Saturday, May 17, 2014
Stupid policies revisited...
So it turns out that I did indeed get health insurance coverage... from my union. I suppose that makes sense but why in the hell do the administrators of this system not know that and mistakenly scare the hell out of their GAs? Seems sort of back-assward to me. However, on a different note... I am no longer a GA. Which means I'm free and it also means I now no longer have health insurance... again. So it goes.
Wednesday, January 29, 2014
Stupid policies: continuing the annoyance of university series.
I'll use just this one example that is very representative and also very contemporary to my current situation.
I work at a university where I am also a student. It's always been mandatory that students have health insurance. You have to sign a special waiver in fact to opt out of the university plan that is automatically charged to your student account.
Over the last year I've worked as a graduate assistant. The experience and environment has been very educational and valuable to me in so many ways. Obviously one of those is that my tuition is waived as part of the deal. I also earn decent money for the time I put in and the experience is going to be invaluable when I leave to seek a job in the Real World. So one would think that I have basic health insurance too since I work on campus, take classes at a full time load, am in good standing and have my student account in proper order. Well you would be wrong. And why is this? It's because of a stupid policy. i.e.
If a student takes only online classes regardless of their program status (on campus or online are your options, and I have always been an on campus student) they magically become ineligible for the health plan.
So the rub here is that since starting graduate school I have taken all online classes. Now, I'm still an on campus student I just happen to be taking my class selection in the online format. I discovered that this is a much easier way to learn this sort of material for me anyway because I could set my own pace and not be saddled to a physical meeting twice a week (per class). In total I could spend 6 extra hours a week on campus sitting in lectures. That's quite a time savings to me and also in the fact that in drastically simplifies my travel arrangements.
So basically I work on campus as a GA (which I would have to assume is the sort of position a truly online student could not hold much less perform as one has to physically go in to work), I am listed as an on campus student in my program, and this status has never been changed. The only thing that is different is the "flavor" of the classes I am taking.
I talked with the provost's secretary about this matter after being informed about the problem at the GA orientation where only then did they warn us that taking online classes exclusively would result in the system dropping you from the health plan. The provost's secretary said that they had had in depth consideration of the criteria and requirements for students to be enrolled in student health plans and that that was the best way they could work it. One of the semi-irrational specific reason/scenarios was that an out of state citizen without insurance and a costly preexisting condition could enroll at the university and soak our health plan for their medical bills. My response to that was, "okay, but I work on campus. I'm physically here 4 out of 7 days. I live 20 minutes from campus by bus, and that has been exactly the case for the preceding 4 years. Isn't there some other consideration outside of simply online or on campus?" Her answer: NOPE.
So that gets a gigantic WTF people. I have also been informed that there is no way to change it or make a special case for me. Part of me wonders if I shouldn't take this to my union (yeah, I'm techinically in a union but I don't have health insurance. What. The. Fuck.)
And that's just one little stupid policy story. There are sadly many more. Perhaps some day I will write of them too. Cheers for now folks. Watch out for those bureaucrats.
I work at a university where I am also a student. It's always been mandatory that students have health insurance. You have to sign a special waiver in fact to opt out of the university plan that is automatically charged to your student account.
Over the last year I've worked as a graduate assistant. The experience and environment has been very educational and valuable to me in so many ways. Obviously one of those is that my tuition is waived as part of the deal. I also earn decent money for the time I put in and the experience is going to be invaluable when I leave to seek a job in the Real World. So one would think that I have basic health insurance too since I work on campus, take classes at a full time load, am in good standing and have my student account in proper order. Well you would be wrong. And why is this? It's because of a stupid policy. i.e.
If a student takes only online classes regardless of their program status (on campus or online are your options, and I have always been an on campus student) they magically become ineligible for the health plan.
So the rub here is that since starting graduate school I have taken all online classes. Now, I'm still an on campus student I just happen to be taking my class selection in the online format. I discovered that this is a much easier way to learn this sort of material for me anyway because I could set my own pace and not be saddled to a physical meeting twice a week (per class). In total I could spend 6 extra hours a week on campus sitting in lectures. That's quite a time savings to me and also in the fact that in drastically simplifies my travel arrangements.
So basically I work on campus as a GA (which I would have to assume is the sort of position a truly online student could not hold much less perform as one has to physically go in to work), I am listed as an on campus student in my program, and this status has never been changed. The only thing that is different is the "flavor" of the classes I am taking.
