Amazon's Last Resort: Shopping for Books in the Digital Age

[Hornbein]

I saw a $75 textbook on Amazon that I wanted. But every book I've bought from Amazon has been so badly made that I consider this a last resort. While wondering what to do, I came across this.

"First a rant: What has happened to the once high art of bookbinding? I have hardcover books, with sewn-in signatures, that have stood up well to decades of extensive use. Some softcover books, particularly the older ones from Dover Publications, have also stood up well. But virtually the entire publishing industry seems to have given up on the idea of making well-constructed books for reasonable prices. "Clifford Algebra to Geometric Calculus", with its poorly glued spine and paper cover, is my outstanding example of the _worst_ of this trend. Even though I handle my books with reasonable care, my not-inexpensive softcover of "Clifford Algebra to Geometric Calculus" started to fall apart almost immediately, before I even made it halfway through Chapter 1. I would have purchased the hardcover version with a "library binding", but the extra expense (more than $150) was so extravagant as to be beyond my means." -- Gregory Grunberg.

Did he really mean that a hardcover cost $150 more? Or $150 total?

I checked out used book on eBay but they cost significantly more than new.

 

[phinds]

... every book I've bought from Amazon has been so badly made ...

Do you blame Amazon for this in some way?

 

[Hornbein]

Do you blame Amazon for this in some way?

I don't know. I haven't bought many books so I can't compare.

I DO know that in my youth I bought LP albums through the mail at a discount price. They always fell apart. Albums I bought at the store never did. So it is possible for large-volume distributors to order special shoddy goods.

So, is there somewhere I can buy books that don't fall apart, or are all modern books like that?

 

[phinds]

I don't know. I haven't bought many books so I can't compare.

I DO know that in my youth I bought LP albums through the mail at a discount price. They always fell apart. Albums I bought at the store never did. So it is possible for large-volume distributors to order special shoddy goods.

So, is there somewhere I can buy books that don't fall apart, or are all modern books like that?

Amazon doesn't make books and I'm not aware that any publishers make books specifically to sell on Amazon, although given their dominance in the book market it certainly would not be unreasonable. Still, I don't think publishers build books based on where they are going to sell.

 

[Astronuc]

Amazon is primarily a distributor. It is the manufacturer of the books who is responsible for the quality, or the publisher, assuming the publisher oversees the manufacture. It seems industry is about cutting costs and returning more on investment, even if it reduces quality of the product.

 

[zoobyshoe]

In my experience there has always been a certain percentage of poorly constructed books. I borrow newer books from the Library all the time and most of them seem pretty sturdy. But, I also buy older books all the time and it's not all that rare to find among them ones that are falling apart, both hardcover and paperback.

However, it could be that textbook publishers, in particular, are getting sloppy, since the strategy now seems to be to "update" them every year in order to force students to buy the new version. In other words, last years text will be out of date this year, so why bother constructing it to last 50 years?

If this problem is real, it may be that it's exclusively a textbook problem, not a problem with books in general.

 

[Vanadium 50]

Quality bookbinding costs money. Smyth sewn books are the best - and the most expensive. Quarter-binding is rare, and half-binding or full leather is rare still. People don't want to pay for this quality.

 

[Hornbein]

In my experience there has always been a certain percentage of poorly constructed books. I borrow newer books from the Library all the time and most of them seem pretty sturdy. But, I also buy older books all the time and it's not all that rare to find among them ones that are falling apart, both hardcover and paperback.

However, it could be that textbook publishers, in particular, are getting sloppy, since the strategy now seems to be to "update" them every year in order to force students to buy the new version. In other words, last years text will be out of date this year, so why bother constructing it to last 50 years?

If this problem is real, it may be that it's exclusively a textbook problem, not a problem with books in general.

I'm sitting here with a shelf full of textbooks 20 and 40 years old and none of them is falling apart.

I have a trigonometry textbook from the 1940's. The paper is so dense if feels like lifting a rock. The content also is superior to anything else I've seen.

 

[zoobyshoe]

I'm sitting here with a shelf full of textbooks 20 and 40 years old and none of them is falling apart.

I believe you, but the question is whether you would have bought them if they were falling apart. Personally, I don't mind shelling out a dollar at the swap meet for a 40 year old book with loose pages or a cracked spine if I am interested in the information in it.

I have a trigonometry textbook from the 1940's. The paper is so dense if feels like lifting a rock. The content also is superior to anything else I've seen.

