We just keep dreaming these things up…

Got plans to travel or study abroad this summer? Tell us where you’re headed…

We’ll pick the top 20 & give you a freetextbooks t-shirt. Then, send us a photo rocking your shirt from Spain, Los Angeles, Destin – anywhere. The best photo gets $1,000.

Enter here

Recently, we’ve had a lot of conversations with employers looking to hire recent grads. Unsurprisingly, they always want to interview our student reps. Why? Because they’re disappointed with the applicants for entry-level jobs. The pool is too average.

Students are ill-prepared for the workforce as new grads. Colleges are doing a poor job of changing that, as ‘career centers’ are at best understaffed, at worst impractical. Advisors barely have time to coach students on their choice of majors, much less help securing internships or post-grad jobs.

What to do? First, choose a major that gets you a job. Something vocational, like accounting, finance, engineering, graphic design, even education. After all, most of your sociology friends will end up working in some type of business anyway. You’ll just have the head start.

Now, go get work experience on your own. No one’s going to do it for you. Call or email companies that you find interesting & ask to work a few days a week. Choose internships carefully. Avoid those that turn you into a secretary or runner. Find someone that involves you & teaches you a skill. Be a part of creating something. Ask questions, build relationships, broaden your horizons.

You’re probably thinking, “Well, I’m pre-law.” That’s a good point and deserves a mention. Professional programs are still valid, but be cautious. Unemployment for law grads is higher than ever. Based on the time, debt & earnings potential for MDs amidst healthcare legislation, it may or may not be worth it.

Still, the same things apply. Go get work experience. Not volunteer experience, but work experience. Internships, clerkships, fellowships, etc. You’ll be better for it. And, you’ll have something other than Habitat for Humanity to discuss in an interview.

via UGA’s Red & Black: http://bit.ly/RDGJDd

I’m pretty positive the fact that students are spending less on textbooks has more to do with the onslaught of textbook rentals (usually 50-70% less than buying) and less with “technological innovations” as this article claims. These days, you can rent textbooks from any bookstore and any online vendor.

Although some textbooks can cost hundreds of dollars, technological innovations appear to be driving book costs down.

Innovations in tech aren’t driving book prices down – publishers are keeping them high, as buying e-textbooks only saves about 10-15% off the new price, whereas used books are typically available at 20-50% less than the new price. Which of these would you pick?

Managerial Accounting by Garrison, 14th edition
Buy from FreeTextbooks: $134.38
Rent from FreeTextbooks: $62.90
Buy for Kindle: $144.81
Rent for Kindle: $78.65

CourseSmart Saves Students More than $100 Million On Textbooks and Course Materials

Here’s the press release, pretty standard with a quote from the CEO and a student singing their praises.

One note about CourseSmart, in case you didn’t know – it’s the big four’s (Pearson, McGraw, Cengage, & Wiley) most concerted effort to circumvent Amazon & Apple, instead going after direct-to-student e-textbooks. It’s probably best geared toward students that want to access e-textbooks on their laptops. They do have apps for iPad & iPhone but of course require that ebooks are purchased through those apps, as opposed to the more natural flow of using iBooks. Selling ebooks direct-to-students nets them a higher profit than paying Apple or Amazon up to 30% of the purchase price. Because students ultimately decide to buy a device (Kindle/iPad), they then expect e-textbooks to be available on that device. So, the same books served up through the Kindle or iBooks Store will ultimately beat out an option that is catered to laptop users or via a third-party in-app purchase.

College Stores Association Argues Against DOJ, E-Books and E-Textbooks Are Different ( via Digital Book World )

Factually, the terms ‘academic textbook’ and ‘e-textbook’ are not used consistently, so without an explicit definition in the settlement agreement, interpretation of the document will be difficult and could cause publishers to hesitate to experiment in the higher education marketplace. Are ‘the Odyssey’ or ‘The Grapes of Wrath’ academic books when sold for use in a classroom?,” said Marc Fleischaker, of Arent Fox LLP, the NACS counsel.

Since no illegal conduct was alleged in the e-textbook market, the DOJ should make clear that e-textbooks are exempt from the settlement and from the lawsuit, the NACS says. Further, the NACS is urging the court — Judge Denise Cote — to reject the settlement unless it makes this distinction in the e-textbook market.