I talked with the provost's secretary about this matter after being informed about the problem at the GA orientation where only then did they warn us that taking online classes exclusively would result in the system dropping you from the health plan. The provost's secretary said that they had had in depth consideration of the criteria and requirements for students to be enrolled in student health plans and that that was the best way they could work it. One of the semi-irrational specific reason/scenarios was that an out of state citizen without insurance and a costly preexisting condition could enroll at the university and soak our health plan for their medical bills. My response to that was, "okay, but I work on campus. I'm physically here 4 out of 7 days. I live 20 minutes from campus by bus, and that has been exactly the case for the preceding 4 years. Isn't there some other consideration outside of simply online or on campus?" Her answer: NOPE.
So that gets a gigantic WTF people. I have also been informed that there is no way to change it or make a special case for me. Part of me wonders if I shouldn't take this to my union (yeah, I'm techinically in a union but I don't have health insurance. What. The. Fuck.)
And that's just one little stupid policy story. There are sadly many more. Perhaps some day I will write of them too. Cheers for now folks. Watch out for those bureaucrats.
Monday, January 20, 2014
Million Dollar Ideas
For starters don't even bother going to watch "Jobs" the Steve Jobs movie; it's awful enough for me to actually say so on the internet on a blog that one person has actually subscribed to (I can't blame the rest of you, what's it been, a year... two... a long damn time.) It reads as if the editor and director sat up in the editing booth with a bag each of acid and meth and just had a blast. Too bad the result is a steaming pile of disjointed plots, half finished stories and poor acting. Woz was believable though.
At any rate the portrait that was so sloppily painted with fingers and mud makes Jobs out to be a thieving, conniving, hypocritical, womanizing dead-beat dad. Okay, all of that is true. However, the way that the story is told just makes me want to slap the director. Also, way too much free hand camera work(I'm not usually one to get sick from jerky camera motion but this got pretty bad and for long scenes.)
All of that is just prelude to the topic at hand.
I maintain a text file that operates as an archive of all my "million dollar" ideas. A more successful contemporary would refer to this as "brain crack", sort of. It's sort of a to-do list and it's sort of a holy-shit-that-would-be-awesome list and it's also something I less frequently than I should update with, well... million dollar ideas. It just occurred to me that this is a double meaning I had not thought of nor intended but is apt all the same. Some of the ideas are worth a million dollars BUT a lot of them are ideas that would cost a million dollars. Which is a much more succinct way of saying what I was going to try to say anyway. Essentially, if I had a million dollars I could probably do something spectacular. Even a spectacular failure is still spectacular! In any case I do not have a million dollars. Nowhere near it in fact. (Always taking donations...) But the ideas do give me some hope that some day maybe I could get lucky and one of them take off or be attainable (and profitable). That is the problem though. First one has to start on the project. Merely having the idea is not enough. This blog is a meandering and probably misguided attempt to enact one of those million dollar ideas. But I have far more "ideas" than time (or money) and I do seem to have some trouble with motivation some times. So basically I'm whining that I was "unfortunate" enough to have to work at a regular job. But idealistic me still wants for a world where maybe just an idea can profoundly change the course of one life or all of ours. Sure I could turn to crowdsourcing or kick-starting for a few of these ideas. But the downside is that I as an individual cannot deal with the fallout of a failure. So as a "little" guy or somebody that just doesn't have enough "fuck you" money to just tinker all day I'm stuck with a nice big bag of brain crack. These addicting little gems that would be great if only...
How does this tie in to the prelude? Very loosely if at all. Jobs seems to have just been in the right circle with the right idea at the right time which is great to a degree. And basically I wish I could pull that off one day too. I just hope I can manage to not piss off everybody around me in the process. In the mean time let's hear it for the big bag of brain crack. If somebody leaves a comment I will post one of my real million dollar ideas in the next post. I'm not kidding, just set it free on the internet... See you around friends.
Saturday, May 12, 2012
Second of a series: The college bookstore scam...
.. and what a scam it is.
Wow, there are so many things I want to say about and to college bookstores.
First off: WHY ARE TEXT BOOKS SO DAMNED EXPENSIVE!!!
Fuck you monopolistic greed mongers. Is it the publishers, the distributors, the faculty? WHO?
I do have some insight and some solutions here so please read to the end.
To start off, I'll review a list of texts and their costs as I am personally aware of. The term before last required that I have an algebra text from Blitzer, a well known (I guess) author of math texts. The cost from the bookstore? $197 and change, I have the receipt. Almost 200 dollars for a fucking book I used for four months? Most of you must be thinking that that is insane and you would be right. It's a nice book, four hundred glossy pages all hardbound and the thing weighs about ten pounds. Was it useful? Yeah I suppose, my assignments were from it and the examples of how to work out problems were present but that was about it. For the price it would have been nice if the thing would have taken my exams or given me a prescription for Nootropil or something approaching it's supposed worth. Nothing such has yet to come from this text.
