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Tuesday, October 16, 2007

Inexpensive, unauthorized but legal: Cheap international textbooks

My son, a high school senior, recently asked if I'd order him a copy of  "A First Course in Abstract Algebra," the textbook for a math class he's taking. The new hardback sells for $124, but poking around awhile online I found a brand new paperback edition for $35.40 including shipping.

The text was identical. And the catch? It was an international edition that arrived bearing the advisory label:

This edition is manufactured in India and is authorized for sale only in India, Bangladesh, Bhutan, Pakistan, Nepal, Sri Lanka and the Maldives. Circulation of this edition outside of these territories is UNAUTHORIZED.

That doesn't mean illegal.

In 2003, the New York Times reported:


But thanks to the Internet, more and more individual students and college bookstores are starting to order textbooks from abroad...The reimporting of American texts from overseas has become far easier in recent years, thanks both to Internet sites that offer instant access to foreign book prices, and to a 1998 Supreme Court ruling that federal copyright law does not protect American manufacturers from having the products they arranged to sell overseas at a discount shipped back for sale in the United States.

Last year,  the Tribune business section reported:

Textbook prices have increased at twice the rate of inflation over the past decade and recently equaled a quarter of the tuition-and-fees expense at four-year public schools and nearly three-quarters of the cost for a two-year school, according to a report from the Government Accountability Office....

International editions are usually the same books but cheaper--and wildly cheaper if used. For example, the popular "Calculus: Early Transcendentals" sells new for about $136. A used international edition can be had for $7.69, including shipping, according to a recent listing on Half.com. Three other copies were selling for less than $25 each, according to recent listings on BestBookBuys.com.

"There's definitely serious savings there,"  said Steve Loyola, president and founder of BestBookBuys.com. He added that content does not typically vary significantly between domestic and foreign editions of textbooks. "Publishers thought they could keep these markets separate, but the cat is out of the bag now."

I'm glad to learn this before the boy heads off to college next year.





Your son is taking abstract algebra in high school? As someone who had to run off to my Friendly Local University to get anything beyond a year of calculus, I'm jealous...

ZORN REPLY -- He's actually taking it for high school credit through a Friendly Local University.


Please, share the wealth. What Web site did you use to search for the book? The only one I know about for textbooks is bigwords.com. Is there a better one?

ZORN REPLY -- I don't want to endorse this site necessarily...the shipping was slower than I'd hoped for...but it was textbookx.com. I hear good things about amazon's UK site...there are many others. follow the links in the posting above and or google international edition textbooks.

Actually, even with a friendly local university, abstract algebra is a surprisingly high-level class for a high school senior. Usually it is preceded by at least 3 semesters of calculus and a semester of linear algebra, although thinking about the material that's typically covered, there's precious little calc or even linear algebra in the first semester of abstract (a second semester of abstract algebra, though will get heavy into material covered in linear algebra).

I have a fair number of foreign and domestic math texts, and my main observation is that the cheap foreign editions tend to be paperback vs hardcover and be printed on thinner paper, and often with poorer printing conditions (there are some where the text is a bit blurry). But that said, it's still a huge savings in cost and given the ridiculously high prices for many college-level texts, I'm all for students getting the cheapest copies they can (when I was teaching community college math, the textbook actually cost more than the tuition for the class!).

I am right in the middle of this textbook pricing puddle. This quarter I am teaching an Intro to Information Technology course at DePaul and co-teaching the same course to students in Lyon, France (as part of a DePaul exchange program.) The leading text for this course from a major publisher retails for about $120. It is a very good text (and written by two friends of mine, so I might be predisposed to use it.)

Two DePaul professors decided not long ago that $120 for an intro text is way too much money. So they wrote their own text. It covers the same basic material, has nice unique teaching features (e.g. the book is available as podcast), and good end-of-chapter problems. They found a small local publisher to offer the book for $29. So DePaul has standardized on their book for our course.

But we ran into a snag with our French students. Our host school in France has no bookstore (it is a VERY different system over there), so those students had to order the book individually. Our publisher said that while the book would cost them $29, individual shipping would cost them $70 - per book. (Not publisher markup; apparently it really costs this.)

So we arranged with the publisher to give us the book as a computer file (a pdf), and sold access to the file for $19. Basically, we lowered the cost to the student from $120 to $19 through some hard work and creativity at our end.

