All Posts Tagged With: "university textbooks"
Want to save money on textbooks?
Loose-leaf is the way to go
Back in first year, I remember being shocked at how expensive university textbooks are. It seemed ridiculous to be paying hundreds of dollars for books that would be getting less than four months of use. And that I wouldn’t necessarily even enjoy reading.
In high school, textbooks are just something that your teacher uses to assign homework. It’s different in university. You spend hours with your textbooks every week, keeping up with readings, doing practice questions, finding quotes for an essay, or studying for an exam. They belong to you, and only you. You’ve known each other since the beginning, back when they were still covered in plastic wrap. It’s a special moment when you peel the plastic off and open a brand new textbook for the first time.
But it’s not a worth-hundreds-of-dollars kind of moment.
Buying textbooks second-hand is one common way to save money. Another solution: buying loose-leaf editions of textbooks. By sacrificing the spine and hard cover, I saved more than $70 on a loose-leaf edition of my biochemistry textbook this semester.
Buying a loose-leaf edition solves another textbook problem: instead of lugging around a 20-pound brick, I can remove all the pages I’m not using at the moment.
-photo courtesy of katerha
Don’t buy your textbooks. Rent them.
UToronto bookstore launches textbook rental pilot project
I remember ordering my textbooks for the first time, way back in first year. It seemed like such a novelty, peeling the plastic wrap off a bunch of brand-new books.
Unlike high school textbooks, there weren’t any ripped pages, scribbled notes or suspicious stains. The covers weren’t handled by eighteen generation’s worth of fingies. Nobody had breathed on the pages with their unbrushed teeth (germaphobes think about these kinds of things).
They were mine. Mine.
Hundreds of dollars and a semester later, the novelty had vanished. The problem is, the life span of most textbooks is a single semester. When you’re done with the course, you’re done with the book. Heck, I felt like I was getting away with something when I got to use my Organic Chemistry textbook two semesters in a row.
Even if you buy the books second hand, from another student or your campus bookstore, it’s still expensive enough for a one-shot kind of deal.
But the University of Toronto bookstore might have a solution. This summer semester, the uToronto bookstore is launching a textbook rental pilot project. After ordering the books online, students pick them up in the store, renting the books for about 40 per cent off the new purchase price.
A similar plan was piloted at the University of Manitoba last semester.
According to the uToronto Bookstore’s website, five titles will be available for the pilot program. The textbook rentals are then returned on a pre-determined Rental Return date. Students are even allowed to highlight and write notes in their rental books. Cool.
Another option is to buy an older edition of a textbook. The changes between editions are usually minimal, and you can save some serious money. The only problem is, even minimal changes can sometimes complicate things. I bought an older edition of my genetics textbook during my second semester. When the professor told the class to read between pages 145 and 192 for the first week, and that the midterm would focus on material from pages 163 and 267, I suddenly realized something: the page numbers between editions weren’t equivalent.
A couple classes I took last semester didn’t even have required texts. Instead, students just accessed a website and printed off course notes.
Meaning, there’s something even better than a rental textbook. No textbook.
-photo courtesy of Evil Erin
How to download your textbooks for free
New websites allow you to download — and even edit — your textbooks
Perhaps the worst post-secondary education scam of all time is the price of textbooks.
Students spend upwards of $200 for a hardcover textbook — only to find that they can’t sell it used the next year because a new edition has been issued, with extensive changes like a new cover or slightly different page numbers. Professors often pad their paycheques with textbook sales while also requiring their own students to buy the book.
Well, it seems that the online world is finally responding. A new U.S. website called Connextions uses the Creative Common license to allow students and professors to add and edit material as long as the original author is credited. Instead of organizing material in a linear manner, like textbooks that list topic after topic, the site presents content in smaller “modules” that are connected to larger courses or collections. This allows students and professors to access information according to topic.
According to its website, “Connexions is an environment for collaboratively developing, freely sharing, and rapidly publishing scholarly content on the Web.” Professors can also build reading packages by selecting material from various sources and adding their own, creating a custom-made, downloadable textbook for their students — for free!
The website was launched by Richard G. Baraniuk, an engineering professor at Rice University. It has received $6 million from the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, according to an article in the New York Times. “We are changing textbook publishing from a pipeline to an ecosystem,” Baranuik told the Times. “If I had finished my own book, I would have finished a couple years ago,” he said. “It would have taken five years. It would have spent five years in print and sold 2,000 copies.” Since posting it online there have been 2.8 million page views and has been translated into Spanish.
Other online options include CourseSmart, a collaboration between six leading textbook publishers, and the Massachusett Institute of Technology’s OpenCourseWare. CourseSmart is a website where students can purchase digital copies of their textbooks straight from the publishers (ensuring the latest edition) at a discount of up to 50 per cent, which can still cost a student in the $100 range. 4,325 books are available in 741 courses and 109 disciplines. Students are given the option of downloading the book or reading online and are able to print sections. The website boasts that, so far, almost 95,000 trees have been saved.
OpenCourseWare is a site where virtually all of MIT’s course material is published. Anyone can download course outlines, assignments, reading material, lecture notes, exams, and videos of lectures, all for free.
Another great source of lectures is iTunes U, where users can download lectures from hundreds of colleges and universities, including top schools like Yale and Columbia. Listeners can learn about everything from philosophy 101 to material on yesterday’s economic strife on Wall Street, from high-level mathematics courses to a discussion of Harry Potter and the Holocaust.
When looking for good old fashioned paper version of textbooks, students are wise to think beyond the university bookstore. Amazon.ca and Chapters often offer new books for prices cheaper than used copies elsewhere, although shipping costs are extra. Abebook.com offers great prices on used books, but be sure to check the shipping costs.
For more useful tips and tricks that can save you money, visit Student Finance 101. Photo courtesy of Wohnai.
A textbook scam: Potter
Some book publishers giving kickbacks to US colleges
For years, it has been standard practice in the college-textbook biz to churn out “new editions” of textbooks, even in such slow-moving fields such as formal logic or metaphysics. In fact, in order to even get a textbook contract with most publishers, profs have to agree to produce x-number of new editions within a set period of time—typically, something like three editions in five years.
Everyone knows it is bogus, that the sole purpose of the new edition is to undercut the used textbook market; it’s effectively a tuition surtax on students (or their parents) that gets paid directly to profs and publishers.
Now some colleges in the US are going one better: They’re publishing department-specific textbooks—usually some standard text with an added chapter that consists of something like the department style guide—and printing an (illegal) notice on the book that reads “This book may not be bought or sold used.” The publisher then sends a royalty (aka a kickback) to the department, which usually forgets to tell the students about this arrangement.
Real classy stuff. Attention students and profs — anyone know of anything like this going on in Canada? Send me private emails if you like.
