IGX

In 2011, [Ariel Diaz] started Boundless Learning, a Boston company that has begun giving away free electronic textbooks covering college subjects like American history, anatomy and physiology, economics, and psychology.

What's controversial is how Boundless creates these texts. The company trawls for public material on sites like Wikipedia and then crafts it into online books whose chapters track closely to those of top-selling college titles. In April, Boundless was sued by several large publishers who accused the startup of engaging in "the business model of theft."

Theft or not, the college textbook industry is ripe for a disruptive shock from the Internet. Publishers today operate using what Mark Perry, a professor at the University of Michigan, calls a "cartel-style" model: students are required to buy specific texts at high prices. Perry has calculated that prices for textbooks have been rising at three times the rate of inflation since the 1980s.

On average, college students spend around $1,200 each year on books and supplies. Those costs, which sometimes exceed the tuition at a community college, are prompting a wider rebellion against commercial publishers. In February, California legislators passed a law directing the state to produce free versions of texts used in the state's 50 most popular college courses. In October, Secretary of Education Arne Duncan said printed textbooks, a $6 billion industry in the United States (when sales of both used and new books are tallied), should be made "obsolete."

baffled wrote:I got a 4.0 the semester I didn't buy a single textbook.

Terry B. wrote:

baffled wrote:I got a 4.0 the semester I didn't buy a single textbook.

You made that nice cutting board that your mother still has in her kitchen as well.

Terry B. wrote:

baffled wrote:I got a 4.0 the semester I didn't buy a single textbook.

You made that nice cutting board that your mother still has in her kitchen as well.

protobuilder wrote:

Terry B. wrote:

baffled wrote:I got a 4.0 the semester I didn't buy a single textbook.

You made that nice cutting board that your mother still has in her kitchen as well.

holy shit, my mom still has the cutting board I made for her in 9th grade hanging in her kitchen!

Fat Cat wrote:I recently went through this when I got my MS and I will tell you the textbook industry is a racket.

Terry B. wrote:In recent years, however, I have gone away from using text books and simply use photocopied materials bound together.


Publishers like Cambridge release books for $3-15 in Asia that they charge $50+ for in the UK and US. Usually the quality of the paper is slightly inferior (though required for more humid climates).

kreator wrote:

Terry B. wrote:In recent years, however, I have gone away from using text books and simply use photocopied materials bound together.

Depending on how much you photocopy, it may not fall under "fair use" law or whatever. Whoever is doing the copying, whether it's yourself or your dept. or your college's library could get slammed with a lawsuit if it's bad enough.

Terry B. wrote:

kreator wrote:

Terry B. wrote:In recent years, however, I have gone away from using text books and simply use photocopied materials bound together.

Depending on how much you photocopy, it may not fall under "fair use" law or whatever. Whoever is doing the copying, whether it's yourself or your dept. or your college's library could get slammed with a lawsuit if it's bad enough.

I developed the materials.

nafod wrote:When I had to take my candidacy exams, I'd actually not had a direct course in any of the topics, due to my grad major being different from the undergrad. So I got copies of the 4 textbooks that the exams were roughly built around, and most importantly I got copies of the solution manuals too. And then I ground through all 4 books, essentially doing every problem in the books. I'd actually do them at first, using the solution manuals to check aftwerward. Then I just got to where'd I study the problem, come up with the solution approach, and then check the solution manual to see if I had it right.

It was an extraordinarily eye-opening experience. I learned those 4 subjects better than I'd learned any other in all my years. No substitute for just doing the reps until the stuff is internalized.

Of course, these were engineering courses, so they lent themselves to grinding it out. Worked for statistics too.