After noticing these remarks on expensive textbooks and this comment on the company that bribes professors to use their books, Preston McAfee pointed me to this update (complete with a picture of some guy who keeps threatening to sue him but never gets around to it).
The story McAfee tells is sad but also hilarious. Especially the part about “smuck.” It all looks like one more symptom of the imploding market for books. Prices for intro stat and econ books go up and up (even mediocre textbooks routinely cost $150), and the publishers put more and more effort into promotion.
McAfee adds:
I [McAfee] hope a publisher sues me about posting the articles I wrote. Even a takedown notice would be fun. I would be pretty happy to start posting about that, especially when some of them are charging $30 per article.
Ted Bergstrom and I used state Freedom of Information acts to extract the journal price deals at state university libraries. We have about 35 of them so far. Like textbooks, journals have gone totally out of control. Mostly I’m focused on journal prices rather than textbooks, although of course I contributed a free text. People report liking it and a few schools, including Harvard and NYU, used it, but it fizzled in the marketplace. I put it in flatworld.org to see if things like testbanks make a difference; their model is free online, cheap ($35) printed. The beauty of free online is it limits the sort of price increases your book experienced.
Here is a link to the FOIA work
which also has some discussion of the failed attempts to block us.
By the way, I had a spoof published in “Studies in Economic Analysis”, a student-run journal that was purchased by Emerald Press. Emerald charges about $35 for reprints. I wrote them a take-down notice since SEA didn’t bother with copyright forms so I still owned the copyright. They took it down but are not returning any money they collected on my article, pleading a lack of records. These guys are the schmucks of all schmucks.
Tenure is down from 60% of faculty to 30% over the past several decades. Many professors bounce from one 2 year adjunct position to another with little benefits, no job security, and meager pay. If the textbook is good enough, why would it be "sleazy" for one in that situation to accept a kickback? Why isn't it sleazy for profs with secure positions to undercut a source of revenue for their struggling colleagues?
Anon:
Yes, if the textbook is the best possible textbook and the instructor was going to adopt it anyway, there's no problem with the kickback. But I doubt that's what's happening. If the book really were so great, they probably wouldn't need to do the kickback thing in the first place. Much more likely, I'm guessing, is that these are crappy textbooks that they're trying to push in this sleazy way. And then the students are paying the price.
This post has given me what is either colossally clever or stupid, I can't tell which. I'm hoping the wisdom of crowds can replace self-censorship.
I'm currently teaching an intro-level stat course for graduate students, and I'm unhappy with the text. I don't feel it does a good job of helping students develop intuition about statistics. It is also ridiculously priced. Although I've looked around, the alternatives are not substantially better.
Here was my thought. Produce a wikibook for the intro stat class. Something that would teach to the post-Bayesian synthesis that Kass described in that paper that was linked to last week. As an online resource, people could embed clever animations and displayed. People could contribute their best explanations, examples, homework and test problems. It could become a real resource for both teachers and students of statistics. Better than anything I could possible due by myself. As long as we could figure a way to support the hosting fees, it could be free.
On the other hand, I haven't finished my last book project yet, so maybe I shouldn't be starting something new :).
These projects live and die by participation. Is anybody with me?
The big question is why the schmucks can get away with this behavior here and hardly not at all in most other industries. If a clothing maker took bribes to put some low-quality or even harmful junk in their clothes, most people would stop buying them.
The answer is that in higher ed, almost none of the price is paid for by the actor — the student — and instead by clueless third parties (parents, government agencies, private loan groups, etc.). So the person with the best information about how ridiculous things are, and which profs should be rewarded and punished, lacks the power to discipline the suppliers.
As the higher ed bubble has spiraled out of control during the past 30 years, this problem has gotten worse. Make it so that students pay for their books with their own money — not mom and dad's, not some state grant, and not a private loan — and you'll see them be as discriminating and disciplinary as they are when they buy clothes or electronics.
Agnostic: is the problem not rather that lecturers are price insensitive, since it's not the lecturer that has to buy the book set as required reading? I think the important thing is to raise awareness among lecturers, rather than to try to 'punish' those who recommend expensive books (to be honest, I somewhat gormlessly hadn't actually thought about the price of the textbooks I was recommending before the original post on this blog).
One thing I recently found out is that my university has (paid for) e-books from elsevier that students can read and download from the library webpage for free. The books aren't always great, but I now try to find an e-book that skint students can get, at least as an alternative to the preferred text for my modules. Might be worth Andrew's lecturing readership checking out if their own uni's have that kind of resource.
Alex:
Using Elsevier as a solution is kind of like using heroin to stop smoking.
Preston
Smucks on smack.
Your mistaken about the student not punishing the book industry. The students are a captive audience and cannot just choose another book. The professors teach according to the book they choose. Another book on the same subject may not emphasize or discuss the same topics in the same way. This could make the difference in a students success or failure. This is the problem, there is no competition. Professors should just tell students the truth, which is books rarely change with new editions. This way students may buy a cheaper version.