Another text I needed was the Norton Anthology of British Literature 8th edition. While this one only cost me $78 and was actually much more interesting than the algebra text it is still little more than a fancy doorstop. In class we, including the instructor, lovingly referred to it as 'The Brick'. And it is indeed a fucking brick. It's almost 3000 pages of onion skin with fine print and lots of notation. While it's the only one of the bunch that I wanted to keep as it contains major and important excerpts from English language literature spanning from Beowulf to Rushdie (sadly no Orwell, a major oversight in my opinion) in was still severely overpriced. Nice book, good reference, but given that most of the content is widely available online for free I have to wonder at the wisdom of having to have it at all. Despite the daily use in class (which a simple google search would have covered up to about 70 years ago) it seems that this was a prime example of text book publisher money grabbing madness. All that said it is still the only book I DIDN'T want to sell back to the greedy bastards at the book store.
Here is the most egregious example of book store buffoonery. So far anyway. For oral communication we were required to have a slim, useless book that cost a mere 137 and change. We used this book for just four chapters and that was it. The rest of the class was based entirely on the instructor's expertise. The book itself is useless beyond those few chapters and it's apparent desire to be turned into toilet-paper. The real kick in the pants here was when I tried to sell it back to the bookstore. And here we come to the real crux of the problem I have with the college book store. I stood in line for ten minutes and upon reaching the front I presented this worthless piece of crap. They told me, get this, 'I'm sorry but we have reached our quota for that book.' WTF you scum bum dip shit jerk bag mo foes!?!?! And my real world reaction is 'so you mean I am stuck with this worthless pile of ass-wipe? I paid 137 bucks for this hunk of junk and now I am stuck with it?' Answer, 'yep, 'fraid so.' I wanted to strangle somebody that day. Luckily I had rented the last text I was required to have. You want to hear that too don't you?
Thought so. Here's another scam perpetrated by 'the book store'. Certain texts you can rent from them. So for my programming course I rented the book. Originally the book was $162 but on rental it cost me $53. Not a bad deal when you are strapped for cash and waiting for aid money to come through. The only pisser here is that this book was technically useful and in order to keep it I would have had to pay the $109 dollar difference. That's right do the math, the book was worth $162 to these paper pirates. Oddly enough I used the book so hard that I feel I actually came out on top here. Not really ahead but on top as the text was so worn, dog-eared, and just plain used that nobody in their right mind would want it again. SO FUCK YOU COLLEGE BOOK STORE, at least I got a little over you greedy fucks.
Well that's the situation. So what can we do to illuminate this subject beyond just my heart-felt consumer rage? Lots.
I asked a few questions at the start.
Firstly, why are these texts so expensive?
Well, honestly, it's big business. It's also old business. So we must consider base greed. Since that is a trivial aspect given that we know the goal of capitalism is the extraction of profit from trade I'll leave the academic conclusion to the reader.
Looking at the historical aspect it is certainly true that books used to be critically expensive objects that required much effort to produce. Today they are not so expensive or so onerous to produce but it seems old habits die hard. Also connected to this trace is the quality of these books. For the moment I'll discard the actual content of these texts (it is a dependent variable which is based on opinion at best) and focus on the actual physical quality. In fairness the texts that I have encountered and used are of a high quality. And they should be too given the level of abuse I often see visited upon these books.I've seen nearly bullet-proof hard covers with nice heavy bond pages and genuine sewed bindings. I've seen the less robust but still very stable firm covers with well glued folios and decent paper. The worst example quality-wise was the aforementioned communications book. The paper was sub-par (still decent I guess but not the best, certainly not $137 dollars worth) the jacket was okay and it didn't fall apart, though I didn't use it that much anyway, so who knows really.
