Some tips for textbooks I wish I knew when I started college:
1. Wait until classes start to buy textbooks. You want to have a chance to talk to your actual professor and hear what they say about the textbook and/or look at the syllabus to determine what, if any, readings are actually required from the textbook. In many cases, textbooks are chosen at a departmental level, so some professors may use them sparingly or not at all.
2. If you determine that the textbook is probably needed for you to finish the course, and there is an older edition available less than 5 years old, then buy the older edition. It will be available online on eBay, Amazon, etc. for a much cheaper price than the most current edition. In most cases, the reading content will be very similar, if not identical. Problems sets might change, but if you are assigned them, you can ask another student to take a look at their textbook, or borrow one from the school library. I started doing this my last couple of years at college, and never had any issues.
3. If you do buy a textbook, read it in its entirety. Remember that you are taking classes to learn, not to blindly follow a course syllabus. So read your textbook - all of it - even the parts that aren't assigned.
I’m able to get most of my books online for free, and have been lucky with professors not requiring textbooks. This semester though I’m forced to purchase a $200 textbook just so I can turn in my homework through some online system, it’s a joke.
> This semester though I’m forced to purchase a $200 textbook just so I can turn in my homework through some online system
Walled gardens encroaching on education.
Can you mention what system it is? There's a few thousand entrepreneurs on this site that might be interested in disrupting broken business models like that one.
When I was doing Algorithms and Data Structures at the University of Otago, the required textbook was Cormen's Introduction to Algorithms first edition. More than $NZ130 at the time, and we got a few weeks into the course before they told us we didn't actually need it for coursework, they just wanted to make sure we had a copy.
I see it's available for $US6.61 used on Amazon now...
When you say "they just wanted to make sure we had a copy" you mean - they made you buy it as a "requirement" (that there was no way around it), or they just told you and most of you bought?
And by "they" you meant the faculty (professors etc) or college administration or some other office office? Just curious about it. I am from India and there are no fixed text books here (at least the colleges I know about - central Govt. funded). There are syllabi and you are free to study the course with anything you want - books, or no books. My college library solved textbook problem for almost 40% students and rest were solved by hands-me-downs from seniors, 2nd hand book stores (some of them have very capable xerox machines too), and then there's "online".
Yep, there is a nasty little trend of textbooks whose homework assignments require a code for a publisher site. The student is then required to fill out the answers on that site. It mostly happens in lower level classes. Why grade students when the computer will do most of the work?
On a side note, I saw a video of some professor ticked off that students got a hold of a test battery from a publisher. This "get all the questions from the publisher" makes me think these folks don't want to put any effort into the class. What is the difference between a prestigious university and a community college given that level of effort?
Students should feel absolutely no guilt in pirating textbooks. The whole industry is a racket, designed to exploit kids in a situtation where they have no choice. I did things the "normal" way my first year of college back in the day and realized how stupid paying $400 a semester in books was before I just nabbed pdfs (and finding them was a challenge in the days before The Book Bay was a thing).
Parent post may be referring to the infamous Pirate Bay, from which you can obtain links to torrents of textbooks. Another source is Library Genesis, which is a russion site hosting many technical books - the URL changes sometimes, but a quick search should help you find it. For journal articles, check Sci-Hub. Happy reading!
> Students should feel absolutely no guilt in pirating textbooks.
False.
> The whole industry is a racket, designed to exploit kids in a situtation where they have no choice.
True. But your previous sentence does not follow from this. The bad actions of others do not justify your own bad actions, no matter how tempting it becomes to think otherwise.
> Students should feel absolutely no guilt in pirating textbooks.
Textbook publishers aren't really hurt by this as much as the legitimate textbook purchasers (your fellow students).
The solution isn't to pirate/steal the content. It's to vote with your feet before you go to a post-secondary that chooses expensive copyrighted books when there are free or very affordable alternatives.
Are you really advocating that children should turn down attending to the best university they can get in to over the choice of textbooks in classes they haven't chosen that are taught by different professors on a rotating schedule? Do you really think that is reasonable or even feasible?