Again, I believe you, but I think if you did a more thorough survey of books from the 40's you'd find poor quality ones as well. Finding the bad ones is a matter of finding sellers who will try to sell anything. A good bookseller wouldn't acquire or try to sell a book in very poor condition.

 

[Hornbein]

I believe you, but the question is whether you would have bought them if they were falling apart. Personally, I don't mind shelling out a dollar at the swap meet for a 40 year old book with loose pages or a cracked spine if I am interested in the information in it.

I bought them new. My professors assigned them, so I didn't have any choice. I've got 29 of these textbooks and they are all doing fine, so the probability of a bad one must have been low.

I question whether those Amazon books would sell in a bookstore. I think they would fall apart on the shelf before they could be sold.

 

[zoobyshoe]

I bought them new. My professors assigned them, so I didn't have any choice. I've got 29 of these textbooks and they are all doing fine, so the probability of a bad one must have been low.

OK, I have checked my books and you might be right. The college texts I have are all structurally sound, some of them going back to 1915. Some of them have separate pieces of paper folded and stuffed into them by students over the years giving the impression of loose pages, but that's illusory.

I question whether those Amazon books would sell in a bookstore. I think they would fall apart on the shelf before they could be sold.

Like I said earlier, I wouldn't be surprised if publishers now treat college texts as 'disposable,' not intended to last more than a semester. You take last years text, shuffle it around a little, reprint it calling it an "updated" edition implying that last years is already hopelessly out of date, and that's enough smoke and mirrors to justify students having to buy a new text.

 

[Evo]

You should also check to see if these books are meant to be sold in the us. Books made for sale in Asia are very poor quality and are not allowed to be sold in the US, but you will find these illegal sources selling on Amazon. It is up to you to check.

 

[jack476]

I've had some problems with horrible binding too, but thankfully it's easy to fix. All you need is some Elmer's school glue (any washable, acid-free glue will do, so don't get ripped off spending $40 on a tub of bookbinding glue that the hipster running your used book store told you to get), a fine-tipped paintbrush or even Q-tips, and rubber bands.

For pages or sections of pages that have fallen out, brush some glue into the crease where the pages fell out of, then just slide the fallen pages back in. After an hour or two, when the glue has lost its stickiness but has yet to start fully drying, run a butter knife through all of the pages that you put back in and near where you made the repair to prevent pages from gluing together, make sure you can still flip pages easily. Then put the rubber bands around the closed book, and compress the closed book under something flat and heavy overnight, by morning the pages will be just as secure as when the book was new, just open it slowly the first couple times to detach any pages that might have gotten stuck together by any residual glue. I've done this with both hard and softcover.

If the binding has separated from the spine, all you need to do is drizzle some of the Elmer's glue into the space between the binding and the spine, and then put rubber bands on in such a way as to force the spine and binding together, and let sit overnight.

Caveat though, I've only done this on books with heavier paper that can survive the peeling apart stage, something that uses very fine paper like Horowitz's Art of Electronics would probably liquefy in your hands if you tried this.

You should also check to see if these books are meant to be sold in the us. Books made for sale in Asia are very poor quality and are not allowed to be sold in the US, but you will find these illegal sources selling on Amazon. It is up to you to check.

That's illegal?

 

[Hornbein]

Like I said earlier, I wouldn't be surprised if publishers now treat college texts as 'disposable,' not intended to last more than a semester. You take last years text, shuffle it around a little, reprint it calling it an "updated" edition implying that last years is already hopelessly out of date, and that's enough smoke and mirrors to justify students having to buy a new text.

The textbook market changed in the 80's or so as I recall. Textbook prices went up. Students started to sell their used books. Sales dropped. Professors (or publishers? I dunno) retaliated by issuing an updated version every year. It was pretty much the same as the old one, but the homework problems were rearranged so that when assigned "problems 3,9,27, and 33 on page 297" you had to have the new edition. It never crossed my mind that the new edition would be better in any way.

 

[Hornbein]

You should also check to see if these books are meant to be sold in the us. Books made for sale in Asia are very poor quality and are not allowed to be sold in the US, but you will find these illegal sources selling on Amazon. It is up to you to check.

How can I tell?

 

[Evo]

How can I tell?

It usually says. But I'll look some more, we've had threads on these junky Asian books before.

 

[Silicon Waffle]

How can I tell?

As Evo says, a message stating that the book is not sold in the US or so and for international students only will be printed on the cover. I used to buy one book (about computer OS) written by an American writer I would like to not name fully here and could read such a message. Concerning the book content quality, I truly love it. It uses easy English, formal styles and is colorful. I love all visual images that really help push forward my understandings.