Majority of College Students Prefer Buying Used Textbooks over Renting Textbooks, New Textbooks & eTextbooks ( via PRWeb )

Textbooks.com, an online textbooks retailer, recently conducted a customer survey to understand college students’ textbook purchasing habits…

Almost 40% of students plan on purchasing more used textbooks this fall while over 30% plan on renting more, and 28% expect to purchase more digital eTextbooks. Sixty percent of students prefer used textbooks, followed by rental (24%), new (9%) and eTextbooks (7%).

This is interesting – makes me wonder how diverse the students polled were. Just playing devil’s advocate, say you asked only juniors & seniors… They’re pretty far along in their major’s course requirements, so we can assume that they prefer to purchased used books so they can keep them for future reference, whether for grad school or generally in their field of study. Rentals are more applicable to freshmen & sophomores, so if the survey polled a higher concentration of older students, they’d certainly be more likely to buy used textbooks, as opposed to renting.

From our own data, orders on FreeTextbooks.com hover close to even – somewhere between 50/50 and 65/35 in favor of rentals. I would expect this number to be even higher for sites that offer really rock-bottom rental prices.  Because we offer free 2-day & $10 overnight UPS shipping, we’re usually about $6-8 more expensive than the absolute cheapest rental price on the web.

Regardless, this data also shows a quickly-increasing number of students that plan to purchase e-textbooks. I do wonder what effect the media plays in this with the recurring (& grossly sensationalist) articles proclaiming  “print is dead”. Most articles about e-textbooks that actually focus on case studies show that many students quickly ask for their print textbooks back. But, that’s another story…

Research from Xplana, a research arm for Missouri Book Service that is the parent company for Textbooks.com (administrator of this survey), reports that digital textbook sales should double year-over-year from 2012 & beyond. Current estimates put digital textbooks at about 6% of the total higher education textbook, but expected to hit 11% in 2013 & 19.5% in 2014. (Source: Digital Textbook Sales in U.S. Higher Education)

Which leads to this…

Huntsville district ahead in digital textbooks, but state encouraging others to catch up ( via AL.com )

State Superintendent Tommy Bice said an advisory committee met Friday in Montgomery to discuss implementation of Alabama Ahead, a law passed by the Legislature in May that authorizes the Alabama Public School and College Authority to sell and issue up to $100 million in bonds to help local school districts purchase laptop computers or tablets, software and digital textbooks.

Huntsville City Schools’ roll-out of digital textbooks will also be done in phases, though all students will have the necessary hardware at the beginning of the new school year in August. Kindergartners through second-graders will get iPads, which they will use at school only.

Superintendent Casey Wardynski has described the process as a “fading out” of bound textbooks and “fading in” of digital texts. Wardynski said the move to digital will save the district money. He said traditional curriculum costs are about $11.5 million for books and an additional $5 million to $7 million for supplemental materials.

This is happening across the country. State school budgets are strapped for cash & the publishers are there to pitch them on the cost-savings of digital textbooks. Starting in California, Texas, & Florida, school districts from nearly every state are following suit & investigating ways to save money by going with e-textbooks.

If you want to estimate the future adoption of higher education e-textbooks, this is the place to start. Today’s students reach for print because they were trained to learn with print, through the dynamic process of flipped pages, highlighting & note-taking. If today’s elementary (even middle) school students are given iPads, they’re changing their learning dynamic in the formative years leading up to college. For the life of a print textbook, that’s the writing on the wall, right there.

Future post – From textbooks to t-shirts: what the digital classroom means for college stores…

Since Apple’s big education announcement last month, I’ve spent a lot of time sorting through my own opinions about the future of education. As the founder of a company that counts higher ed students as customers, I have a fair share of experience not only in classrooms, but in anticipating student needs. Let me be clear – I’ve no doubt that textbooks are going digital & whether it’s a few or many years, print textbooks will be (not extinct, but) rarely used.

One popular opinion is that the adoption of books and online learning materials should be compared to the adoption of digital music. It can not. The relationship between a student and study materials is incredibly dynamic, whereas listening to music is pure consumption. What I mean is this – most students have a relationship with the content they’re trying to absorb. In a print textbook, they’re flipping pages, making annotations or highlights, referencing multiple books at once, etc. In studies like this one that attempted a school-wide e-textbook adoption, e-texts were “a detriment to learning the material”. To play devil’s advocate, are these results flawed because they’re testing students that have a history of traditional learning? Maybe so – time will tell. For now though, most students prefer to keep their print textbooks, but to predict college students’ future behavior, we need to watch what’s happening in K-12.