> The thing about children is that they generally don't have the experience or knowledge to make decisions like this.
very true.
>Besides, voting with your dollars is a fallacy.
in an oligopoly such as education where the purchase and sale of goods/services is subsidized then the power of voting with your dollars is diminished. the core concept is not a fallacy, and is actually a good metaphor for market action.
the problem is that 18 y/o young adults are able to borrow far more money than they ought to be able to, creating a market of naive buyers with extraordinary buying power. its no surprise that some of them buy things like comparative literature or gender studies degrees.
We're not talking about children, these are college students. They can weigh the risks/benefits of piracy.
>voting with your dollars is a fallacy
What do you mean by that? Are you suggesting that companies will survive without any customers buying their product?
The only situation in which voting with your wallet doesn't work is when you have no choice. In this situation, the students do have the choice to pirate the books, buy used books, or bite the bullet and buy the book.
5. Buy the east asian english edition of the textbook.
This was all the rage when I was in school, especially since our bookstore sold at retail price (or about 80% for a used copy) and _generously offered_ to buy the books back at the end of the semester for 3-10% of list price. College bookstores are a racket.
> since our bookstore sold at retail price (or about 80% for a used copy) and _generously offered_ to buy the books back at the end of the semester for 3-10% of list price. College bookstores are a racket
There are already business models that have started to chip away at this type of racket. Chegg and Amazon rentals are decent examples.
Sadly I'm unimpressed with the progress it has made. I'm convinced replacing expensive formally published textbooks with cheaper or freeware digital books is superior. The problem is with department deans and professors that hawk their own books in their courses.
Yeah, absolutely don't buy from your college bookstore. Hell, just purchasing the book from Amazon cut the cost by at least a third for just about every item.
It is probably the sign of a good professor that they are producing their own course material rather than just telling students to go and read a certain text book chapter.
That material is what they think is important and is in their own style, if that style clicks with you then great, if not then you're out of luck.
With text books, you get everything, not just what someone thinks is important and you can go to the library and find one with the right style to suit you.
I still have all my text books, and I actually do use some of them occasionally if I need to revise some topic.
The maths department where I attended did this for first year material. They put together a ~100 ish page packet that we paid something nominal for, making all other textbooks optional.
So who sets the question paper and homework assignments? If it is the same prof who hand over the material, that's not a very good class. I wonder which subject this might work well for.
It works well for courses which are based on critical reasoning such as physics and mathematics. Going both with and without textbooks for many courses I can say that the textbook doesn't make much difference if the notes from the course are done well. If they aren't then the class can be a real pain.
It took me a couple of classes of barely or never using books to start doing #1 in conjunction with the library/sharing of #2. It also helps if you can get an idea of the books in advance from someone who just took the course, giving you a chance to grab a library copy before they are all checked out.
In my experience I did get a couple of professors that weren't pleased when I didn't get the book(s).
One frustrating thing was professors assigning their own books. There were a couple of cases where much of the class was directly related to it, but otherwise it was for vanity/$$$.
1. Wait until classes start to buy textbooks. You want to have a chance to talk to your actual professor and hear what they say about the textbook and/or look at the syllabus to determine what, if any, readings are actually required from the textbook. In many cases, textbooks are chosen at a departmental level, so some professors may use them sparingly or not at all.
2. If you determine that the textbook is probably needed for you to finish the course, and there is an older edition available less than 5 years old, then buy the older edition. It will be available online on eBay, Amazon, etc. for a much cheaper price than the most current edition. In most cases, the reading content will be very similar, if not identical. Problems sets might change, but if you are assigned them, you can ask another student to take a look at their textbook, or borrow one from the school library. I started doing this my last couple of years at college, and never had any issues.
3. If you do buy a textbook, read it in its entirety. Remember that you are taking classes to learn, not to blindly follow a course syllabus. So read your textbook - all of it - even the parts that aren't assigned.