When I went to the professor earlier in the semester (first week) I asked if the texts will be on the library's reserve and he assured me that they would be and he didn't disappoint. But he did say to me that he tries to pick books that would be a substantive addition to students libraries. Furthermore, he told us that he discourages taking books off of course reserve, because "you won't want to be doing much reading in the library."  Up until I went to the library to survey what was required for the mid-term tomorrow, did I realize how hard he must have tried to keep himself from laughing. The one textbook is simply a survey book of  different political ideologies, full of the typical 'history of thought formation' that fills almost any introductory political science course, it does have a few notable additions, but nothing I would consider a staple addition to my library especially at $156. The reader also, is just chalk full of excerpts from some of the greatest political minds of the past 5 centuries, however, like I mention before - all of these readings are simply found online or could all be purchased for half the price probably used, and you would get the entire thing not just the 5-10 pages that deal specifically with one issue/thought.

What bugs me particularly about this is not the waste of new material that is constantly required to print these books, although that does bug me, but the mentality of the professor. I feel offended that he/she can put these expensive textbooks on a syallabus and justfiy (knowing their real worth) that students should buy them. To just assume really that I must $156 lying around and would just love to blow it on a few textbooks that will be obsolete after the course is finished. Furthermore, this is a larger insult for all of us who work to go to university, and work to stay in university only to have it reduced to an accessibility of elitist ownernship of required textbooks. Professors certainly do not encourage course materials to be made reserve at the library, for a class of 80+ students they only have usually one copy of the book on reserve.  While I am managing fine by pulling materials from the library, is it right for those who cannot afford textbooks to be fighting over the one or two copies that do exist? Furthermore, libraries are no longer what they used to be in terms of use and I wonder if the attitude of consuming and "just buy the book" contribute to its demise. Really the elitism of knowledge killing the very institution that universalizes it, here in Southern Ontario.

Still looking for an affordable textbook?

Check out Rochester Textbooks and you can save 30% on textbooks!

I ordered my textbooks. They've cost me a fortune. Well over £200. 4 have come. I'm waiting for another 4. And deciding whether to order another two. To cheer myself up after that awful amount spent on books I got some DCs...mainly because my Converse have a hole in and they're not very suitable for the winter. I also got some smart shoes, trousers and a top. Because....I got a job :) An Electoral Role Canvasser is what I am, for the next few months anyways. It's only temporary. Before I do my work experience module, to get some money for Christmas.

I'm now going to go prepare food for the longest day ever tomorrow and get a really early night ready for a really early morning. The FP is very down at the moment. She does too much. I'm taking her to lunch soon to try put a smile back on her face :)

Thanks Daniel & Wired!

Update: Here's the link to the Columbia Business School posting.

What is this, a Choose Your Own Adventure novel? Am I supposed to pick my own page and hopefully it isn't the one where I fall to a gruesome death at the hands of the Restatement (Second)? Who the hell edited this book, and why weren't they fired?

Textbook cartels take note, you need to hire better editors if you want to keep gouging us for rearranging the same book over and over and changing the edition each time. Apparently you hadn't finished rearranging before you wrote this section. Jerks.

What I came up with is that I am home schooling our children.  There were three textbooks that specifically addressed the annexation of Hawaiʻi and here is the info I came up with for them in order of grade level.  I am hoping that when I read others they will do a more through job in addressing our 50th state.

Early United States. Orlando: Harcourt Brace & Company, 2000. ISBN: 0-15-309788-4

• Grade 5, CUSD

Unit 4: The American Revolution Chap. 8: "History" Blurb - 1775-1783: In Hawaii, whaling ships from all over the world were stopping for supplies. (316)

Commentary: I appreciate the fact that the book recognized the existence of Hawai'i before American Missionaries arrived since in most textbooks, that is where Hawai'i's history begins - rather than the 100AD when they were said to have migrated to the islands.