Now we can look at the content quality assessment. Most of the texts I have been required to have (bought or otherwise, we'll get there dear reader) serve the purpose they were intended for. Some better than others, and some only passingly. As concerns expense to produce I would like to cite the math text from Blitzer. This is a very flashy book. It's about half a generation away from being the equivalent of what MTV used to be back in the day to the world of math texts. Lots of glossy pop-culture references to 'explain' math. Explain to brain-addled couch-potatoes how to do something they've been told all their lives to hate and expect to do poorly at (math is not a priority skill in the grand scheme here in the US, very, very sad is what that is). Also it was technically accurate and useful if you tune out all the pop references. This also brings me to a theory about this particular text. Might the use of trendy and current entertainment figures (celebrities) inflate the cost of this book due to rights acquisition? I think that's a very valid theory and would love to be able to say conclusively if this book's price reflects a hefty kick-back to SAG, MPAA, RIAA, and gang. This was also one of the highest-quality books in both categories. As it is the best example I will turn to the worst. The communications book was dated, uninteresting, and it's format was aggravating. Now it's not as if the information was inaccurate, besides how would I know, that's the instructor's job, but it was just difficult to digest because it was old, cold and boring. No flare at all. It sounded as if Ben Stein was reading it very slowly every time I tried to read it, it was that bad. I've also had a few other bad books. The one for Data Structures was basically a boat anchor. I think I opened it two times, once before the midterm and once before the final. It was of minimal help in both cases. Another text that was fairly frustrating in that it could be very unintuitive was for Computer Organization.
Are there other considerations to price? Sure. Some texts had a reputation factor. I'm dubious as to some of their supposed worth and that is really all I can say.
Moving on. Is it the publishers, the distributors, the faculty? WHO?
My best answer is that it's a bit of all the above. Surely the publishers are the ones who should be scrutinized the most. They make the books, the decisions about content, format, and distribution means. And I'll return to the this in my proposed solutions at the end.
So let's look at the distributors. Standard middlemen taking their standard cut. This is really just idle speculation but it's, well, standard enough to be trivial.
So how about the faculty. Yes they too share a hand in this dastardly business. They pick the books after all. And speculatively, they are susceptible to influence. Influence from, colleagues, superiors, sales-people / vendors, etc. I do have it on good word that there is another layer to explore as pertains to the relationship between faculty and vendors / distributors. And this is basically a core issue. The model that was explained to me by an unnamed faculty member was basically that of forced upgrades. The books are firstly only available new for a few years and there is limited production. Of course there is always a 'new edition' being brewed up and ready to be pushed out. Not that that's a bad thing really. Keeping the content fresh is important. And that is a legitimate reason for these texts to be expensive. Research, development and refinement do take actual work and therefore money. But I'm contending that they are overly expensive. Also the general method of use for the average college text is abuse. So the materials need to be more robust. Again a good thing. Here's the problem there though. While practicing one of my solutions to the conundrum I've learned a few things. Of primary interest here is that there is ultimately little variation from edition to edition of a particular text. Yes there are differences but they are usually minor but in some cases they are drastic. This could be seen as a sort of precautionary dick-move on the publishers part. Change it just enough to sucker in the next lot. But the real question here is, why does this cycle continue? Well because faculty are pressured, by the book-store itself in many cases, to update the required text in order to keep a contract with a vendor whom distributes the preferred text which are updated regularly. Essentially this is lock in. There's also a whole lot of minutia we could delve into about the nuance of selecting texts for a course, familiarity, experience, compatibility (forced or voluntary). Ultimately I am concerned that this system I have just described (in excruciating detail) could be so much better on a fundamental level regardless of the many little flaws.
Finally, let's hear some proposals to fix this busted system.
Man, have you fools not heard of print on demand?!? This is a pretty pie-in-the-sky idea at the moment but it is becoming more available. In fact many 'teacher's editions' are starting to be put out in loose-leaf format so that the instructor may pick and choose what parts they need. The obvious next step here is to well, print on demand only the material the instructor intends to use in the class. Since texts are inherently limited runs anyway why not allow for the custom selection of materials from a full catalog of possible topics. Obviously this idea has great potential but since it would limit profit in the form of forced identical sales on a short time scale it is unlikely that the publishers will willingly offer such a system.Okay so that's an idealistic solution. How about something more... obtainable.