I won't ever again make my students pay circa $100 for a book. There are too many other options - and too much material available on the Internet for me to justify that cost to the student. And, just as the music industry business model is breaking down this summer and autumn (a fascinating story, but far adrift from this thread), the textbook publishing industry is due for a fall as well. I am happy to do my part to help it along.

Ugh, textbook prices are horrible. As a college professor, I've actually found myself trying to avoid using textbooks because they're so expensive—the students invariably thank me, but I do miss having the extra resource. It's just that unless I'm using a book nearly 100% of the time in the course, I can't justify forcing my students to pay $100 or more for something they'll use from time to time. The international editions are really useful (I sometimes see students walk in with textbooks whose outer cover is printed entirely in Chinese, but the content in the body of the book is identical to the US-printed textbook—but much, much, much cheaper).

As has already been commented, though, the thing that really leapt out for me was the abstract algebra. That's a pretty brutal course to throw at a HS senior!

As a small seller of textbooks as well as other books on half.com and other sites, I wanted to comment on the international edition dilemma. Half.com is an ISBN driven catalog site, international editions have different ISBN's so the Calculus text you mentioned finding on half, is NOT to be sold there unless it is an exact ISBN match to a provided listing. Just as PDF's of solution manuals or e-books cannot be sold.
The other point I wanted to make was that NOT all international editions will work for students. Chapters may be different or missing; problems may be in different orders. The quality of the international text may vary depending on what international market it was prepared for. In some cases, an international edition may be just fine but not always.
Another option for students may be a previous edition of the required text for class. Some newer editions have a lot of changes, others are virtually identical. Checking with a professor or other students who may have taken the class previously is a good way to see if this is an cost-savings option.

Why haven't more professors taken the web approach to course texts by now? I finished my undergraduate degree 10 years ago and the profs were just starting to put course materials on their own websites. I thought that was the beginning of the end of expensive required texts. Most of my professors always lamented how they rarely saw any of the profit from the textbooks they published anyway.

Course websites are perfect for a prof to write course-focused content and charge nothing for the student to access it. A website is much more dynamic and allows links, quick access, portability etc. Often, text books cover much more than the class requires, and you end up only using 30-40% of a book. It becomes a nice reference for a few years, but can quickly become outdated as it collects dust on the shelf.

In the post graduate classes I've taken since college, I've had some profs use their course websites this way. But many used them merely as a way to post grades, announcements etc.

I realize an online course text requires the prof to put in much more work to create this content. But when spending $2000-$3000 for a class, it should be expected.

ZORN REPLY -- My dad will be a good person to ask about this. Stay tuned.

For EZ: Noting that 2 out of 6 comments comment on a high schooler taking an abstract algebra course, I won't claim change of subject - I wondered if you have ever done a column on gifted students and acceleration policies? In practice it would seem you favor acceleration...other thoughts or columns?

ZORN REPLY -- Umm, I dunno. I think it's important to keep students challenged and fulfilled, and this course was something Alex's high school math teacher thought would fill the bill for him. I only mentinoed the name of the textbook and the price because concrete details are usually better than vague ones, not to get into this other area or brag on his math talent -- it's considerable and I'm very proud of him for it, but I take no credit other than passing along some (dormant in me) math genes.

Why not write my own textbook and post it on the web site?

I'm adjunct "at an undisclosed area community college" so I'm pretty much the low man on the teaching totem pole.

If I write a textbook for a course, I'm not sure that I would own it. As a work for hire (unless my undisclosed... would permit me to sell it on the side), the college would own what I produced. My online lectures are owned by the College, so I could be not continued and have no ownership of what I created.

It's not just an abstract possibility. I full time faculty person bumped me from teaching when their class was cancelled.

I had the same experience a few years ago - ordered a surprisingly cheap copy of a math text on abebooks.com, and it was labeled for sale in India. The only difference I noticed between it and the "real" version was the flimsy quality of the paper. For someone who highlights a lot, I guess that could be a problem; otherwise probably not.

Random plug: if for some reason your son wants to continue in algebra, I'm told my husband's book "Groups and Representations" (Alperin/Bell) is reasonably clear. On the other hand, I personally think algebra is a horrible subject that that no one should study it at all (traumatic memories of grad school are being re-repressed as we speak.)


As one whose memory goes back to college days in the early 1970's when you'd have to pay big bucks for a textbook, only to have it reduced to $1.50 on "trade-in day" at year's end, I say...Right On! (Hey, I said I was from the 70s)

Ken writes: "Why haven't more professors taken the web approach to course texts by now? ..."

