, tutorials etc. Assignments were class specific and produced by lecturers. How does the US system actually use all these books?

I did my Master’s degree in France and I’ve never has a single textbook to buy. All of our courses were made by the professors. They obviously didn’t rewrite them every year because… why? It worked fine.

We had suggestions of text books if we wanted to go further, but they were all available for free at the university library

Textbook prices in North America are just plain criminal. The racket is exacerbated by the requirement by profs to always be on the latest edition, even though there is no material change in content. It is a disgrace.

A few of the best profs at my school had their own "textbook" that was basically custom-written and only covered the material covered in their course. 40-60 pages, $20-30, and 100% relevant

Digital homework systems, licenses, and school and professor mandates asides, I wonder how much of the actual content in textbooks is freely available on Wikipedia right now.

Some books I pay for, some books I pirate, some books I do both because sometimes it's handy to have a pdf.

But I mainly pay for books because it tends to be cheaper than printing them myself.

If I were born as a westerner with my mom and dad being there always to catch me if I fall I would always pay for knowledge, sure. But I pretty much feel entitled to free knowledge. I will happily pirate a 200 eur math textbook, 200 eur for me is a lot more than for your average westerner.

In college, I used https://used.addall.com and one semester got all my books down to $35 with older editions. This only worked because people in class would share photocopies of the problem sets from the new editions. A couple of cool professors would also give exercise numbers for the last few editions; they had previously taught the class with those editions, anyway.

Back when I was in uni all the students bought books, sometimes second hand or indian versions or pirated them at copy shops.

Meanwhile me and a few friends got access to all the books for free by hanging out in the library every day. It's not something that would scale to everyone but I always found it amusing. Ended up buying a total or 4 books for a 5 year EECS course, and that's because I wanted those as keepsakes, for nostalgia reasons.

When I was at university, I bought about 300€ worth of textbooks. In total, for the whole 5+ years. Math books we used were about 30-40€ each, the IT books maybe up to 50€. More often than not you didn't need any book at all since the professor put up his lecture notes as PDF or you could just copy it in the library from his handwritten notes (that was back in the early 2000s where the Internet was not quite as it is now)

Super confused by stories like this. I went to university in Germany and any course materials we needed were provided to us as pdfs. They also had a service where you could print it out on a bunch of copy paper if you wanted a bit more tangible form, for basically the cost of paper and toner. My entire tuition likely cost less than American students waste on books. Don't you want people to learn?

The best college prof I had used scientific article printouts as our text. She provided excellent notes to present the material.

One friend I knew in college did the math and realized he could buy a really nice SLR and tripod for the cost of his textbooks one semester. He bought the camera, tripod, and books. Then he spent an evening each semester photographing all the pages of all the books, then returned all of the books.

One of my relatives attends a public university that rents textbooks to students. At the end of the year they're returned. If a new edition comes out, the university eats the cost. As I understand it, some of the books are available as downloads, and in other cases teachers accept the use of old editions.

I dislike the wording of this title.

It’s not about being “acceptable” - it’s about it being _necessary_ to afford. Sure, maybe they could go hungry for a few weeks… but this is such a predatory practice that preys on the psychology of student loans. “I’m already paying 60k for tuition… what’s another $800 for 4 books.”

Serious question.

Anybody actually keep and use their old textbooks?

Way back in the day, I only ever kept an algorithms book and used it once a never.

I kept my compiler textbooks, my computer architecture textbooks, and my algorithms textbooks. These include Crafting a Compiler, Engineering a Compiler, Code (by Petzold), Computer Architecture (by Hennessy). By far the one I reference most is Skiena's Algorithm Design Manual. I actually bought the new edition of that one for myself since it's in color now. My $250 differential equations textbook was ritualistically burned at the earliest opportunity.

I still have my "Fundamentals of Physics" (5th edition, I think they are on 12th edition now). This one I still occasionally read from time to time just for the fun of it.

The other textbooks I still keep just for when I need weighted objects to stack something. I don't actually read them.

For the business operations and analytics courses I teach, many of the available textbooks are outdated or out of touch with industry. Thankfully, our library has a license to subscription services like O’Reilly Media, which gives students “free” access to their books and learning platform.

I know an instructor who'd tell his students "I wrote a book for this course, and you can buy a hardcopy if you want, but there's a PDF floating around on the Internet if you don't think it's worth buying."