Davidson, James W. and Stoff, Michael B. 2006.  America: History of Our Nation, Independence Through 1914. Boston: Pearson Education, Inc.  ISBN: 0-13-133381-X

• Grade 8, LAUSD

Unit 6: An Age of Industry (West Transformed 1860-1896, Industry & Urban Growth 1865-1915, Political Reform and the Progressive Era 1870-1920, U.S. Looks Overseas 1853-1915, Ch. 16 Sec. 1: Eyes on the Pacific p. 551 -

Commentary: Promotes stereotypes: "The islands have great natural beauty, sunshine, beaches, and rolling surf.  But beauty was secondary".  "The first people to settle Hawaii were Polynesians, who arrived by canoe around the 600s".  Briefest description ever regarding Hawai'i and it's annexation, BUT language implies that it was NOT okay for American planters to overthrow and that Hawai'i had a right to its own monarchy.  Additionally, in teacher's footnote, has background regarding the Clinton Apology in 1993

Creating America: a history of the US, Beginnings through World War I. Evanston: McDougal Little Inc, 2006.  ISBN: 978-0-618-55951-0

• Grade 8, LAUSD

Unit 7: Modern America Emerges Ch. 23 Sec. 1 "The Annexation of HI" - P. 661:

Commentary: Ignores King David Kalakaua's forced signing of Bayonet Constitution (and by forced I mean guns actually held to his head) - uses very anti-monarchy language "Believing that planters has too much influence, she [Queen Liliuokalani] wanted to limit their power…American planters in HI were upset by these threats [as if the threats were unwarranted from an LA Gang]…they staged a revolt [in many textbooks, it is actually the Hawaiians who tried to stage a revolt after Liliuokalani was imprisoned, although many ethnocentric textbooks do call Dole's act a revolt].  With the help of the U.S. Marines, they overthrew the Queen and set up their own government.  They then asked to be annexed by the U.S."...etc.  Book also has Quick bio on Queen Liliuokalani but doesn't even mention her imprisonment and focuses more on her western attributes similar to taming of a savage types of literature.

Every book aimed for large scale distribution is printed hundreds of thousands, or even millions of times. In each printing (or edition), a book is marked with a number, an ISBN. This is either a 10 or 13 digits number that identifies this book, and that can then be used to search for this book in databases, or to compare the price of book “A” with book “B” and you can be sure that if two books have the same ISBN than they are the same book. So the best way to make sure you are buying the good book is by verifying its ISBN.

It is at this point that we come in. In the past it was difficult to compare prices because you had to go from store to store, but the Internet has allowed for increased transparency, putting power into the hands of the smart consumer. Of course, the seller or store needs some kind of online presence and an online catalog of books for search engines to work.

Given that books are sold at different websites by different sellers at different prices the book price comparison engine searches through the largest bookstores on the web, to find you the best deal on the book you want. There are two steps involved in this: the search and the comparison.

The search is exactly what it sounds like. A request is sent to each and every bookstore for books that match the search criteria entered by the user. Let's say you want a book on "statistical business analysis". A request is sent to bookstores to give a list of "statistical business analysis", or with "statistical business analysis" as the subject. Every bookstore then returns a list of books (or none if none is found). The search engine will then order these results according to an algorithm; for example a book titled "The analysis of quarterly results' statistical data - Business" will be lower in the list than a book titled "Statistical Business Analysis applied to real-life scenarios" because the second book's title matches exactly the search criteria. Once sorted, the results are displayed to the user.

Once the user picks a book to get the best prices for it, the second step, the comparison, begins. A request is sent to all bookstores for the current price, availability and shipping price for a given book. The results are then sorted according to total price and the result is displayed to the users.

So why are there so many different book price comparison websites? The difference is in the details. Some might be very fast, but they search and compare using internal databases instead of live data, something that might turn out to be a problem. Indeed, since the price and availability of books sometimes fluctuate wildly, using information a few days, or even a week old, might mean inaccurate results. You should always use engines that fetch live data as it is guaranteed to be the most accurate; it is true they are a bit slower but waiting those few seconds more might save you a lot of trouble.

Other search engines will display a lot of details when what you really want is the book. At We Compare Books we aim at simplicity. Just search for a book, click on it to compare prices and you are ready to buy it. Three mouse clicks is all you need to find the best price.

If the user would like to see all prices for bookstores that currently have the book, simply clicking on the "Check full comparison report" link will bring up a list of all bookstores and their price for the book. Sometimes you might want to buy from a particular bookstore for a variety of reasons; by looking at the list you can quickly decide if it's more important to buy from that bookstore or to buy for the lowest priced one.

