Am I referring to affirmative action? Pell Grants? Forgiveness of student loans?
No, I'm talking about the primary area where college students are actually plagued by injustice. I am talking about the market for textbooks.
Though the world of academia tilts heavily to the left, the professor/textbook writers of the world participate as rapaciously in cutthroat capitalism as anyone on the planet.
Students get sticker shock when they go to buy a particular text. So, they resort to the used market, which is better than ever thanks to ebay, half.com, and a variety of other outlets.
But the textbook writers regularly act to destroy the value of the old editions by continually issuing new ones whether necessary or not. The Nobel winning liberal economist Paul Samuelson earned a fortune on his many-times updated standard text.
The situation is on the verge of changing, though. Whether you want to own cherished novels or books of history as an e-book is one question. Owning college texts as e-books is a slam-dunk yes. And because the texts are electronic and can be easily altered, students have a strong case to expect updates as a matter of course to be either free or offered for a nominal additional cost. Certainly, they don't have to be forced to pay for the hard covers, the glossy paper, and the full color ink.
The day of the $20 college text may finally be here. And the incentive to continually offer updated versions with an extra paragraph here or there may be coming to an end.
The company to do it is Amazon. Much has been made of the iPhone as a device for reading books, but I can't imagine using that small screen for textbooks where you need to take notes, mark passages, etc. The Kindle is exactly that kind of device. And a student version may eventually be forthcoming.
Pete| 2.24.09 @ 2:53PM
Well said, Hunter. I tried to save a couple of bucks on a textbook by buying the previous year's addition only to find that although the contents was essentially the same, the format and order of topics had been switched around so that it did not match my syllabus of assignments, rendering the one-year old edition absolutely useless. So I had to upchuck over fifty bucks to buy the new one. At the end of the semester, I stood in line for an hour to try to sell the new edition back to the bookstore (as a used book), but they had already had a brand spanking new edition ready to roll and wouldn't buy my book back. Such a deal. Anyone interested in a Phlebotomy Essentials, Third Edition? Cheap.
Pingback| 2.27.09 @ 5:23PM
The American Spectator : AmSpecBlog : Leveling the Playing Field … | EducatorsArea.Co links to this page. Here’s an excerpt:
Pingback| 2.27.09 @ 5:23PM
The American Spectator : AmSpecBlog : Leveling the Playing Field … | EducatorsArea.Co links to this page. Here’s an excerpt:
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