ChatGPT has made this argument obsolete. First, ChatGPT can generate textbooks that can not be copyrighted. Second, ChatGPT makes textbooks obsolete by replacing one-size-fits-all text with custom answers to questions.

Source: I'm a teacher.

Not quite, as ChatGPT will also very confidently say something wrong within the first paragraph.

History books can also very confidently say something wrong within the first paragraph.

When I graduated from high school they were throwing out history books. I picked up 3 consecutive editions of a US History Book from my favorite teacher. One said the US won the Spanish-American War, another said Spain won it, and the third said Cuba won it.

I always bought used books from previous students from the semester before me, and then sold them after I was done.

The cost in the end was pretty miniscule as the loss in value of a book across 1 semester was pretty tiny.

Im glad HN is on the same page about piracy: it’s not stealing if you still have the thing I’ve “taken” from you. If only everyone was consistent enough to apply that logic to AI.

I used to buy international paperback editions cheaply on these online mom and pop businesses. Saved like 50-75% on most titles. Hope students are still able to do this?

I had many courses where I was told to buy a high priced textbook, coincidentally authored by the professor, which was never even referenced or used.

Tell a student not to pirate textbooks due to copyright while teaching them that chatGPT scans almost all available knowledge for free ...

No one should feel the least bit guilty for copying. It’s not unethical. If it’s a problem, just add the price of the book to the course.

We'd just buy one copy and everyone would get a photocopy or (later, when tech was better) scan.

The only useful textbook I had in college was the book algorithms, which was a $20 paperback.

Price to value was solid.

Who needs textbooks when Chatgpt, YT, open course, khan academy, gives u education for cheap?

It is a business between publishers and universities. There is no mystery here.

It’s not piracy when you’re pirating from a pirate

Besides bleak job market, horrible healthcare, being potential homeless due to skyhigh housing cost, stark contrast to the boomer's easy life, the more extreme weathers and the climate change, textbook is probably an afterthought. It's not even in top 10 things to worry about

If a textbook you require for a course can cost up to 500 dollar (not unheard of in e.g. medicine) and you have to buy multiple books in one semester it's no longer an afterthought. What is top ten will always depend on personal situations.

I mean in the context of this post, paying for textbook is an afterthought(i.e. pivacy)

Millennials have more money than boomers did at the same age. There was no "boomer's easy life." That's a myth. https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2023/05/millenn...

Complete bullshit. "adjusting for inflation" doesn't include the price of housing and the price of education, both of which increased at least one order of magnitude faster than salaries.

Are you sure about that? Have you actually talked to the students about the cost of everything right now? Especially the housing stats is such an easy stats to game on. They usually mean the family unit who owns the place they live in, so if a student who lives with his parents, the whole family would be considered as home owner.

Btw Im not a student and I lucked out in the tech. I just feel sorry for the current kids

50 percent of Boomers owned their own home as 25-to-39-year-olds, compared with 48 percent of Millennials, hardly a difference deserving of headlines or social-media memes.

That's a ridiculously wide age range to use for comparison. And you'd be better off showing the median age of first home purchase or mortgage payoff. A modest increase in income or net worth is meaningless if housing has skyrocketed in comparison.

I mean, you're not wrong, but note that in 2023, Millennials and "25-to-39-year-olds" are one and the same. That is, I agree that this is not the best comparison, but the age range isn't arbitrary.

That's true, but it captures folks across such a wide range of stages of life as to be useless. Breaking it down into two to four buckets would make the point more convincing.

The number is around 32 for boomers, and 34 for millennials.

The age range is very specific, say 95th percentile onwards, else you can just say 18 - 39, but you would find that even more unreasonable, despite it including roughly the same population.

It's not wide. Mortgage payoff is not tracked as much as anyone would like.

> A modest increase in income or net worth is meaningless if housing has skyrocketed in comparison.

If the housing prices are temporarily inflated or stagnate for a few years, then it truly does not matter as much as you would like it to be. No generation is immune to market conditions, nor should be.

It's hardly news that most people find it easy to justify all kinds of lying, cheating, and stealing to themselves. To be charitable, young people are usually too oblivious/ignorant to fully appreciate why what they are doing is wrong, and there is also a ton of peer pressure to steal and cheat.