At this point you should be feeling pretty good, you were able to afford all of your books, and the semester isn’t as bad as you thought it was going to be, now what? Well, I know that you probably do not want to hear this, but this is the best time to purchase books for next semester. The fact is that right now there is almost no competition, and you can get some really great deals.

The first thing that you should do is look at what courses you still need to take, see the ones offered next semester, and see what books are required for those courses. If you feel confident that the same professor will be teaching these courses in the fall - hint: if it is a full time professor who has taught this course for the past few years chances are that they will also teach this course next semester), and if this is a non-technical class (history, literature, English, research, etc. -  then you can assume relatively safely that next semester this same professor will be teaching this same class. This means it is likely the same book will be used. Why? Simply because professors tend to use and reuse their syllabus for years, and by changing the book they have to do more work on a new syllabus, so they stick with the same textbook.

So, if you buy your textbooks for the next semester at midway during the current one, you will save a bundle; don't forget to compare prices before you buy!

Dear Professor,

Thanks for taking the time to read this email.

I buy and sell textbooks from professors such as yourself.  I sell these books on the used market.

If you have some books you would like to sell, please let me know your availability next week.  That's the week of October 6th.  If you have any availability on Monday and Tuesday that would be great.

Now, you have the right to sell your own books, whether to senders of unsolicited e-mail, bookstores, or eBay.  But if you are looking to unload textbooks, you can do so in a way that directly benefits students:

• You can donate desk copies of current SCC textbooks to RISE (located in AJ 7) and to the SCC library reserve collection.  Students use these textbooks to stay in school.
• You can donate recent (non-current) textbooks on SCC curriculum topics to RISE.
• You can donate non-current textbooks to the SCC library.  Books that are not added to the collection benefit students through the library book sale.  (Please call 558-2377 before donating materials.)

Burma is fierce and heartless, Cambodia cannot be trusted and Laos is inferior to Thailand. Everyone knows this is true, because the history textbooks say so.

Sanitsuda Ekachai, Assistant Editor for Outlook, Bangkok Post

To read the whole commentary, click HERE.

Select a chapter to review from the list of from an open textbooks posted at:

http://cccoer.wordpress.com/discipline-specific/

Review Criteria

Provide feedback for a chapter of the open textbook in terms:

1. Clarity and comprehensibility - content, including the instructions and exercises
2. Accuracy
3. Readability - in terms of logic, sequencing, and flow
4. Consistency of course materials - consistency in the content language and use of key terms as is necessary to facilitate understanding by novice users
5. Appropriateness of content - appropriateness of the material for community college level courses
6. Interface - technological issues such as broken links, improperly displayed graphics, and ease of navigation
7. Content usefulness - the ways in which the content could be useful for teachers, students, and those with a general interest in the subject area
8. Modularity - the ability to adapt, rearrange, add, delete and modify the content by sections
9. Content errors - the presence or absence of factual errors, grammatical errors, and typographical errors in the content
10. Reading level - appropriate for community college level students
11. Cultural relevance - use of examples that are inclusive of diverse races and ethnicities

Send your open textbook review to info@collegeopentextbooks.org

If I had a quarter for every time snow ruined my night of fire juggling... [We Don't Eat Lint Here]

A look back at the Library Journal of the 80's shows how much the Internet has changed how we do books. [Jess and Josh Talk About Stuff]

Speaking of the more tactile media: A journey into the seedy textbook underworld. [Philosophiae Agonistes}

Tip links:

• Behind in your work already? 5 steps to getting back on track [University Scholar]
• Another lesson in collegiate deceivery: Bring work to the gym. [Grad Hacker]

New blog added: Tales From Your Favorite Resident Assistant

• Currently, 108 buses drive Columbia students. How will the new school affect these routes? Will more buses or routes be added? Are schools going to increase the staggered openings to accommodate? How much time does it take to ride the longest route?
• The new high school will receive the same editions of textbooks as Rock Bridge and Hickman high schools, making the move transparent for students. Approximately every five years, textbooks are reviewed and reordered for schools. How do the books compare with those used throughout Missouri?
• The district is slowly rolling out video-recorded class lectures so students who miss a day of school or want to review daily classes are able to do so from home computers. What other schools do this? Is there a way to track how frequently it's used? Will students actually use it? How do teachers feel about being video-recorded? Will it be used to aid/improve teaching methods?
• There's a lot of talk about the 9th Grade Transition Committee. Has any sort of transition committee ever been in place to help students adjust? Is this something they're only considering to go along with the regrouping of grades into three schools?
• What students are promising athletes that could be hindered by moving to a school without an established program? How will this affect recruiting efforts if there won't be full teams until the freshmen are seniors? Should we spend this amount of energy, concern and effort on athletics?