 

[zoobyshoe]

The textbook market changed in the 80's or so as I recall. Textbook prices went up. Students started to sell their used books. Sales dropped. Professors (or publishers? I dunno) retaliated by issuing an updated version every year. It was pretty much the same as the old one, but the homework problems were rearranged so that when assigned "problems 3,9,27, and 33 on page 297" you had to have the new edition. It never crossed my mind that the new edition would be better in any way.

Check out the charts on this site:
https://www.aei.org/publication/the-new-era-of-the-400-college-textbook-which-is-part-of-the-unsustainable-higher-education-bubble/

And just in case the rise in college textbook prices could be blamed on the increasing costs of publishing books in general, the chart below clearly shows that that’s not the case – the CPI for recreational books has been falling relative to the overall CPI since 1998, while the CPI for college textbooks has risen 3.5 times more than the overall CPI.

Students are a captive market: they have to buy the book assigned and can't shop around for better deals.

 

[Sophia]

I've bought advanced biology, advanced physics and chemistry from Amazon this summer and they are all right. I haven't used them much, though. :-)
I also read quite a lot and I didn't notice lower quality of binding.
What I noticed is much lower quality of new domestic appliances. But that's another story :-)

 

[Hornbein]

What I noticed is much lower quality of new domestic appliances. But that's another story :-)

My sister's career is selling home appliances. She says even $5000 refrigerators are engineered to fail in a few years.

 

[Hornbein]

Check out the charts on this site:
https://www.aei.org/publication/the-new-era-of-the-400-college-textbook-which-is-part-of-the-unsustainable-higher-education-bubble/

Students are a captive market: they have to buy the book assigned and can't shop around for better deals.

Actually I sympathize with the writers of physics textbooks. They are very difficult to write and sales are low. I think that $150 for a good textbook is a good deal. I've checked out some free textbooks available online and they weren't worth it.

Professors are underpaid. They collude to boost one another's income by assigning one another's textbooks. I don't blame them.
----
If I were a student and was caught in the "new edition" game, I would buy an "obsolete" edition cheap then get Xerox copies of the problem sets from the other students.

I'm glad I kept most of my textbooks, and regret the few I got rid of or avoided buying in the first place. I feel sorry for students who can't afford to keep their books for reference.
---
As for whether the "higher education bubble is unsustainable," I say it can go on forever. It may be a losing game on average, but it can continue as long as not having a degree is perceived as worse. People will gamble at bad odds if the alternative is being a permanent loser.

I have a cousin who owns a small software consulting company and they place no value on degrees. He hires people with certificates from large vendors like Microsoft.

 

[SteamKing]

I have a trigonometry textbook from the 1940's. The paper is so dense if feels like lifting a rock. The content also is superior to anything else I've seen.

It must've been printed after the War. Wartime books used very thin paper and smaller page sizes to save material, and some of the bindings were not as durable.

Another problem you find often in older texts is that the paper used is not acid-free, and the books printed with this stuff slowly decompose over the years, regardless of whether you use them or not.

 

[Silicon Waffle]

I am unclear about the collusion.
But this is really smart of you! You sound like my professor.

----
If I were a student and was caught in the "new edition" game, I would buy an "obsolete" edition cheap then get Xerox copies of the problem sets from the other students.
I'm glad I kept most of my textbooks, and regret the few I got rid of or avoided buying in the first place. I feel sorry for students who can't afford to keep their books for reference.
---
As for whether the "higher education bubble is unsustainable," I say it can go on forever. It may be a losing game on average, but it can continue as long as not having a degree is perceived as worse. People will gamble if the alternative is being a permanent loser.

I couldn't keep most of my books, which is a sad thing. At the same time I also realize that I don't remember anything said in the books I have read after some time.
It is probably because I am becoming old now but I find I become more interested in or inspired towards the ideas or words used in a particular passage of a page than about how accurately the books should have been written.

I have a cousin who owns a small software consulting company and they place no value on degrees. He hires people with certificates from large vendors like Microsoft.

Lemme know more please so that I can try applying for a position in there.

 

[Vanadium 50]

rofessors are underpaid. They collude to boost one another's income by assigning one another's textbooks.

Do you have any evidence for this? Both of the textbook authors I know well got $1/book. Maybe it's up to $2/book now. Either you are writing a widely-used intro text, in which case the "collusion" doesn't matter, or you're not, in which case you aren't making any money even with the "collusion".

