Book sticker shock [Students, colleges try to beat the high cost of texts]

Arizona Daily Star ^ | Becky Pallack

[SandRat]

[NeilGus]

I can’t wait for kindles to wipe out the college text book market. It is a total scam.

[Mygirlsmom]

My daughter goes to a school that rents their textbooks. It’s a real money saver.

[mrmeyer]

I was thinking the same thing. It would have been easier on the wallet (and the back for that matter) if kindle books were available when I was in college.

[Moonman62]

The crooks in academia have already figured out a way to stop that. Kindles aren’t designed for the handicapped.

[Huskrrrr]

We write our own chemistry lab books and sell them for $10 or offer them to students online for free.

[SnakeDoctor]

Textbooks are big business for colleges, and for the professors individually ... nothing will change.

Requiring certain books to be purchased is often the only way a professor makes any royalties off of his writing ... and they release a “new edition” every year or two to torpedo the used book market. Why would they let students get away with used books, cheaper books, etc., when it cuts into their bottom line?

They’ve got a monopoly, and a captive market. No need to change anything.

SnakeDoc

[Jeff Chandler]

College textbooks have been a scam for so long that they were a scam when I went to college.

College professors often help author the required textbooks and make money on them.

Publishers frequently change minor parts of a textbook in order to make the used textbooks obsolete.

Not only will the Internet make college textbooks obsolete, it will make most brick-and-mortar college classrooms obsolete.

The days of college-as-a-scam-to-employ-professors are numbered.

[Thunder90]

I spent over $500 on textbooks one semester when I was at UW-Madison...

Now, I still spend over $300/semester for graduate textbooks...

[catman67]

Textbooks were overpriced 40 years ago. Also, some professors used to have their secretaries xerox their lecture notes and sell them to students as “required texts” at exorbitant prices!!

[cyclotic]

My daughter rents hers from chegg.com.

She has saved hundreds of dollars if not thousands

[EyeGuy]

“I can’t wait for kindles to wipe out the college text book market. It is a total scam.”

####

The textbook con game, while indeed an in-you-face fraud, is but a drop in the bucket.

The entire construct of academia is a scam today. The length of education alone that these students are put through, is utterly ridiculous.

Regarding eReaders, what is to stop them from charging fees for downloading the CURRENT text?

[whitedog57]

I have written my own notes and post them on the course site for free.

Yet some students demand a textbook. Go figure!

[whitedog57]

I have written my own notes and post them on the course site for free.

Yet some students demand a textbook. Go figure!

[VermiciousKnid]

Moonman’s right, NeilGus...they’ve already claimed the Kindle’s a no-go because it violates ADA.

Crooks, every single one of them.

Regards,

[LS]

Our Patriot's History of the United States , used in many, many college and high school classes across the country, is only listed at $42.00 and on Amazon is $24.00 new and only $3.98 bargain price. Can't beat that. Buy all three of my books and I'll autograph them all if you send them direct to me with forwarding instructions!

[Thunder90]

Textbooks are stupid. Use your campus’s E-Reserve system and databases like Ebscohost and Jstor to supplement, and programs like D2l.

[A_Former_Democrat]

I saw a new Intermediate Accounting text at the SMU bookstore and I swear it was about $215.

Plus tax.

[Minus_The_Bear]

"Textbooks are big business for colleges, and for the professors individually ... nothing will change."

Students will scan to PDF and then put them on their iPads or Kindles.

Some already do.

Students don't care about propping up a corrupt system. If technology comes along to improve education administrators can't really stop it.

[SES1066]

Referencing Kindle as a dead-tree substitute.

In 2009, several Universities tried out an Amazon-subsidized program using Kindles. All participants were, almost immediately, put "Under Investigation" by the Dept. of Justice, Civil Rights Division because this program was presumed to be in violation of the A.D.A. (Americans With Disabilities Act). Public pressure from the National Federation for the Blind was also brought forth because the Kindle could not be independently operated by a blind person.

The key point made in this referenced article was that the DoJ would prefer to deny this use of new technology to all rather than have a minority disadvantaged. FYI: The newest generation of Kindle handles most of this operational impediment for use by the blind but the DoJ has already sent messages to all concerned, reminding them of the requirement(s) to use technology "in a manner that is permissible under federal law."

Personally, I translate this as; We won't approve it unless or until you make it usable by the least intelligent clerk we can find in the DoJ - in other words, NEVER!