RE: E-Books: high cost of textbooks

[Rick Adams]

Dave wrote:   ===========================================   I agree with Joseph's students--reading books on a computer screen sucks.  The screen is fixed (even laptops aren't moved around as easily as printed books) and the sense of staring at a direct light source (as opposed to reflected light) is annoying after a long session (at least, to me).  And the actions of marking up your book, writing in the margin, highlighting passages, and writing down separate study notes are activities that aid memory.  Attempting to do these same actions with keyboard/mouse and a computer screen amounts to a different (and possibly inferior) form of active reading and rehearsal.   ===========================================   The use of a well designed tablet computer eliminates all of those objections. It is as easily moved about and held as a textbook (easier, most texts today are fairly heavy and bulky), it uses reflected light when the illumination is good and only backlights when it is not, you can mark it to your heart's content (using the handwriting recognition software that comes with it), and you can write study notes into a separate document right on top of it, even having the benefit of copy-and-paste functions using the book itself. The contents of the book can fit, together with an enormous amount of support material ranging from PowerPoint slide shows to Excel spreadsheets, videos, and reference materials or situational modeling software, on a single DVD-ROM and be loaded into the computer's hard drive for convenient use then--when the term is over--saved to a single DVD-R disk for permanent storage. And since the cost of actually manufacturing a DVD-ROM is less than $1.50 ($2.50 with a high quality box, a basic manual, and packaging) the publisher can't claim that the book is expensive to print!   Taking the concept one step further, it would be easily possible for an academic library to purchase the book with student reproduction rights and make copies of the DVD-ROM for the students enrolled in a class (right now, for instance, Microsoft makes many of it's products--including some very expensive ones--available to students for a small fee and the colleges simply dupe the DVD's in the lab for distribution).   Prices ARE ridiculous. Right now I'm looking at a text I'll be using for a Group Dynamics class starting next month. The book is mid-sized quality paperback (somewhat smaller than the APA Publication Manual and of the same quality), has 484 pages (mostly text with 4-color images on the covers only), and costs the students $90.00. THAT is ridiculous.   I expect a publisher to make a profit--but not to gouge the customer as textbook publishers do today. Students are a captive market--they MUST buy the texts we instruct them to purchase. That makes it our responsibility as the people who choose those texts to refuse to assign books that are overpriced. As a mainstream author, I receive far better royalty rates than is true of textbook authors--and I can guarantee that nothing I've ever written has sold for the kinds of prices we commonly see for Introductory level texts. Someone claimed that the problem was frequent revisions. Take a look at the books in the computer market sometime--most software packages (MS Office, Adobe Photoshop, etc.) are upgraded every 18 months to 2 years--and an entirely new set of books is needed to replace the ones about the previous version. Compare the cost of a comprehensive non-academic version of a software training book with the academic version. The current price for a 1200+ page comprehensive training manual and reference work on the average computer software package is $39.95 ($49.95 if it comes with a CD-ROM or a DVD-ROM with the text and additional resources on it). The price for an educationally targeted book on precisely the same topic, running between 250-400 pages and of identical quality of publication is at least $90.00 without CD-ROM. If anyone can justify that kind of pricing (twice the price--1/2 the content) I would love to know how they did so. More to the point, I would love to know why any instructor with a shred of concern for his or her students would voluntarily ASSIGN the $90.00 book instead of the (better written and more comprehensive) $39.95 one available at Barnes & Noble off the shelf.   Rick   -- Rick Adams. Capella University Grand Canyon University Jackson Community College [EMAIL PROTECTED] [EMAIL PROTECTED] [EMAIL PROTECTED] [EMAIL PROTECTED] "... and the only measure of your worth and your deeds will be the love you leave behind when you're gone." -Fred Small, J.D., "Everything Possible"     --- You are currently subscribed to tips as: archive@jab.org To unsubscribe send a blank email to [EMAIL PROTECTED]