“It may be the season for graduation parties and commencement speeches, but colleges and universities are already prepping for next year, even in the bookstore,” Pullen reports. “Next fall, during opening weekend, students will once again file into university bookstores to purchase course materials, school supplies, and a college sweatshirt or two.”
“While the university licensed gear may seem like a throw-in, it’s big business for colleges and their coffers,” Pullen reports. “But as the higher education industry plans for a future involving digital content delivery to devices like Apple’s iPad, these college-branded impulse purchases – and perhaps even college bookstores – may quickly become a thing of the past.”
Pullen reports, “Should students demand content on the iPad, bookstores will be locked out. Apple’s current App Store and iBookstore sales models give publishers the lion’s share of a 70-30 revenue split, and cut out the schools entirely. Meanwhile, in bookstores’ current distribution model, colleges pocket, on average, 33% of the price of a new book.”
Full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: Change is the one constant. Universities should be working with Apple to stock iPads – along with Macs, iPhones, and iPods – in their campus bookstores.
DIE COLLEGE BOOKSTORE DIE!!!
Its been 20 years, and I can easily remember being pissed off at having to buy some stupidly expensive brand new book that there were no used copies of because the professor had ‘updated’ the courseware with his latest copy, or lugging around 20lbs of books in my backpack for courses that’d make use of only a small portion of the material, or getting to sell back my book to the bookstore for pennies on the dollars.
College bookstores getting screwed: I say GOOD! They’ve been giving the royal screw to students for too long.
Are you kidding? I’ve worked in a place where the “everything should be free” liberal professors brought each chapter they needed — one at a time — to the college copy center to be xeroxed off for the class. Their excuse? “Oh, I didn’t remember to tell the bookstore to stock the text in time for the semester.”
I remember taking a calculus class where the book was three inches thick for a semester course. i would love to see these big books disappear.
@Cascadians
I had one of the first Macs on campus when I attended L&C;in 1984-1985 ! Wish you were around then – there was NO support for Macs. I worked in the computer lab, wiping the drool off of Kaypros and Compaqs!
He missed the big issue! In the past teachers and publishers used students as a captive audience. Much like airplanes selling food. Students didn’t have a choice they needed to buy a poorly written book for $200! But now with the ipad, students can pirate PDF copies to read on their ipads. And we all know students can and will use torrent!!!
Do you really need textbooks for most courses. All that
info and infinitely more is available on the internet. Your
history professor’s ‘textbook’ could consist of a few sheets
of WEB addresses to be visited in timely sequence as
the course progressed.
@ daugav369pils,
“Do you really need textbooks for most courses. All that info and infinitely more is available on the internet.”
So true and it’s all peer reviewed. NOT!
Textbooks are peer reviewed. They can be trusted. The internet is full of truths, half-truths, lies, liberal thinking, right wing rants, trojans, worms and viruses. It’s not to be trusted. Handing in a paper you found on the Internet won’t cut it any more.
amen, Doug.
Regrettably, even as publishers switch away from print text to the e-format, I think we’ll still see ridiculously high prices. They will say the cost is not in the print, but in the “intellectual property.” Either way, I think e-books are now. And I will choose those if I can. But as I said earlier, they need to allow for annotations.
Certain professors have banded together, or anyway have loosely affiliated, who have created low-cost e-book textbooks in various fields. I read about this bunch a year or two ago, so I don’t have the details, but I think such near-freeware will gain a foothold and then catch on, breaking the current logjam. anyone who has more details on them should post a link.
“…I remember taking a calculus class where the book was three inches thick for a semester course…”
Oh, Gawd that reminds me of my college calculus book… $50 (in 1982 dollars) and there was no instruction in it. Just problems. “OK, class do pages 200-202.” It was nothing but a friggin’ hardbound workbook and it was 50 freakin’ dollars!
I see here that the college bookstores are still pulling the same garbage.
Deus Ex Technica, I WAS there in 1984-1985; I was the English Dept Secretary. I probably typed (on an IBM Selectric typewriter!) your syllabi, assignments, etc. Remember the pictures, the hammock, the 2 huge white Samoyeds? That was me
” width=”19″ height=”19″ alt=”smile” style=”border:0;” /> And I had to use an ancient Ditto machine to make copies. After that job for a year I went to work for IBM on their DisplayWriter, that cadillac dedicated word processor that became obsolete the day the PC came out. But by that time I had played with a Mac Plus and was hooked.
Remember that year how they went thru 4 College Presidents in 1 year? Quite scandalous.
How about the bookstore negotiate a lower price for the electronic book? They can get a break because of the number of students requiring in for their class.
Doesn’t have to be all doom and gloom. Also sell ipads too.
I went to Engineering school, and then law school.
After I reported to class with my new (or hopefully used) text, I would find that about 50% of the time, the instructor or professor never even used the text. Rip-off.
Other classed used offset printed, stapled together “notes” from the teacher, which sold from $30 to $50. The teachers who wrote them told me they got about $1 a copy. The grad students who wrote them got nothing. The middle-men rip off again.
The schools also regularly changed text, so that used books became useless and you had to buy new “list price” texts.
Wait until the Professors learn that they can self publish their own texts. Several outfits take your text and graphics, format them and publish them for iBooks. The publisher charges nothing upfront and 40% of receipts, which includes the Apple 30% publishing and collecting cut. The Prof gets 60%. Soon Profs with leverage will negotiate self-publishing rights for their own texts as part of their employment “package”.
Great info I would suggest using GreenTextbooks.org
Save Money, Save The Planet
GreenTextbooks.org specializes in the recycling of textbooks, DVDs, CDs. Buying used textbooks not only saves you money, but cuts down on greenhouse gases caused by the manufacturing of new textbooks.
With GreenTextbooks.org you’re not only saving trees, you are saving some green. http://www.GreenTextbooks.org
can you read kiddie e-books on iPad – jim TV
the Universities should embrace this… not hate it… more up-to-date publishing and better resources at better costs to students would come of this…
All bookstores need to move with the times. College bookstores need to move the fastest. Textbook publishers also need to get with the digital reality. Books are not worth what they were before. Take out the printing and distribution costs, especially for relatively small print runs and the cost of books needs to drop dramatically. $10 tops? How about a subscription model—so much a year for (this course) text books, and it should be very cheap with no DRM.
@Big Al MBP
“Textbooks are peer reviewed. They can be trusted.”
“AUSTIN, Tex. — After three days of turbulent meetings, the Texas Board of Education on Friday approved a social studies curriculum that will put a conservative stamp on history and economics textbooks, stressing the superiority of American capitalism, questioning the Founding Fathers’ commitment to a purely secular government and presenting Republican political philosophies in a more positive light.” NY Times
Using a Mac will take care of viruses,worms etc.
There are a ton of internet sites that are truthful and peer
reviewed. They’re just harder to find. But isn’t that the
professor’s job in leading his students to them?
Big Als MBP wrote: “Textbooks are peer reviewed. They can be trusted. “
I can make you a nice offer on a used bridge across the East River if you believe this ;o)
The peer review pertains only to articles in scientific journals, e.g. Nature, Science, New England Journal of Medicine. Textbooks, by contrast, are written by the authors, subjected to an editing process, and published. I know because I wrote chapters for three textbooks. A textbook represents the collected opinions of the author(s). Since the subject matter of a textbook is often widespread, the author(s) cannot be an expert(s) on everything he/she/they cover(s) in the book. That’s where the errors creep in. That and being opinionated.
Obtaining the information you need from the websites of two or three professors will give you a far more balanced view and teach you that there are no truths, only more or less well-founded opinions.