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| As of 11/20/20; Assembly Language is $122.95! |
I FIGURED it might be interesting to follow up on my earlier post (about the high price of textbooks and new legislation aimed at helping to remedy the situation here in California) by taking a quick look at some textbooks sold here at Irvine Valley College.
Naturally, my efforts below are unsystematic. So, for what it’s worth:
LOGIC
My area is philosophy, especially critical thinking and ethics. In my own courses (sections of Introduction to Philosophy and Ethics, etc.), students have access to readings (mostly secondary readings that I have written) for free online.
But we teach logic as well. So I visited the IVC Bookstore website (Follet) and selected Introduction to Logic (Philosophy 3). Our logic instructors always seem to use Hurley’s Concise Introduction to Logic, a standard text.
For the first section listed, a “custom edition” of Hurley’s book sells for $70.25 new and $52.75 used (it is the only required text).
For the second section listed, an “abridged” version of Hurley’s text is sold new (only) for $44.25. (Evidently, it comes with a CD-ROM.)
I went to AMAZON and looked up Patrick Hurley. Here, I encountered a problem, for it was hard to tell which versions of Hurley’s text correspond to the texts sold by IVC/Follet. The hardcover version sells new for $115.95 and used “from $109.95.” The paperback (I think) sells new for $90.88 and used “from $14.00.”
There’s no reference to “custom” editions.
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| Nowadays, the paperback is $32 |
So I moved on to an area with which I am unfamiliar: Math. Once again, I went to the IVC bookstore. At random, I selected Math 10 (Intro to Statistics).
For the first section listed, one book is required and another is “recommended” (evidently by the instructor; there is yet another section entitled “suggested by bookstore”).
The required text is Statistics & Probability Theory, by Dachslager (5th edition). New, it sells for $76.50. Used, it sells for 57.50.
The recommended text is Statistics & Probability Theory (SSM), again by Dachslager (5th edition). It sells new for $43.50 and used for $32.75.
I went back to AMAZON and searched under that title. It popped up as the seventh book listed, so I clicked on that. Statistics & Probability Theory, by Howard Dachslager, is available at AMAZON “used & new…from $48.00.” Nothing about editions is mentioned.
AMAZON sells the latest edition (2004) of what appears to be the recommended text (Solutions Manual for All Unsolved Problems in Statistics & Probability Theory) for $40.00. Also, “6 used & new [copies are] available from $33.00.”
Something by Howard Dachslager entitled Statistics & Probability Theory: A Tutorial Approach (2004) is available at AMAZON for $28.90. [See graphic: as of 2020, the paperback is $32]
Howard Dachslager is an Irvine Valley College math instructor.
(A quick perusal of math texts sold at IVC indicated that it is typical for a student to spend between $130-150 for a new text and about $90-100 for a used text. See.)
LIT
At random, I selected “Literature.” Again, at random, I selected “Lit 1.”
I went to the IVC Bookstore website and selected the books sold for the first section listed of our Lit 1 course.
Two books are required for the course: (1) Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, which is listed at $10 used, $13.25 new; and (2) the Bedford Intro to Literature, which is listed at $62.50 (used only).
Unfortunately, the precise edition of Conrad’s famous work is not indicated. But the prices seem pretty reasonable. On the other hand, I did find editions available at AMAZON that were cheaper still.
AMAZON lists several versions of the Bedford text. The latest edition (hardcover) can be purchased for $81.95.
On the other hand, it is “available [used and new] from $45.75."
5 comments:
That guy shouldn't be a teacher (Dachslager).
None the less, I think most of your prices are still on the lower end of the spectrum - my math books cost me upwards of a 110 per book to 150. Most science books are over a hundred dollars as well, and I'm lucky if I can get them from Amazon under $60.
There is this other site, should anyone else read this, called "Half.com" recommended to me by some teacher. After a single semester of trying to buy books at this site, I gave up. Why? Because every single book (save 1 'literary book') I ordered was never shipped, and the people who put the order up on the website had no intention of delivering it. They were scamming tons of students. Since I have a limited budget and pay for my own schooling, I had to wait the 20 days to get my money back from half.com before I could go purchase the books "for real."
A few of my friends had similar experiences; buying books is hell.
We want lower prices and we'll do a lot to get them.
Dachslager making a killing selling his own books? Figures. He's one of MATHUR's pals.
I encourage the students to do anything LEGAL to abtain the texts required by the instructors especially and particularly if they find a way to NOT purchase them from the IVC or any other college or university bookstore. Also, be VERY certain that you only purchase the text your instructor requires as indicated on his or her syllabus and not the "tricked-into" supplemental by the IVC Bookstore management.
IVC Boostore Management = total unrepentant assholes.
Always have been, this new crew of gold plated A*holians are nothing new.
However it is not just them, it is also the fucking book publishers and their forced bundling and their obnoxious 'barge into the faculty offices unannounced' sales representatives and pressure monsters.
I teach two types of classes (online and hybrid) for the same subject with the same book. It's an e-text available for $60, along with access to the workspace site. I know very, very few students have shelled out the extra $90 it costs to get the paper text with the site.
But the site lets me see lots of interesting things. For example: the average access rate over all assigned readings in my online class is 62.5%. In the hybrid class, it's worse: 46.3%. It's not that my students don't need the reading; the average grade for both classes is about 73%.
I have always suspected that students weren't reading assigned material, but now I can actually see that. As an economist I know about monopoly sellers, limited information, and certainly about the great reduction in competition caused by publisher and content-provider mergers.
Still, the reading statistics leave me wondering: How are student complaints about textbook prices related to the fact that many students consider them fairly useless? How many students buy the texts having in mind that they probably won't read them? Do they resent the high prices because they see a textbook purchase only as some kind of insurance in case they find they do need to read it? Or because they know how infrequently they will use it?
Again, the price-cost ratio in this market shows blatant profiteering, and trying to get a profit sheet out of a textbook publisher will only start an accounting shell game. But I'd still like to see a regression on the intensity of price complaint against the GPA of the complainers.
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