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

[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?

 

[Sophia]

This is still done here in primary and secondary schools. Schools get new books for each student when they are issued and they just borrow them for a year. At the end of school year, books are returned back and given to next class of students. It was pretty standard to use 10-15 years old books until our beloved government begun inventing a completely new curriculum almost each year. Now we have a different problem, the authors simply don't manage to produce new textbook each year so that it is very common that students don't have books for a couple of months until they are released. This has now been happening like 6-7 years in a row and we have learned to expect reports about missing textbooks at the beginning of each school year. But hey! We have 3 or 4 various curriculums at primary schools now! Each cohort has different standards depending on the year they started their education. So the life expectancy of a textbook is like 1-2 years now.
I remember that we used 20 years old textbooks for Music at elementary school and more than 20 years old Slovak language textbook at high school. Now that was very funny because it was written before the revolution and it still included chapter about giving enthusiastic speech about socialist regime and celebrating the Communist Party. :-) We made fun of it because at the age of 16-17 we didn't even remember the old regime which ended when we were 1-2 years old. :-)
Only university students have to buy their books themselves.

 

[zoobyshoe]

Here's a depressing article:

Millennial voter disengagement has corresponded with increased financial hardship. The Generation Opportunity report found that a lack of employment opportunity has contributed to the doubling of poverty levels among young people to 16 percent in 2013, compared with the 8 percent experienced by early baby boomers at a similar point in their lives. Some 48 percent of millennials have said they now believe that the American Dream is dead — a view that the new report says has been exacerbated by the high cost of student debt.

Last March, Obama unveiled a Student Bill of Rights along with a raft of new policies aimed at fixing the nation's student loan system. Obama has implemented a series of changes to education over the course of his two terms in office, including increasing Pell grants, introducing tax credits for college, implementing a 2010 Student Loan Forgiveness program, and proposing last January to make two years of community college free for responsible students. While these reforms have won varying levels of support and success, student debt and defaults have continued to rise, surpassing $1.3 trillion in 2015.

The lack of economic opportunity for millennials has led them to delay significant life events, such as getting married or buying a home. Only 36 percent of Americans under 35 now own a home, according to the report — the lowest level on record since home ownership was measured by age. Meanwhile, 26 percent of millennials said that they still lived at home with their parents.

https://news.vice.com/article/young...-american-dream-is-dead?utm_source=vicenewsfb

 

[Hornbein]

Here's a depressing article:
https://news.vice.com/article/young...-american-dream-is-dead?utm_source=vicenewsfb

Look at the bright side. The banking system is doing great.