Don’t buy the costly textbook, download it for free
Noam Cohen
Squint hard, and textbook publishers can look a lot like drug makers. They both make money from doing obvious good — healing, educating — and they both have customers who may be willing to sacrifice their last pennies to buy what these companies are selling.
It is that fact that can suddenly turn the good guys into bad guys, especially when the prices they charge are compared with generic drugs or ordinary books. A final similarity, in the words of R Preston McAfee, an economics professor at Cal Tech, is that both textbook publishers and drug makers benefit from the problem of “moral hazards” — that is, the doctor who prescribes medication and the professor who requires a textbook don’t have to bear the cost. “The person who pays for the book, the parent or the student, doesn’t choose it,” he said. “There is this sort of creep. It’s always OK to add $5.”
In protest of what he says are textbooks’ intolerably high prices — and the dumbing down of their content to appeal to the widest possible market — McAfee has put his introductory economics textbook online free. He says he most likely could have earned a $100,000 advance on the book had he gone the traditional publishing route, and it would have had a list price approaching $200.
“This market is not working very well — except for the shareholders in the textbook publishers,” he said. “We have lots of knowledge, but we are not getting it out.”
His volume, ‘Introduction to Economic Analysis’, is being used at some colleges, including Harvard and Claremont-McKenna, a private college in Claremont, California. And that is a big difference between textbook publishers and the drug makers. Sure, there have been scientists with McAfee’s attitude — Jonas Salk was asked who owned the patent to the polio vaccine and scoffed: “Could you patent the sun?”
For the textbook makers, however, it is a different story. McAfee allows anyone to download a Word file or PDF of his book, while also taking advantage of the growing marketplace for print on demand.
A broader effort to publish free textbooks is called Connexions, the brainchild of Richard Baraniuk, an engineering professor at Rice University. Connexions uses broader Creative Commons license allowing students and teachers to rewrite and edit material as long as the originator is credited. Teachers put up material, called “modules,” and then mix and match their work with others’ to create material for students. NYT NEWS SERVICE
It is that fact that can suddenly turn the good guys into bad guys, especially when the prices they charge are compared with generic drugs or ordinary books. A final similarity, in the words of R Preston McAfee, an economics professor at Cal Tech, is that both textbook publishers and drug makers benefit from the problem of “moral hazards” — that is, the doctor who prescribes medication and the professor who requires a textbook don’t have to bear the cost. “The person who pays for the book, the parent or the student, doesn’t choose it,” he said. “There is this sort of creep. It’s always OK to add $5.”
In protest of what he says are textbooks’ intolerably high prices — and the dumbing down of their content to appeal to the widest possible market — McAfee has put his introductory economics textbook online free. He says he most likely could have earned a $100,000 advance on the book had he gone the traditional publishing route, and it would have had a list price approaching $200.
“This market is not working very well — except for the shareholders in the textbook publishers,” he said. “We have lots of knowledge, but we are not getting it out.”
His volume, ‘Introduction to Economic Analysis’, is being used at some colleges, including Harvard and Claremont-McKenna, a private college in Claremont, California. And that is a big difference between textbook publishers and the drug makers. Sure, there have been scientists with McAfee’s attitude — Jonas Salk was asked who owned the patent to the polio vaccine and scoffed: “Could you patent the sun?”
For the textbook makers, however, it is a different story. McAfee allows anyone to download a Word file or PDF of his book, while also taking advantage of the growing marketplace for print on demand.
A broader effort to publish free textbooks is called Connexions, the brainchild of Richard Baraniuk, an engineering professor at Rice University. Connexions uses broader Creative Commons license allowing students and teachers to rewrite and edit material as long as the originator is credited. Teachers put up material, called “modules,” and then mix and match their work with others’ to create material for students. NYT NEWS SERVICE
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