Ebooks, of course!! But sadly not a true reality and also prone to crippling by the publisher-vendor alliance. I've encountered a few offerings of ebooks from the bookstore. The bookstore/publishers are frustratingly back ass-ward about the implementation though. Recalling specific examples they fall into a middle category. New books are very expensive, rentals an usually close to half that price and ebooks are more expensive than renting in all cases I encountered and usually minimally less expensive than the new book. Now this sucks for a few reasons. One, regardless of the content development expense, ebooks have the advantage of taking almost no overhead for production, distribution and 'storage'. It's just a computer file. So why not make it that much more affordable? Short answer: greed, more seeking answer: Luddite ass-hatery. It's unfortunately not a better option than a paper text in most cases. I can take a book anywhere, I could study with out power, I can highlight things and personally I still have an affinity for bound physical books (though textbooks hardly qualify as 'good' reading material in most cases. Also the additional cost of a reader device to cover the use anywhere function is a little off-putting and still not as tactile as a book. The device of course does have the advantage of being one single thing and in theory (if all texts were available, that has never been the case in my experience) could replace a couple dozen pounds of dead pulped pressed printed and glued trees that I seem to lug around every term. That I think would offset most disadvantages of not having real books. But who knows, that's just my way of looking at it. Basically they gouge you even more for an ebook given the cost to profit ratio and you still can't go all electronic. Which means you still don't have the best of both worlds or a choice really about the matter and furthermore you still paying out the whazoo for the whole deal. Some day this will work well but right now it's a mixed bag at best.
So those are what would be considered the legitimate market solutions to the bookstore problem. But I can do better. In fact after my first term and the extraordinarily bitter experience with the bookstore I determined to never give them another dime (which is unfortunate in a sense because I'd kind of like to have a t-shirt to add to my collection but only the bookstore sells them and, well, fuck the damn bookstore.) I have succeeded in not paying the highwaymen of college texts from that point on.
Now, I'll tell you my big secret. Trust me, if you don't know about this you are going to thank me in a minute. The system is imperfect but also functional enough that I haven't spent more than 12 dollars in the last four terms and that was to amazon for a math book which I would have ended up keeping anyway, so that was a win. So what's the secret?
The library system is your friend. A book hording cluster of archival octopi. It's their job and passion to collect, catalog and lend books on everything and anything. And if you are fortunate to go to school somewhere with good consortia you have a great resource. And the big secret -it's not that big of a secret- is to just get the texts from the library. Now in 99% of cases your school library will not have your text book for several reasons. The one that bristles me personally is contractual agreements between libraries and bookstores that preclude a library from holding current textbooks. This does not mean that another library can't have the book though and that is where library consortia come into play. I have been successful at obtaining most of the required texts through the library system. Sometimes I have to settle for an older edition or a slightly different version (paper vs. hardback). But only once have I had to actually buy a book and as stated above that was a reasonable and winning transaction. 12 bucks for a pretty decent math text that I could use as reference material later was a pretty good deal. Now this has led to some hiccups, such as renew limits and slight content changes to contend with but it is well worth the hassle to save money. In my personal estimate I figure I have saved almost 2000 dollars by not buying from the bookstore. So support your library system and give the bookstore the finger.
So what have we learned here? The bookstore according to my interactions with it is a despicable monopolistic enterprise that controls access to required materials for students. The publishers are also a source of trouble. The texts range from over-produced fluffed up show-boats to cheap and dysfunctional assemblages of loosely coherent sub-texts. It is deplorable that all of these entities and others collude to stick it to the poorest segment of campus society. The administration allows a private business cabal of bookstores, publishers, vendors and ancillary players to dictate policy to university libraries, departments, faculty and ultimately the student body. We have learned that there are idealistic solutions to this situation. We can have ebooks, we could have print on demand, we could also collectively source texts as a service of the library (or at least a consortia). And practically we can mostly utilize the library system to acquire the texts we need.
So I hope I have demonstrated that the bookstore is a scam. I also hope you have taken away some good tips on how to avoid being hooked by them and also what we could attempt to move toward in the future to make the system equitable. Surely we could agitate to achieve a better system soon. And of course I'm all ears if anybody out there wants to start curing this cancer of the campus.
Thanks for reading. And always remember to take up the good fight. As Edmund Burke said 'all that is required for evil to triumph, is for good men to do nothing.' (obviously paraphrased but the spirit is preserved.)
End rant.
Cheers all!
Wow, there are so many things I want to say about and to college bookstores.
First off: WHY ARE TEXT BOOKS SO DAMNED EXPENSIVE!!!
Fuck you monopolistic greed mongers. Is it the publishers, the distributors, the faculty? WHO?
I do have some insight and some solutions here so please read to the end.
To start off, I'll review a list of texts and their costs as I am personally aware of. The term before last required that I have an algebra text from Blitzer, a well known (I guess) author of math texts. The cost from the bookstore? $197 and change, I have the receipt. Almost 200 dollars for a fucking book I used for four months? Most of you must be thinking that that is insane and you would be right. It's a nice book, four hundred glossy pages all hardbound and the thing weighs about ten pounds. Was it useful? Yeah I suppose, my assignments were from it and the examples of how to work out problems were present but that was about it. For the price it would have been nice if the thing would have taken my exams or given me a prescription for Nootropil or something approaching it's supposed worth. Nothing such has yet to come from this text.