Now that Apple has entered the arena, everyone is excited about having “dynamic, interactive digital learning” in our schools, yet I’ve not seen real evidence that an “interactive” learning experience creates a smarter student. But why is it dominating the headlines? Because it moves everything we love about the Internet into our classrooms. Doing a digital matching exercise somehow feels like a video game. That educational video embedded in their textbook somehow feels like YouTube. Ask a fifth grade student if they’d rather learn on an iPad or out of a book & we all know the answer.

However, if standardized testing, not student preference, is our barometer for success, then shouldn’t we be making sure that students in digital classrooms are showing improvements? Consider the Kyrene School District in Tempe, Arizona, which launched a $33 million all-digital initiative, yet has shown stagnant test scores in reading & math. As this NYT article explains, schools like the Kyrene District “are spending billions on technology, even as they cut budgets and lay off teachers, with little proof that this approach is improving basic learning.”

On that note, the New York Times commissioned an article series from September 2001 to January 2012 called “Grading the Digital School“. Here are a couple excerpts:

• From “Inflating the Software Report Card“: Intel, in a Web document urging schools to buy computers for every student, acknowledges that “there are no longitudinal, randomized trials linking eLearning to positive learning outcomes.” Yet it nonetheless argues that research shows that technology can lead to more engaged and economically successful students, happier teachers and more involved parents.
• From “A Silicon Valley School That Doesn’t Compute“: Schools nationwide have rushed to supply their classrooms with computers, and many policy makers say it is foolish to do otherwise. But the contrarian point of view can be found at the epicenter of the tech economy, where some parents and educators have a message: computers and schools don’t mix. “A spare approach to technology in the classroom will always benefit learning. Teaching is a human experience… Technology is a distraction when we need literacy, numeracy and critical thinking.”

With iBooks Author, Apple’s entry raises its own concerns. If anyone can create “incredible Multi-Touch books complete with rich graphics, movies, 3D objects, and more”, then how will academic quality be maintained? If there’s no certification or approval process for academic publishing, then will the same multi-billion dollar publishing companies keep the upper-hand based on brand recognition alone. If that happens, then those publishers maintain pricing control and they’ll price books how they want to. And, if textbooks are initially priced at $14.99, we’ll probably see a race to the bottom like we have in the App Store. If you have an iOS device, consider how many times you’ve purchased an app that cost more than $5. If at all, it’s very few. Apple commoditized mobile applications and forced companies to charge a few dollars for what they’d been charging $50 for. Think of EA Sports – Tiger Woods Golf for Xbox is $55 – for iOS, $4.99. If it wasn’t priced this low, it wouldn’t sell.

Will this happen to textbooks? In my opinion, it may for K-12 but publishers have too much invested in higher ed publishing to sell, for example, a digital Organic Chemistry textbook for $15. It’s easy to propose that we can create free college textbooks, but what is forgotten is the enormous expense in writing, editing & publishing academic material. Prices will continue to be relative to the specialization of content. What that means is that, whether print or digital, an introductory psychology book should always be cheaper than an electrical engineering book.

Even worse, the most obvious barrier to adoption of Apple’s new platform is cost, as noted in this CNET article. Public schools already operate on razor-thin budgets. Teacher salaries & allocations for instructional resources are in sharp decline, so how is the end-all answer a $500 device?  For argument’s sake, let’s take a mid-sized high school of 700 students. Outfitting students with base-line iPads would cost $350,000 then 700 books at $15 add another $10,500 per subject. And, as much as we hear about the cost of outdated, print textbooks, their life-span exceeds an electronic device. Give every student an iPad and think of the cracked screens, dwindling battery life, etc. Will the school district have to hire an IT technician to keep everything up-and-running?

To restate, I’m not suggesting or even in favor of digital losing to print. It won’t. But let’s not get so caught up in the latest Apple announcement that we call it an end-all and fail to see the obstacles that can prevent adoption. In Walter Isaacson’s biography of Steve Jobs, he himself acknowledged that everything Apple does is intended to sell more devices. Apple’s motive isn’t to destroy publishing – it’s to sell more iPads.

Here is a quick look at our charitable giving for the 2010/2011 semesters. This is entirely attributed to orders & separate contributions from our awesome customers. If you bought, rented, or sold books through us, a thousand thanks for being a part of this!

• Provided 4,984 meals for food-insecure American families through Feeding America.
• Donated $644 to charity: water’s freshwater well projects in developing nations.
• Donated $232 for books & supplies to underprivileged classrooms through DonorsChoose.
• Provided vaccinations against meningitis, measles, & polio for 675 people through Doctors Without Borders.