First It Was Song Downloads. Now It’s Organic Chemistry.

I'm surprised it took this long.

First It Was Song Downloads. Now It’s Organic Chemistry.

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AFTER scanning his textbooks and making them available to anyone to download free, a contributor at the file-sharing site PirateBay.org composed a colorful message for “all publishers” of college textbooks, warning them that “myself and all other students are tired of getting” ripped off. (The contributor’s message included many ripe expletives, but hey, this is a family newspaper.)

All forms of print publishing must contend with the digital transition, but college textbook publishing has a particularly nasty problem on its hands. College students may be the angriest group of captive customers to be found anywhere.

Consider the cost of a legitimate copy of one of the textbooks listed at the Pirate Bay, John E. McMurry’s “Organic Chemistry.” A new copy has a list price of $209.95; discounted, it’s about $150; used copies run $110 and up. To many students, those prices are outrageous, set by profit-engorged corporations (and assisted by callous professors, who choose which texts are required). Helping themselves to gratis pirated copies may seem natural, especially when hard drives are loaded with lots of other products picked up free.

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It is going to be pretty hard to feel bad for the textbook publishers. I remember having to pay ~$400 for one semester of books back in 1990. I also remember when I sold them back to the bookstore and got something like $35. The books then sell used for only about a 20% discount, thus the store makes another $320 after giving me just barely 10% of that pure profit.

I hated the cost of textbooks in college. I thought it was all outrageous. Especially since publishers seem to nitpick and update or change a few pages and call it a new edition. And for a lot of subjects, the material fundamentally never changed. Something like a maths book or history, not current history, and English, don't often change nearly as much as publishers say they do. How many versions of some war 50 years ago do you really need? There are no new breakthroughs in the English language. Fundamental mathematics has been around for ages. I would assume where the breakthroughs with new maths wouldn't be something a freshman in College would be taking.

Always thought book prices were a scam.

I’m not sure what I think about this. Being a Gen/Biochem major, I understand that it’s probably necessary to prescribe a new textbook to a course every year or so – the field moves that quickly. That being the case, and considering that these textbooks are more student friendly when the have pretty big glossy diagrams and photographs and will be obsolete curiosities within three years, and will have an audience of a subset of undergrads from x amount of universities world wide, and must be written by academics of outstanding reputation… well I can see why they sell for a premium.

I don’t imagine there’s really that much profit in marketing textbooks. It’s probably a less lucrative field in publishing despite the prohibitive price of the books.

PS The fact that you were getting such a lousy trade in on your textbooks is a comment on the lack of activism of your student body. Monash University has a book coop that sells 2nd hand text books for up to 75% of the original price, and takes a 28% cut from the sell price. It was established for students by students and has managed to compete these 32 years. Yay student activism!

Like Mala, I have mixed feelings on this. While I can remember paying some pretty steep prices, I also know that a lot of these books just can't be sold on massive scales like the latest fiction bestsellers so initial publication costs have to be spread over a much smaller sampling.

Of course, I rarely sold my books back. I usually kept them for references for future courses. But I do know that you can't depend on the main university bookstore to get the best price for sell of a used book. You're better off going through a student group or selling it used online.

Whatever the case, "stealing" the book isn't a solution.

"To many students, those prices are outrageous, set by profit-engorged corporations (and assisted by callous professors, who choose which texts are required)."

Apathetic is another good term for those professors. I've been at a university for one year now, and boy what a difference from a community college. Our education system needs major reform- starting with foot-dragging tenured professors.

On the topic with the publishers. Another trick they like to use is to constantly keep putting out revised editions. They make a few petty changes, put in different homework problems, swap page numbers, etc... And vioala, all the used editions on ebay become useless. Go buy a brand new one.

Colleges are just as bad with their buy back programs. I've never sold my books back to them. I just keep them, and I never buy my books from them.

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Originally posted by Malacasta
I’m not sure what I think about this. Being a Gen/Biochem major, I understand that it’s probably necessary to prescribe a new textbook to a course every year or so – the field moves that quickly.