Another text I needed was the Norton Anthology of British Literature 8th edition. While this one only cost me $78 and was actually much more interesting than the algebra text it is still little more than a fancy doorstop. In class we, including the instructor, lovingly referred to it as 'The Brick'. And it is indeed a fucking brick. It's almost 3000 pages of onion skin with fine print and lots of notation. While it's the only one of the bunch that I wanted to keep as it contains major and important excerpts from English language literature spanning from Beowulf to Rushdie (sadly no Orwell, a major oversight in my opinion) in was still severely overpriced. Nice book, good reference, but given that most of the content is widely available online for free I have to wonder at the wisdom of having to have it at all. Despite the daily use in class (which a simple google search would have covered up to about 70 years ago) it seems that this was a prime example of text book publisher money grabbing madness. All that said it is still the only book I DIDN'T want to sell back to the greedy bastards at the book store.
Here is the most egregious example of book store buffoonery. So far anyway. For oral communication we were required to have a slim, useless book that cost a mere 137 and change. We used this book for just four chapters and that was it. The rest of the class was based entirely on the instructor's expertise. The book itself is useless beyond those few chapters and it's apparent desire to be turned into toilet-paper. The real kick in the pants here was when I tried to sell it back to the bookstore. And here we come to the real crux of the problem I have with the college book store. I stood in line for ten minutes and upon reaching the front I presented this worthless piece of crap. They told me, get this, 'I'm sorry but we have reached our quota for that book.' WTF you scum bum dip shit jerk bag mo foes!?!?! And my real world reaction is 'so you mean I am stuck with this worthless pile of ass-wipe? I paid 137 bucks for this hunk of junk and now I am stuck with it?' Answer, 'yep, 'fraid so.' I wanted to strangle somebody that day. Luckily I had rented the last text I was required to have. You want to hear that too don't you?
Thought so. Here's another scam perpetrated by 'the book store'. Certain texts you can rent from them. So for my programming course I rented the book. Originally the book was $162 but on rental it cost me $53. Not a bad deal when you are strapped for cash and waiting for aid money to come through. The only pisser here is that this book was technically useful and in order to keep it I would have had to pay the $109 dollar difference. That's right do the math, the book was worth $162 to these paper pirates. Oddly enough I used the book so hard that I feel I actually came out on top here. Not really ahead but on top as the text was so worn, dog-eared, and just plain used that nobody in their right mind would want it again. SO FUCK YOU COLLEGE BOOK STORE, at least I got a little over you greedy fucks.
Well that's the situation. So what can we do to illuminate this subject beyond just my heart-felt consumer rage? Lots.
I asked a few questions at the start.
Firstly, why are these texts so expensive?
Well, honestly, it's big business. It's also old business. So we must consider base greed. Since that is a trivial aspect given that we know the goal of capitalism is the extraction of profit from trade I'll leave the academic conclusion to the reader.
Looking at the historical aspect it is certainly true that books used to be critically expensive objects that required much effort to produce. Today they are not so expensive or so onerous to produce but it seems old habits die hard. Also connected to this trace is the quality of these books. For the moment I'll discard the actual content of these texts (it is a dependent variable which is based on opinion at best) and focus on the actual physical quality. In fairness the texts that I have encountered and used are of a high quality. And they should be too given the level of abuse I often see visited upon these books.I've seen nearly bullet-proof hard covers with nice heavy bond pages and genuine sewed bindings. I've seen the less robust but still very stable firm covers with well glued folios and decent paper. The worst example quality-wise was the aforementioned communications book. The paper was sub-par (still decent I guess but not the best, certainly not $137 dollars worth) the jacket was okay and it didn't fall apart, though I didn't use it that much anyway, so who knows really.
