Another option: Check to see whether your college or university offers a textbook rental service to help students save money.
To learn about additional ways to rent textbooks rather than buy them, check out this helpful column on the subject from ConsumerMan Herb Weisbaum. Check out CourseSmart. Free downloads are your friends. Many classics of literature and a wide array of other books can be downloaded for free at Web sites such as Project Gutenberg. Form a book-sharing confederation. Do you know or can you meet other students who share your major? If so, you could create a band of brothers and sisters who share, buy and sell books with each other at fair prices.
Many colleges set aside copies of textbooks at the library, where they can be used for free. Your city or county library may even have copies of certain textbooks. Older editions are always worth a look. If a new edition has just been released for one of the textbooks on your list, compare it carefully with the last edition. Sell your books with care. They cost significantly less than traditional books and can incorporate videos, online connectivity and other features that traditional textbooks cannot.
Purchasing new textbooks can be expensive. Kayla Lowe has been a writer since Lowe is the author of "Maiden's Blush," a Christian fiction romance novel. Many critics blame this trend on what they describe as a rigged textbook economy that only profits the publishing industry. They typically just receive a syllabus and purchase as told. As a result, the price point is largely exempt from popular demand, giving publishers supreme control. One professor told me this tendency is necessary because of perennial advances in the given field.
However, although that may be true on occasion, even people who were formally employed in the industry have admitted that these "new" editions typically include little more than glorified cosmetic updates—a new picture, for example, or a heading adjustment. Advocates have called for more open-source textbooks as alternative—resources available online at little to no cost. Ethan Senack, who advocates on federal higher-education issues for U.
Public Interest Research Group, is particularly vocal in his support for this alternative, recently authoring a report , "Open Textbooks: The Billion Dollar Solution," that details how much money students can save using open-source materials.
Senack is, of course, right to say that technology has changed how the textbook market operates. Many college courses still use physical textbooks and mandate digital content as an add-on—complete with end-of-semester expiration dates, which undermine resale value, for example.
These new materials do come with pedagogical advances. With traditional textbooks, each student is presented with the material in the same way regardless of his or her proficiency in that particular subject. Even Pearson, another behemoth in the textbook industry, now brands itself as a "digital learning and services company.
The software essentially streamlines the process of analyzing and reviewing a text—think a teacher reading an excerpt, asking questions, and assigning an essay— on a simple interface. This interface allows kids to highlight material, take notes, and ask their classmates questions virtually.
It even includes a "raise hand" button that a student can click to alert a teacher if he or she has a question. The program, moreover, pre-selects what it considers difficult or particularly wordy paragraphs, flagging them with a "Close Reading" tag; clicking this button opens up an brief explanatory video. Students can follow along with the audio version as they read the text—perhaps negating the need for the teacher to call on a student to recite the text out loud.
The name alone—which, phonetically, sounds like a human—got me worrying about the prospect of a robot takeover, but I digress. Behind the scenes, the software builds a database detailing the proficiency of each student, information that is then used to formulate questions tailored to kids based on what they find most challenging. Essentially, the program—which is based on 20 years of research by cognitive scientists, mathematicians and engineers—can instantly assess the individual abilities of an entire class of students at a rate that would be impossible for most teachers.
You have 20 kids, you have 20 different needs.
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