—Lauren Rosenberg

I moved into my dorm yesterday, classes start on Thursday. Until then I need to reorient myself to Santa Barbara and life in an American college. No more pub quizzes for me.

I bought my textbooks and with a shock remembered the price discrepancies between here and Scotland. For this quarter I have three books (two of them used) for two classes totaling $220. I am taking three classes so I am glad that there is no textbook (yet) for my third class. And one of them is a small book too.

According to the article, however, this is the first machine installed in a university library, so there's a way to go...

It's no secret that people learn in different ways, so why, the authors of this book ask, "can't schools customize their teaching?" The current system, "designed for standardization," must by its nature ignore the individual needs of each student. The answer to this problem, the authors argue, is "disruptive innovation," a principle introduced (and initially applied to business) by Harvard Business School professor Christensen in The Innovator's Dilemma. The idea is that an audience in need will benefit from even a faulty opportunity to fulfill that need; in education, the demand for individual instruction could be met through infinitely customizable online computer-based instruction.

A reviewer on Amazon offers this summary of the book's arguments:

Dr. Christensen argues that the traditional government-run education system will in the near future be "disrupted" by the innovation of computer-based learning. At first, online learning will compete against nonconsumption by offering classes in subjects where there isn't enough demand in any given school to justify offering a traditional course (such as a very advanced math one or an unusual foreign language). But eventually, He believes that the technology will improve such that computer-based learning will render the traditional model of education obsolete. In "Disrupting Class", he postulates that demand for computer-based high school classes will follow an S-curve that will start to "flip" (significantly accelerate) in the year 2012. In the years between 2012 and 2018, Dr. Christensen projects that the share of online courses will grow from 5% to 50% of all high school courses.

Professor Christensen's influence on industries and large organizations should not be underestimated. Intel sent its top 2000 managers to his workshops in the early 1990s, when it was being attacked on the low end by innovators such as Cyrix and AMD. The Celeron chip emerged from this exercise, which helped Intel fend off the disruptive technology of the newcomers. However, he recognizes that the public school system is a very distinct animal from a profit-driven corporation, and the tools needed to effect change are quite different indeed.

One aspect of his analysis, I believe, is spot on regarding how one of the major players in the educational field will be affected by the predicted disruption, and that is the publishing industry. He characterizes the textbook industry as:

a scale-intensive value chain business, marked by high fixed costs, much like the pharmaceutical and commercial aircraft manufacturing industries. The costs of writing, editing and setting up to print and bind a book are roughly the same, whether 1000 or 1 million copies are sold. ...These are blockbuster seeking businesses. A large monolithic market for a single best selling title is just as attractive to a textbook publisher as the blockbusters Zantac and Lipitor are to a drug company.

There is little dispute among textbook publishers that because individual students learn differently, they need differentiated learning options. But the textbook companies can't get there from here. Were they to focus on developing different books for each type of intelligence, their volume per title  - and their profitability - would decline markedly. Because this is so disruptive to their business models, most of the intellectual and financial energy of this formidable industry focuses on creating and commercializing still more blockbuster books for large, undifferentiated masses of students.

But Christensen and his co-authors point to the enabling technology of such Web 2.0 innovations as User Generated Content as the solution to this dilemma. In other words, the disruptive innovation will come from the consumer side, as opposed to the producer side, since the producers have too much to lose to be the innovators. Like most disruptive technologies, these tools will initially be adopted on the margin, say for tutorial purposes, rather than be integrated into the mainstream system right off the bat. His prediction:

For several years, most teachers and students will still have conventional textbooks. But little by little, textbooks will give way to computer-based online courses - increasingly augmented by user-generated student centric learning tools. At some point, administrators, school committees, and teachers unions will recognize that even without explicit administrative decisions ever having been made, student-centric learning will have become mainstream.