Now we can look at the content quality assessment. Most of the texts I have been required to have (bought or otherwise, we'll get there dear reader) serve the purpose they were intended for. Some better than others, and some only passingly. As concerns expense to produce I would like to cite the math text from Blitzer. This is a very flashy book. It's about half a generation away from being the equivalent of what MTV used to be back in the day to the world of math texts. Lots of glossy pop-culture references to 'explain' math. Explain to brain-addled couch-potatoes how to do something they've been told all their lives to hate and expect to do poorly at (math is not a priority skill in the grand scheme here in the US, very, very sad is what that is). Also it was technically accurate and useful if you tune out all the pop references. This also brings me to a theory about this particular text. Might the use of trendy and current entertainment figures (celebrities) inflate the cost of this book due to rights acquisition? I think that's a very valid theory and would love to be able to say conclusively if this book's price reflects a hefty kick-back to SAG, MPAA, RIAA, and gang. This was also one of the highest-quality books in both categories. As it is the best example I will turn to the worst. The communications book was dated, uninteresting, and it's format was aggravating. Now it's not as if the information was inaccurate, besides how would I know, that's the instructor's job, but it was just difficult to digest because it was old, cold and boring. No flare at all. It sounded as if Ben Stein was reading it very slowly every time I tried to read it, it was that bad. I've also had a few other bad books. The one for Data Structures was basically a boat anchor. I think I opened it two times, once before the midterm and once before the final. It was of minimal help in both cases. Another text that was fairly frustrating in that it could be very unintuitive was for Computer Organization.
Are there other considerations to price? Sure. Some texts had a reputation factor. I'm dubious as to some of their supposed worth and that is really all I can say.
Moving on. Is it the publishers, the distributors, the faculty? WHO?
My best answer is that it's a bit of all the above. Surely the publishers are the ones who should be scrutinized the most. They make the books, the decisions about content, format, and distribution means. And I'll return to the this in my proposed solutions at the end.
So let's look at the distributors. Standard middlemen taking their standard cut. This is really just idle speculation but it's, well, standard enough to be trivial.
So how about the faculty. Yes they too share a hand in this dastardly business. They pick the books after all. And speculatively, they are susceptible to influence. Influence from, colleagues, superiors, sales-people / vendors, etc. I do have it on good word that there is another layer to explore as pertains to the relationship between faculty and vendors / distributors. And this is basically a core issue. The model that was explained to me by an unnamed faculty member was basically that of forced upgrades. The books are firstly only available new for a few years and there is limited production. Of course there is always a 'new edition' being brewed up and ready to be pushed out. Not that that's a bad thing really. Keeping the content fresh is important. And that is a legitimate reason for these texts to be expensive. Research, development and refinement do take actual work and therefore money. But I'm contending that they are overly expensive. Also the general method of use for the average college text is abuse. So the materials need to be more robust. Again a good thing. Here's the problem there though. While practicing one of my solutions to the conundrum I've learned a few things. Of primary interest here is that there is ultimately little variation from edition to edition of a particular text. Yes there are differences but they are usually minor but in some cases they are drastic. This could be seen as a sort of precautionary dick-move on the publishers part. Change it just enough to sucker in the next lot. But the real question here is, why does this cycle continue? Well because faculty are pressured, by the book-store itself in many cases, to update the required text in order to keep a contract with a vendor whom distributes the preferred text which are updated regularly. Essentially this is lock in. There's also a whole lot of minutia we could delve into about the nuance of selecting texts for a course, familiarity, experience, compatibility (forced or voluntary). Ultimately I am concerned that this system I have just described (in excruciating detail) could be so much better on a fundamental level regardless of the many little flaws.
Finally, let's hear some proposals to fix this busted system.
Man, have you fools not heard of print on demand?!? This is a pretty pie-in-the-sky idea at the moment but it is becoming more available. In fact many 'teacher's editions' are starting to be put out in loose-leaf format so that the instructor may pick and choose what parts they need. The obvious next step here is to well, print on demand only the material the instructor intends to use in the class. Since texts are inherently limited runs anyway why not allow for the custom selection of materials from a full catalog of possible topics. Obviously this idea has great potential but since it would limit profit in the form of forced identical sales on a short time scale it is unlikely that the publishers will willingly offer such a system.Okay so that's an idealistic solution. How about something more... obtainable.
Ebooks, of course!! But sadly not a true reality and also prone to crippling by the publisher-vendor alliance. I've encountered a few offerings of ebooks from the bookstore. The bookstore/publishers are frustratingly back ass-ward about the implementation though. Recalling specific examples they fall into a middle category. New books are very expensive, rentals an usually close to half that price and ebooks are more expensive than renting in all cases I encountered and usually minimally less expensive than the new book. Now this sucks for a few reasons. One, regardless of the content development expense, ebooks have the advantage of taking almost no overhead for production, distribution and 'storage'. It's just a computer file. So why not make it that much more affordable? Short answer: greed, more seeking answer: Luddite ass-hatery. It's unfortunately not a better option than a paper text in most cases. I can take a book anywhere, I could study with out power, I can highlight things and personally I still have an affinity for bound physical books (though textbooks hardly qualify as 'good' reading material in most cases. Also the additional cost of a reader device to cover the use anywhere function is a little off-putting and still not as tactile as a book. The device of course does have the advantage of being one single thing and in theory (if all texts were available, that has never been the case in my experience) could replace a couple dozen pounds of dead pulped pressed printed and glued trees that I seem to lug around every term. That I think would offset most disadvantages of not having real books. But who knows, that's just my way of looking at it. Basically they gouge you even more for an ebook given the cost to profit ratio and you still can't go all electronic. Which means you still don't have the best of both worlds or a choice really about the matter and furthermore you still paying out the whazoo for the whole deal. Some day this will work well but right now it's a mixed bag at best.
