If You Don't Eat Your Meat, You Can't Have Any Pudding

[plumtreeblossom]

One of the books for one of my spring semester classes was priced at $114.00 retail at the Harvard Coop, and the teacher specifically instructed us to buy it specifically there. Kickback? He can bite me hard. I just bought a rat-bag used copy of the exact edition of the book on Half.com for $28.00.

Occupy Adult College!

Comments

[daisytells.livejournal.com]

Good for you Mare! The only way to stop the runaway inflation that is in the college bookstore business is to seek other ways to obtain course materials.

[ron_newman]

Now, for your next assignment, write an essay (or maybe a one-act play?) about this ...

[plumtreeblossom.livejournal.com]

Oh, plenty of people have written essays on this. Having previously worked in college textbook publishing, I can tell you it is pure racketeering. Publishers take what would have been a $25 textbook and tart it up with a ton of unnecessary ancillary products like CDs and websites and smack a $100 price tag on it. They also will put out completely unnecessary new editions every year, and will convince professors to adopt only those newest editions, which effectively prevents students from being able to buy used books. I am glad I am out of that industry.

[ayelle.livejournal.com]

Having also worked in educational and college textbook publishing and specifically in permissions, I feel like this is a bit of an overstatement. I've seen textbooks like that (the psych textbooks, oh god, it's exactly what you describe here) but I've also done the legwork on tracking down permissions for textbooks with many different contributors and it DOES add up without any artificial price inflation. I really disagree that the whole educational publishing industry is "pure racketeering," though I agree there are scammers in it. My impression after two and a half years in the biz (less than you, I know) is that it is not, in the end, a very profitable business and there's a lot of scrambling just to keep from going under.

The account really doesn't line up with my years of experience teaching -- I saw more of what you're talking about when I was in publishing, but on the teaching side it doesn't look like this at all. Some of it's my field, of course. In the discipline of English, our textbooks and critical editions are lucky to get new editions every ten years, by which point they're often desperately needed. And they almost never have CDs etc! I might see it differently if I taught in the sciences.

ETA. By the way, I know you were in publishing more years than me -- if I'm just flat-out wrong about this, I'd like to be educated. Got any juicy stories? Are kickbacks to professors real? My colleagues and I are all pretty convinced they're a myth. Frankly, we're lucky to get desk copies -- publishers have been cutting back! I haven't gotten a desk copy for years!

[treacle-well.livejournal.com]

I still work in college textbook publishing, and think you are unfairly oversimplifying and engaging in hyperbole here.

[ron_newman]

I didn't know, or had forgotten, that you used to work in textbook publishing. Was it Houghton Mifflin?

[noire.livejournal.com]

I tell my students to buy the textbook used on Amazon. I even make sure that the first reading is available on the class website in case they don't get the book in time, AND one of my criteria for a class text is that it is under $45. There is no reason on the face of the Earth that a text for one of my classes should cost a cent more. In fact, last semester all the readings were available electronically on the class website and there WAS no required text.

Yeah, it's a scam for sure. And believe me, NOT all faculty are supporting this!

[ayelle.livejournal.com]

I don't do that to my students because it would be wrong -- though I personally would like to the bookstore supported rather than Amazon, it's not my place to push my value system onto them, and anyway, even I buy from Amazon when my finances are squeezed, as theirs probably are. Thus, I give my students the ISBN, tell them it's available at the bookstore, and let them do what they want. (I also try to make sure the first readings of the sem are available as handouts or PDFs so they have time to figure it out.) However, it may not be any kind of kickback situation. He may well have been burned in the past by students buying used copies of what turn out to be earlier editions and then having textbooks with different page numbers and even different text (and, worst, out-of-date information). I have seen this happen more times than you'd even believe -- it even happens with regular books, not just textbooks! The proper solution to this is to provide the ISBN and tell your students to make sure they get the proper edition (and tell them why other editions are or are not acceptable -- i.e. "don't get the first edition as it's much too old; the second's OK if you don't mind figuring out the page number differences; the third had a misprint and should be avoided, but fyi, we'll be using the fourth ed in class and that's what I'd recommend"). But he may just be out of touch, not corrupt -- the kickback situation strikes me as by far the least likely explanation for his request.

[hill-the-khore.livejournal.com]

AUGH this fucking kills me. A number of my professors in undergrad were great about using only readings that could be transmitted electronically so there was none of this $112 bullshit.

The others, mainly in the hard sciences . . . Not so much.

[heatherp8.livejournal.com]

You go, girl!