A bit of historical perspective may be appropriate here. Anyone who studied engineering or science up to the early 1970s would recognize the name K + E (Keuffel & Esser), the premier manufacturer of slide rules for over a century. Their story may ring a bell:

K+E held patents for a wide range of slide rule features, including improved cursor indicators, functions and scales, and the adjustable body mechanism. Caught by the huge market shift created by electronic calculators, CAD systems and laser surveying systems, which displaced all of their strong markets, K+E shrank dramatically after 1972. K+E even sold some TI manufactured calculators for a brief period trying to capitalize on their existing customer base and industry knowledge. The final assets of K+E, mainly involving paper products, were sold to AZON in 1987, after several painful internal re-organizations.

There are some striking parallels between companies like K+E in the 1970s and the textbook publishers of today. A prime indicator of an industry in decline is rapid consolidation. Another is the introduction of "new" products whose main objective is to protect the existng franchise that the "old" products have built up over the years. One wonders if any publishing executives have ever heard of K+E. The authors may want to leave a couple of copies on the desks of their publisher, McGraw-Hill.

I didn't have the book for 130 until after class yesterday so I did the "Linear Inequalites" section (1.2) before the "Applications of Equations" (1.1)—it's a whole lot easier making up inequalities off the top of my head (that're essentially the same as the exercises) than it'd be to make up "applications" (i.e., word problems). Now that I've got the book, I discover that there's a boxed-off "definition" to this effect.

An inequality is a statement that one number is less than another number.

How is this anything but worse-than-useless to anyone? I'm more or less convinced as of right now that I'd've given a worse lecture yesterday if I had've had the book—I'd very likely have felt obliged to do some version of this rant right there and students are already pretty weirded-out on the first day of class without the instructor going off on some random angry tirade.

It may be even more to the point to mention that the "Rules for Inequalities" that follow could hardly be presented in a more confusing style: the heart of the matter ("change direction when you change signs") is given using esoteric terminology (and also in code) and appears third in a list of Rules mostly having nothing to do with working out the actual exercises. The first thing I'd do if I had a free hand is throw out this book.

A very very interesting article from Macleans Magazine campus edition, I highly recommend everyone check it out. Textbook prices are totally unregulated by any sort of external body outside of the on-campus University Bookstore and the university community and are not subject to any sort of public transparency or accountability. Being an industry which lends itself to monopoly, often times textbook stores charge prices to turn a profit (whether that be large or small, there is little information out there on their business success). Like any business we cannot really fault them for this, but is this meant to be a business? Textbooks are a necessary part of anyone's education, with your success often times being dependent on your ability to access these high priced duo-tangs of information. Now, the writers of these books do get paid royalty's but ask any professor and they will tell you it is very very little.

This is an ever growing battle and if you have any concerns or comments on this please feel free to contact us!

Jenn Prosser, VP Academic

Currently, we're in our 3rd week of the Fall semester and we've had some pretty interesting discussions in class. I'd like to think that I'm facilitating higher learning, but that it's still too soon to tell. This week was dedicated to self-introductory speeches, but after my first class I found the experience to be disheartening. After numerous annoucements both in class and online, why is it only 6 people out of a class of 30 decide to do the assignment? I thought it was amusing that the students that weren't prepared all came to the consensus that I had misinformed them, yet the class I taught immediately after theirs came to class mostly prepared. Yes, this is a community college after all; however, don't these students deserve the benefit of the doubt? Many would argue yes, but as I struggle to balance leniency and stringency in the classroom, I feel as though there are just some students that don't care. There's only so much I can do to ensure my students an education. Why aren't students upholding their responsibilities? How high do the stakes have to be for them to be motivated? As much as I represented the ideals of slackerdom during my academic career ( I still do, mind you), I still found myself doing a moderate amount of work, be they menial or otherwise, in order to fulfill my "requirements". After talking to some other faculty members, it seems as though this experience is fairly common. Now I ask those of you that are reading this, help me understand this sort of mentality that goes through a student's head. Forgive my naiveté, but I've always believed that after you graduated high school, no one forced you to continue your education. So why waste my time and the time of other students?