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More like in the advanced courses. The basic, core material never changes, even in science. As a chem major I can tell you the core subjects of gen chem, organic chem, and physical chem are about the same shit that's been taught over the last 50 years. The revisions are not justified and not based on actual learning material. It's always new features, new formats and improved layouts.

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Originally posted by Deokoria
Whatever the case, "stealing" the book isn't a solution.

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I disagree. The real thieves here are the publishers. The colleges too.

Yeah. This struck a chord with me, too. Honestly, if i can spend $600 bucks on an iphone or something similar i dont complain too much about the costs of textbooks and appreciate the time that goes into them. What kills me is the resale of the books. Like Ari said the consumer gets relatively nothing back, and the bookstores reap a huge profit . Unless im mistaken and textbooks fall under a different category, used book sales are exempt from royalty infringements so the whole reason I would buy the book for that price in the first place has just gotten shot out the window.
So, is this a tit for tat situation? After the first year of sales, how likely is it that you would be buying a NEW book and not a USED book? If its used...then I guess the question really is: who are you really stealing from? Most likely its the people at the bookstore who are basically stealing from you. Still, stealing is not the answer, but I can appreciate the bit of anarchist sentiment.

I don't know about you, but I don't know too many uni students who can afford $600 phones, let alone required readings costing multiple hundreds of dollars a piece.

Many aussie students, myself included, had to make the batshit CRAZY decision of 'Do I pay rent this week? Or do I buy this $300 textbook.'

In what universe does that make sense?

In my opinion, paying for the text books was/is the worst part of going to college. My roommate at the time told me about a website that sells new and used books. I checked it out and bought a book for an English class. The book I needed was still in wrapper new. I paid $12 or so for it. When I went to the bookstore the next day, just to see what they sold it for, it was upwards of around $70-$80.

With that said, my question is this: Is it really the publisher, or is the bookstores that jack up the prices just like any other department store? They get it wholesale at X amount per book, jack up the price by 70% then sell it.

You don't have to look very hard to find people selling books. Every bulletin board that I ran into had someone selling a book. I was even standing in line at the bookstore, and some random guy comes up and says "I'll sell you a copy of that $110 book for $50." The only reason why I turned him down is because I doubt he would take Visa.

I do agree that it's bullshit that your text books cost more than your tuition (at least my did, but I only went to community college) but there are other ways to get the same books for a lot cheaper.

Yeah, I always buy books used and since I get a stipend for books from the army, I end up getting to keep money in my pocket which rocks! A lot of my books cost around 80 dollars USED from the bookstores on campus and upwards of 100 dollars new. I can find a lot of them online for between 1-20 dollars.. sometimes shipping is more expensive than the actual books.

What I hate is when Professors want you to use their own book for class and they come out with a new edition every year or two years so you can't really find it used anywhere. I mean I understand why they would do it but it really bites for us! Especially because of how much college tuition has gone up.

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Originally posted by Nephrys
What I hate is when Professors want you to use their own book for class and they come out with a new edition every year or two years so you can't really find it used anywhere. I mean I understand why they would do it but it really bites for us! Especially because of how much college tuition has gone up.

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Actually, I believe that is illegal.

Colleges mandate changing books every so often to get that profit. Every used book a college bookstore sells is actually taking a loss, they'd rather sell a new book to maximize their profit.

This is definitely a tough issue. I wish I had numbers on what kind of profit margins they make on the textbooks, as that would be helpful. If there is truly some kind of abusive profiteering going on, then I'd feel a little more sympathy for the thieves.

What makes this situation different than many other types of IP theft is the fact that students don't really have a lot of choice. Some schools have good student run co-op/used book sale systems, but many schools don't. You also don't have a lot of time to shop around. You get your classes and usually within a few days (tops) you need your books.

The school bookstores are definitely engaging in massive profiteering. They are the ones giving you 10% or less for your books and then selling them at 80-90% list price. It is a shame these guys can't find a way to screw the university bookstores as well as (or instead of) the publishers.