Digital Textbooks for College?

doggkruse asks: "I recently purchased textbooks for the current semester in college only to end up with an empty wallet and a sore back. I have been looking into digital textbooks so that I will not have to lug around the real ones any more. I have found one site that seems to offer a very limited number of digital books. Does anyone know of a more complete solution. Especially one that works with Mac OS X. As laptops in classes are becoming more prolific, I think it is time to ditch the paper and save my wallet."

Bad idea.

[Anonymous Coward]

Here's why [gnu.org]

~~~

Sorry to hear it...

[Mattcelt]

While I sympathize with your plight, I'm even more concerned with the number and size of books that are being foisted on our younger students. It's worse than it was when I was in school - and a large number of children are starting to develop back and shoulder problems at a very young age because of the weight of the books they are expected to carry.

Problem is, textbook companies don't *want* to put things on CD for us - there's no financial incentive to do so. One student could buy the textbook and share it with the whole class - or even world+dog. So they have no reason to put things in a digital format, as much easier as that would be.

Anybody have any ideas about how we might get around this?

Make the professors demand it

[bluGill]

Your professor holds office hours, and announces them at the begining of class. (at least in the university I went to, I assume the others are similear) Get in his office and complain that paper books are too heavy and askward, you want paper books. Don't forget to mention that cost is also a problem with books. Thank the professors who do pay attention to money (even if it is accidental...) too. While you are there (and now that you know the way and when to go) use those office hours regularly get help on the class. Perhaps you can get an A. (I always wished I had taken my own advice...)

Most text books are written by professors. If you demand e-books, they will see a demand, and make sure at the very least their next book has an electronic format.

You as a student have little power in itself. Professors are human though, and they have power. Work on them, and they will use the power to represent your interests.

Since when has Digital been cheaper?

[bandy]

Since when has the digital version of an analog consumer product been cheaper than the original? Digital is whizzy, and a chance for the manufacturers to charge more, as the first adopters pay the cost of tooling up and the follow-on crowd gets to pay the established high price while the content providers rake in the dough.

Is it cheaper to:

• press a cd or dvd
  
• slowly copy a video or audio tape from a master
  

They'll lock you into a magic proprietary format which will break at the most inopportune time and you won't be able to sell them to others. Just say no. High book prices is one of the costs of college.

Re:They'll cost as much or more than the paper one

[user no. 590291]

And they'll have no resale value, because they'll be DRM'd out the ass.

is it really cheaper?

[mdaitc]

ok, so i thought i'd look at computer books.
Introduction to Object Oriented Programming With C++
Millspaugh, Anita
Harcourt College Publishers
ISBN: 0-03-023621-5

Digital version: $40
Amazon marketplace: 23 from $7.49 - just bought one including shipping for $10
Amazon.co.uk: 19.95 = $30USD approx.

so what would you use? what's the advantage, when i can have a book in my hand for $10 to have it digitally for $40...

the virtual real world

[KrazzeeKooter]

I hope we can all picture a future where the information, particularly educational material is free as its distribution has no cost. (MIT's online coursework is a good example of things moving in that direction.) The cost of outfitting a study will likewise be increasingly more desirable, and increasingly more expensive. It's not a stretch by any means.

But it is hard to guess how it will change other aspects of life and indeed that will be the greater impact. Suddenly a society with truly equal opportunity, being rich or of a geographic local like the US may not distinguish between the have and have nots of knowledge, information, and hence opportunity as is now specifically the case in institutions of higher learning and modern media. Perhaps literature becomes free while physical books might become more sought of as tokens, tomes, and symbols of knowledge by increasingly eclectic collectors and keepers. Their real value is that they can be referenced and referred to as frozen snapshots of a state knowledge at a given point in history. A slice of the cerebral cortex while the cerebral cortex continues to think and evolve.

The primary texts are free to change and develop, free of traditional copyright, until someone again takes a snapshot or captures a state of the literature that is particularly poignant or relative. What living texts will mean to educational texts is one thing (in fact it's well underway specifically making leaps in the study of the human genome), but what it means to fiction could be quite amazing. Will arts and literature cease to sustain a living? Will all those facets of life beyond basic existence (food, shelter, water) separate from from the higher exploits of culture, like art, literature and music. A separation of culture and commerce similar to the separation of church and state?

Would this truly make culture open and finally end the corruption and exploitation of culture by commerce. (Yes your identity and your need to belong in culture are being exploitatiously sold back to you, don't buy in, don't further fuel it.) It's a given that commerce has driven a wedge between the population and it's own culture and identity. It's given that further alienation of the individual and their society through commerce will increase suicide, bulimia, and and infinite amount of other social illnesses.

Will a separation of culture and commerce allow for greater opportunity and interest in non-commercial success through exploits in knowledge and arts without some sort of mandate for commercial success first. Perhaps in the near future someone might happily flip burgers and be a world renowned expert and lecturer on 1950's movie posters, or 14th century history of the city of Florence though they may live in Boise Idaho.

...or perhaps the silent majority of us may live in caves, stripped of our identities and culture and left eating rice while shelling out the bulk of our income for the latest pop artist is a vain and desperate attempt to fill a need we failed to understand when we had the chance... burying our children because they couldn't buy their way into society.

Re:Is the cost really for the paper?

[flabbergast]

Think about how small a market college textbooks compose. For instance, my undergrad CS program used 5 different books for 5 concurrent semesters of OS. (mostly because they switched from Java to C++ to C). Now, I realize most people would cry "The bastards! I can't use a book from last year!" but what I'm trying to point out is just the volume of textbooks available for an intro to OS class. So, even if 40 of your classmates buy a book for a semester, (and that's a fairly large class), times that by perhaps 100 different unversities that may use this textbook at $100 a pop, that's only $400,000. While that may seem a lot of money, after recuperating printing fees, editor fees, etc etc and the advance, there's not much left. And 100 different universities using this book is a stretch if there are plenty of books available. On the flipside, I'm sure Deitel and Deitel have made mad cash on Intro to C++/Java/C# etc...etc. Or even better, what about my African Storyteller professor who wrote the book we studied? how small a market is that? I'd bet pretty small.