Some of you may be wondering about the title of this post and I'm getting to that. The title relates to an incident which took place after class today. I couldn't fathom this statement uttered to me by my student, "Wait, I need the textbook?". Where do I begin to respond? Luckily I bit my tongue, as I often find myself with a witty disposition to say something that might get me fired. But I'll say it now since this is my blog. "No you don't need the textbook, what you need to do is drop my class because the chances are you're going to fail." It seem as though requiring a textbook for a course is either completely foreign or an ingenious concept recently discovered by scholars. To be fair, they never used textbooks in high school either.

Well that's enough self-righteous indignation from me for one evening.

"Squint hard, and textbook publishers can look a lot like drug makers. They both make money from doing obvious good — healing, educating — and they both have customers who may be willing to sacrifice their last pennies to buy what these companies are selling.

"It is that fact that can suddenly turn the good guys into bad guys, especially when the prices they charge are compared with generic drugs or ordinary books. A final similarity, in the words of R. Preston McAfee, an economics professor at Cal Tech, is that both textbook publishers and drug makers benefit from the problem of “moral hazards” — that is, the doctor who prescribes medication and the professor who requires a textbook don’t have to bear the cost and thus usually don’t think twice about it."

So, what's a professor/student to do?

The article goes on to discuss three different solutions . . . or, at least, what could be examples of potential solutions. The first is what Dr. McAfee did at Cal Tech: make his book available for free (by download) or at a relatively low cost through POD publishers. A wider ranging approach is what Rice University is doing with its Connexions project: an open-source curriculum development project that's a kind of Wikipedia for college instructional materials. Finally, there is CourseSmart, a consortium of textbook publishers making titles available online via subscription (for 180 days) or by download (to a particular computer alone).

In the case of Dr. McAfee, I'd say that his altruism is genuinely admirable. But, in a free market system where there is money to be made from the exchange of knowledge from one person to another, professors like him will be the exception rather than the rule. Connexions is an interesting site to browse around---I've been checking in on it periodically over the last 2-3 years---but its greatest strength (its free-form nature) is also its greatest weakness as it's all over the place in subjects/organization/presentation. Sure, you have a percentage of faculty who are interested in developing new materials as well as adapting existing materials but you also have a greater number who want to have fully developed materials that are ready to plug into their classes right off of the shelf. Plus, there's a whole host of features to textbooks/curriculum materials that generally require specialists beyond the writers themselves: illustrators, indexers, book designers, permissions editors, proofreaders/copyeditors, and more.

As for the CourseSmart site, to be honest, this is a perfect example of how textbook publishers want their cake and to eat it too. Want to subscribe to a book online? Feel free. But if you drop that class and retake it next semester you'll be buying that book online again. Want to hang onto your book after the semster is over? Didn't we mention that your online subscription is over in 180 days no matter what? And, it just irks me that publishers act like this is some act of altruism when, instead, their profit margins are staying essentially the same by having no printing or shipping costs and no wholesale discounts to bookstores because they're being cut out of the equation entirely. Plus, I know it's just the old teacher in me, but I think having a physical textbook to hang onto, carry around, read, mark up, and refer to in class or in a lab has a certain inherent value way beyond just having words on a computer screen.

Textbook publishers may have much in common, as The New York Times suggests, with big drug makers but I tend to think of them as being more like the old corporate music giants. As Anton Newcombe of The Brian Jonestown Massacre said in the movie Dig!, it wasn't college students downloading songs in their dorm rooms courtesy of Napster that "ruined" the music industry, it was the record companies treating artists like indentured servants while acting like they had an insurmountable monopoly on the only means of delivering music to fans/listeners all for the sake of supported their own excessive overhead. And based on the profit margins they used to make with that model, that's why they've had such a hard time adapting to how the music industry---or, rather, the industry of music distribution---has evolved over the last ten years. Textbook publishers will only be able to sustain their pricing system in conjunction with cosmetic repackaging of titles to undercut used book sales for so long before it all falls apart. And then they'll be pointing the finger at someone else as to why it all went wrong for them.

In the end, it all seems pretty needless. At the very least, at . . . the . . . very . . . least . . . if textbook publishers did something as basic as using the same general pricing models as trade publishers---retail price being ten times the printing cost with the wholesale price ten times the printing cost---their margins would be slimmer but they wouldn't be fomenting a revolution.

Mark

Click Here to Subscribe to Our Blog Posts by Email