 

[Hornbein]

Do you have any evidence for this? Both of the textbook authors I know well got $1/book. Maybe it's up to $2/book now. Either you are writing a widely-used intro text, in which case the "collusion" doesn't matter, or you're not, in which case you aren't making any money even with the "collusion".

Then I don't know what's going on. Why do professors buy into the "new edition" scam?

 

[Sophia]

I don't know, but for example, some of my professors openly told us that new editions of textbooks are not worth it and that we don't need to buy new ones. If there were a couple of pages not included in older editions, they allowed us to copy them. These were textbooks from Earth science, Geology and Social anthropology.
I think it depends on professors priorities and common sense. Some of them may feel that 5 years old science textbook is just too old and they want to teach the students to use resources that are up to date because it will be crucial to their future research.

 

[StevieTNZ]

Are you buying second hand, or if not, what books have you purchased with poor binding? I've found no books from Amazon I've purchased with binding defects.

 

[Hornbein]

Are you buying second hand, or if not, what books have you purchased with poor binding? I've found no books from Amazon I've purchased with binding defects.

That could very well be. If you like their product, go for it.

The last book I bought from Amazon was so light weight it was like it was full of helium. I didn't know a book could be like that. The spine was already cracked. It was new, not used.

I also once ordered five copies of the same book from Amazon. They came loose in a box without any packing material. The books gouged one another in transit. This made quite a poor impression on me. Duh! Amazon did replace the books free of charge.

In general I have been unhappy with online purchases. Open the box, take one look at the contents, and say "I never would have bought that if I'd seen it first." That's happened to me three times in a row. If there is any subjective element in the purchase I do my best to delay purchases until I can make it to a store. Commodities only.

 

[zoobyshoe]

Actually I sympathize with the writers of physics textbooks. They are very difficult to write and sales are low. I think that $150 for a good textbook is a good deal. I've checked out some free textbooks available online and they weren't worth it..

The author of a book has no say at all in the retail price. The prices are set by the publisher and retailer and they make any money to be made. That's true across the board with books, not just textbooks.

What is important about those charts I linked you to is that, while the cost of recreational books has gone down with respect to the Consumer Price Index, the cost of textbooks has gone up 3.5 times the CPI. To be clear: it does not cost more to publish textbooks today than it used to, they are simply charging the consumer much more. They have adopted the tactic of charging as much as they can because they have a captive herd of consumers of their product. $150 for a textbook is a horrible deal when a comparably sized recreational book only costs $45. Students have to pay because they have no alternative.

When I was in college in the mid 1970's we paid the same for our texts as we would have paid for any non-textbook of similar size. The cost of texts was a non-issue for us (except for the fact you had to make a lump purchase at the start of every semester).

 

[Hornbein]

The author of a book has no say at all in the retail price. The prices are set by the publisher and retailer and they make any money to be made. That's true across the board with books, not just textbooks.

What is important about those charts I linked you to is that, while the cost of recreational books has gone down with respect to the Consumer Price Index, the cost of textbooks has gone up 3.5 times the CPI. To be clear: it does not cost more to publish textbooks today than it used to, they are simply charging the consumer much more. They have adopted the tactic of charging as much as they can because they have a captive herd of consumers of their product. $150 for a textbook is a horrible deal when a comparably sized recreational book only costs $45. Students have to pay because they have no alternative.

When I was in college in the mid 1970's we paid the same for our texts as we would have paid for any non-textbook of similar size. The cost of texts was a non-issue for us (except for the fact you had to make a lump purchase at the start of every semester).

Why on Earth do professors agree to getting paid $1 a copy? I bet the great majority of them are making below minimum wage on textbooks. Are they hoping to hit the jackpot? Is it for the prestige of having a published textbook?

Professors could self-publish. My freshman calculus professor did that in 1975. The book was ugly but the content was fine. The class had hundreds of students so it made him a goodly sum. Today it would be much easier to self-publish.

I went to grad school in the 90's. For one of the courses I saved money by not buying the text. It was on reserve in the library and I used that.

If universities and professors wanted to help the students I think something could be done about it easily. Freshman calculus textbooks are all pretty much the same. A communally authored book could be excellent.

I have a suspicion that some universities have a financial interest in high textbook prices. At UC Santa Cruz there was only one textbook store. It was in the center of campus in a building the university owned. The university either owned that business or made a goodly sum from the rent. Universities have evolved into for-profit organizations.