So those are what would be considered the legitimate market solutions to the bookstore problem. But I can do better. In fact after my first term and the extraordinarily bitter experience with the bookstore I determined to never give them another dime (which is unfortunate in a sense because I'd kind of like to have a t-shirt to add to my collection but only the bookstore sells them and, well, fuck the damn bookstore.) I have succeeded in not paying the highwaymen of college texts from that point on.
Now, I'll tell you my big secret. Trust me, if you don't know about this you are going to thank me in a minute. The system is imperfect but also functional enough that I haven't spent more than 12 dollars in the last four terms and that was to amazon for a math book which I would have ended up keeping anyway, so that was a win. So what's the secret?
The library system is your friend. A book hording cluster of archival octopi. It's their job and passion to collect, catalog and lend books on everything and anything. And if you are fortunate to go to school somewhere with good consortia you have a great resource. And the big secret -it's not that big of a secret- is to just get the texts from the library. Now in 99% of cases your school library will not have your text book for several reasons. The one that bristles me personally is contractual agreements between libraries and bookstores that preclude a library from holding current textbooks. This does not mean that another library can't have the book though and that is where library consortia come into play. I have been successful at obtaining most of the required texts through the library system. Sometimes I have to settle for an older edition or a slightly different version (paper vs. hardback). But only once have I had to actually buy a book and as stated above that was a reasonable and winning transaction. 12 bucks for a pretty decent math text that I could use as reference material later was a pretty good deal. Now this has led to some hiccups, such as renew limits and slight content changes to contend with but it is well worth the hassle to save money. In my personal estimate I figure I have saved almost 2000 dollars by not buying from the bookstore. So support your library system and give the bookstore the finger.
So what have we learned here? The bookstore according to my interactions with it is a despicable monopolistic enterprise that controls access to required materials for students. The publishers are also a source of trouble. The texts range from over-produced fluffed up show-boats to cheap and dysfunctional assemblages of loosely coherent sub-texts. It is deplorable that all of these entities and others collude to stick it to the poorest segment of campus society. The administration allows a private business cabal of bookstores, publishers, vendors and ancillary players to dictate policy to university libraries, departments, faculty and ultimately the student body. We have learned that there are idealistic solutions to this situation. We can have ebooks, we could have print on demand, we could also collectively source texts as a service of the library (or at least a consortia). And practically we can mostly utilize the library system to acquire the texts we need.
So I hope I have demonstrated that the bookstore is a scam. I also hope you have taken away some good tips on how to avoid being hooked by them and also what we could attempt to move toward in the future to make the system equitable. Surely we could agitate to achieve a better system soon. And of course I'm all ears if anybody out there wants to start curing this cancer of the campus.
Thanks for reading. And always remember to take up the good fight. As Edmund Burke said 'all that is required for evil to triumph, is for good men to do nothing.' (obviously paraphrased but the spirit is preserved.)
End rant.
Cheers all!
Friday, May 11, 2012
Out of Context #1: A study
This is a random comment to a post (well not really that random, but still fairly random...) from a fairly well known blog in the blogbloggybog world (no idea, just made that shit up, deal with it). It is only tangentially connected to the topic of the original post and provoked from a long chain of back and forth. An association chain in essence.
I present this here as Out-of-Context #1. It is an experiment in which I would hope (unlikely as it is given the popularity of this blog) to see what people 'think' the context is or just what they think in general about this lifted excerpt from a random place on the Internet.(No fair googling either.)
Also, I find it odd that blogger's infrastructure thinks that the words "blog" and "blogger" are both misspelled.
I present this here as Out-of-Context #1. It is an experiment in which I would hope (unlikely as it is given the popularity of this blog) to see what people 'think' the context is or just what they think in general about this lifted excerpt from a random place on the Internet.(No fair googling either.)
4 months ago in reply to 3 Likes
Also, I find it odd that blogger's infrastructure thinks that the words "blog" and "blogger" are both misspelled.
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