Illegally acquiring textbooks is
gaining more and more popularity, as college students download their books for
free online. The average price of textbooks currently average at $1253 a year,
with individual books costing over $2-300.
In the past 10 years alone textbook prices have skyrocket over 182%, and
an astonishing 800% over the last 35 years. As a result, students are becoming
more sophisticated in acquiring their course materials at a lower cost.
Textbook renting has become a huge market, and countless file sharing sites
have grown rampant throughout the internet. Although it is illegal to upload or
download copyrighted material without permission, this has virtually no
influence on stopping students from doing it.
Publishers often create new
versions every year, with little to no difference in content, but charge a few
hundred dollars for the “newer edition”. In many scenarios, the people that
write the books, professors, researches or distinguished students, don’t even
get royalties for the chapters they contributed. Thus publishers have turned
the textbook industry into an optimal form to maximize profit. To worsen this,
colleges try to avoid the issue by requiring you to submit work online. In
order to simply get access to course material or homework online, it is
becoming necessary and mandatory to acquire an additional access key. Even if
the student chooses not to purchase the textbook, the key alone can cost
upwards of 95% the book’s original value. Students have no say in this, and on
top of whatever they are paying for their tuition thousands are being shelled
out yearly for textbooks and additional material.
This has caused an interesting
change in social networking, and the dynamic of acquiring textbooks. Between 2008
and 2012 the amount of social media posts linked to textbook PDFs was only in
the hundreds per year. While in 2013 they have spiked to over thousands a month.
While with most multimedia copyright issues are extremely uptight, textbooks seem to have taken another turn. You hear
countless stories of Hollywood suing individuals or recording companies hunting
down torrenters, but textbook publishers appear to have no quarrels with
copyright infringement. The only apparent copyright enforcement effort is from
the larger textbook companies, such as Pearson and Macmillan, instituting practices
guarantying the purchase of materials (keys to online resources) and raising
prices to make up for the increased amount of downloads.
Many seem to speculate that the
sudden boom in textbook downloading long after people first began pirating
music and movies is due to the more recent offering of ebooks, and the vast
monetary difference between downloading an album verse downloading a textbook. Personally,
I have not purchased a single book yet for college and refuse to unless absolutely
necessary. Is it fair to charge students such an absurd amount for a book that
their own professor may have written, or a book that will only be referenced
once throughout the semester? Even if the book is difficult to acquire, students have the mentality, if it takes 2 hours to find that's still upwards of $100 an hour they are saving over purchasing it. I am a huge fan of open-source textbooks,
following a Pay-What-You-Want structure, but unfortunately they are only currently
available among small specific niches the academic world and not wide spread. I look forward to a time when knowledge is seen for its academic purpose rather then monetary gain.
http://www.vocativ.com/usa/education-usa/lots-college-students-simply-stopped-paying-textbooks/
http://www.collegedata.com/cs/content/content_payarticle_tmpl.jhtml?articleId=10064
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