I received an email from a textbook salesman. This isn’t a rarity, but today this line lept out at me:
“Ideal for students learning concepts and reasonably priced at $144.95,”
No. Just no. $144.95 is not reasonably priced. This is the first of what is likely a lot of emails that I get to respond with the line in the sand that I’ve drawn:
“Reasonably priced” at $144.95?
No thank you. I won’t subject my students to materials, including books, equipment, and any online tool licensing, that cost more than $60 per course. Until your offerings are in this range, please do not contact me again.
Even my $60 per course number is high as far as I’m concerned.
Open source textbooks are the future (I hope so) 😎
With philanthropic support, our books have been used in 38,143 classrooms, saving students $1,783,506,230 since 2012
Yep. Any course that I have control over, I try to switch to OERs to save students money. Unfortunately, it’s a ton of investment to do that for our largest courses, where our TAs depend on the homework services that come integrated with the textbooks. And I don’t have a clue how much that textbook costs, because it’s embedded in their tuition. I just hate that they don’t have access to it after the semester is over, which is why I casually mention not to use library genesis to acquire a PDF of the textbook for posterity’s sake, because that violates copyright law.
This is exactly why I got into piracy in the first place, I could not afford textbooks and neither could my sister. They are ridiculously priced