I can't speak for all professors, but what you're asking us to do is, essentially, each write our own brand-new textbook for every course we teach. This is a prohibitive amount of work (not to mention an awful lot of duplicated effort).

That said, many of us do indeed put course material online, and—especially in courses where I've forgone a textbook—I've made some effort to compile lists of relevant links. For one course I teach I've gotten considerable mileage out of Wikipedia (with appropriate cautions and vetting the relevant pages for accuracy, of course). A few textbooks have put their entire text online, for free, knowing that people will still buy the books in large numbers because it's nice to have a reference book on hand, but if you just can't afford it (esp in less affluent high schools that would still like to offer advanced placement courses) then at least it's there for you to use.

Ultimately, something's got to hit the fan at some point. Textbook prices have risen at much greater than inflation for years now (nearly doubling in the last ten years, when the CPI has taken roughly 23 years to double), and that certainly can't continue indefinitely.


JENS ZORN WRITES: I taught quantum mechanics to senior physics majors course at Michigan for about a decade and I worked hard to develop a set of on-line lecture notes that would convey my visual, heuristic take on the subject. I wanted my students to obey John Wheeler's principle that one should not do a formal calculation until one had a reasoned estimate for the answer.

My notes (http://www-personal.umich.edu/~jenszorn/ select Quantum Mechanics ) were complete in many ways, but they still had minor glitches --- a few typos, an equation-numbering that was not completely consistent, an inadequate index, and problem sets of uneven difficulty. These deficiencies were not huge; an ambitious student would overcome them, albeit with some annoyance that the errors and omissions in the notes led to some waste of time. These deficiencies could have been remedied, but the work involved to do so was considerable and was not very interesting.

So my students still wanted me to assign a standard textbook ($100 or so) as a safe, well-vetted source of information. They appreciated having a somewhat different point of view on the same subject.

Nonetheless, I believe that the direction for teaching is toward on-line texts with (A) links to supply details as the reasoning moves forward, (B) animations and videos to provide examples, (C) easy modification to meet the needs of a particular course, and (D) portability as the weight of standard printed introductory texts threatens us all with gravitational collapse.

ERIC ZORN FOLLOW UP: I can imagine, though, that many professors would be reluctant to post online material that they consider proprietary. Lesser teachers could swipe the material, lazy students could use it as an excuse to skip lecture classes and penny-pinching administrators in the future could use the presence of the material online to reduce the size of the faculty.
On the other hand, surely the days of the door-stop textbook are fading. Any such book can be reduced to a .pdf file viewable and highlight-able on a laptop. And today's students are unlikely to complain that they don't like to read on the computer....if they're anything like Alex, all they seem to DO all day is read on a computer.

Just a remark to say that cheap texts from overseas were already a factor in the years 1950-60 Many of us then in graduate school would buy supplementary texts and reference books printed in Taiwan. The books were small and on thin paper but perfectly adequate for our needs; the price was about 15% of the US editions.

I recall one incident when Victor Weisskopf arrived, unannounced, as a friendly visitor to our laboratory. As he stopped to exchange pleasantries with our lab director, the graduate students all scrambled to hide their pirate copies of his book on nuclear physics.

ERIC ZORN REPLY -- But, Dad, is "pirate" the right term? Presumably Weisskopf's publisher made the decision to sell the book cheaply in Taiwain and the purchases were legal.

My recollection of those days (1950's) is that overseas publishers did not worry about copyright enforcement and so felt free to publish without explicit permission. Their original motivation may have been to make books available to overseas students who absolutely could not afford the US/UK prices, but they were probably not sorry to see the growth of a US market for their product.

So "pirate" may well have been the appropriate descriptor in those days. In the current situation, US publishers have indeed arranged to make lower-cost editions available for students in selected countries, so the issue now is whether those cheaper books may be sold in the US.

My daughter is in 7th grade at Whitney Young. They are required to carry a 2-3" 3-ring binder for each class, plus a text book. With a loaded backpack (gym clothes, lock, lunch, pens, etc.) of over 30 pounds, we choose to purchase a set of books for home (except for the French book, found online for fee). Between ebay and online sellers, the books were around $20 each (with retail prices of $50-75); the books were all identical to those issued by the school.

Publishers Settle Lawsuit Against Internatonal Textbook Pirates. Defendants Imported, Sold Unauthorized Copies of Non-U.S. Versions of Textbooks. http://www.pearsoned.com/pr_2007/101807a.htm

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