 

[zoobyshoe]

I can't answer your questions because I was completely out of touch with that whole unpleasant evolution while it was taking place. A few years ago I started meeting a lot of college students in coffee houses and that's when I began to learn that textbook prices had been inflated to unbelievable heights. At some point after I left college, textbook publishers and retailers realized they could fleece the students big time and there was nothing to stop them. In my day, the attitude of the academic world was that it was an inherently good and worthy thing to educate all willing students at minimum cost to them. It was good for the country, the world, and humanity. How education evolved into a business is outside my comprehension.

 

[Hornbein]

How education evolved into a business is outside my comprehension.

I don't really know. Tax cuts meant reduced public support. The money had to come from somewhere.

It used to be that administration was a small part of the university and was usually done by elder professors. Such were replaced by CEOs out to maximize income. I was at BU when John Silber was president, he was like that. It was quite possible that BU had to do that in order to survive.

University administration has grown greatly, and has to more than pay for itself. Marketing of athletic teams is a major source of income.

Stepping into less sure territory, I suspect there was public resentment when medical costs started to increase rapidly. Why should we pay for doctors to be educated when they use that education to charge as much as they can? Let them go into debt and pay for their own education. There was more public resentment when so many students defaulted on their subsidized loans.

Then there is that weird faith that the invisible hand of the market makes everything right. If you believe that, then a market-driven university is what you want. Like it or not, that is the dominant philosophy of this age.

 

[zoobyshoe]

Then there is that weird faith that the invisible hand of the market makes everything right. If you believe that, then a market-driven university is what you want. Like it or not, that is the dominant philosophy of this age.

That may be the meme, but what I see is a return to the days when the company owned the workers. The company gave you a job, but you had to live in company housing, pay company dictated rent, and you had to buy company work tools at company dictated prices. Since you had to buy everything from the company, you weren't even paid in cash, but in company "scrip". All that was fixed so that you always ended up in debt to the company and had no way out.

"You load sixteen tons and what do you get?
Another day older and deeper in debt.
Saint Peter don't call me cause I cain't go:
I owe my soul to the company store."

 

[Vanadium 50]

Why don't professors assign earlier editions of a textbook? Same reason you can't walk into a car dealer and buy a brand new '68 Mustang. They don't make them any more - even when the older editions are better (1st edition of Taylor and Wheeler, 2nd edition of Jackson).

Why do professors write textbooks if they usually don't make money? If they wanted to make money, they'd be in a different line of work. But it can be lots of reasons: prestige, dislike of other texts, lots of things.

Why are textbook prices increasing? It's a classic arms race - as prices go up, students are incentivized to buy used. So sales drop. To counter that, publishers release new editions more often, but this means that they have to recover their costs in, say 3 years instead of 10. So they need to raise prices. But that means even more students buy used, and so on. That said, as a point of fact I bought a copy of Jackson for $46.45 in 1984. That works out to $106.10 in 2015. I can buy one on Amazon (3rd edition, not second) for $105.80.

 

[zoobyshoe]

Why are textbook prices increasing? It's a classic arms race - as prices go up, students are incentivized to buy used. So sales drop. To counter that, publishers release new editions more often, but this means that they have to recover their costs in, say 3 years instead of 10. So they need to raise prices. But that means even more students buy used, and so on. That said, as a point of fact I bought a copy of Jackson for $46.45 in 1984. That works out to $106.10 in 2015. I can buy one on Amazon (3rd edition, not second) for $105.80.

This sounds reasonable, but is probably not the case. If it were, we'd see the same sort of "arms race" reflected in "recreational" books: 'as prices go up, readers are incentivized to borrow from the library instead of buying their own copy, or, to wait for used copies to show up on Amazon. To counter that, publishers have to raise prices. Libraries and readers therefore buy fewer books. Therefore publishers have to raise prices yet more to cover their costs, etc, until the average novel costs over a hundred dollars.' But this isn't happening. Instead, publishers have figured out how to produce recreational books yet more cheaply than in the late nineties. There remains a really healthy percentage of readers who don't mind paying the brand new retail price for novels.

Back in the day (I don't know about now) elementary and high schools used to buy a stock of books and use them year after year. Here's a shot of the sticker the school district here put in a physics text I picked up at the swap meet:

That text was printed in 1955, but was still being used 12 years later, as we see from the 1967 student. How did the publisher of this, or any of those texts back then, survive in a system where it was fully expected that a copy of a book would be used over and over again for years?