<p>I work at a large U, and found a postcard in my mailbox today entitled “Tired of High Textbook Costs?”. It’s from the Copyright Permissions Center, and is advocating the use of these packets for “more control of content” plus “more control of costs”.</p>
<p>I thought this was an interesting trend. From our website:</p>
<p>General Information</p>
<p>Course packets are collections of articles and/or book chapters compiled by instructors to supplant or accompany traditional textbooks. Instructors wishing to use a course packet for their course would first submit their list of citations to our office and deliver original copies to the appropriate Printing Services Copy Center. The Copyright Permissions Center notifies the Copy Center when the permission process is complete and the center then produces the packets and delivers them to the appropriate University Bookstore for distribution to students.</p>
<p>We used packets a lot back in the day when I was in grad school and TAing. We used to make them available to students at local copy centers.</p>
<p>My daughter seems to have something similar assigned for one of her classes this fall, but the listed cost is astronomical and I am very curious to get to the bookstore on move-in day and see what it contains.</p>
<p>some universities have their own offices which put together course packets. Others depend on commercial firms. The packets allow profs to assign readings from different books or journals without requiring the students to buy the whole books or to all descend on the library to read the same journal, as typically, university libraries have only one copy of the journal to which they subscribe.
The cost of the packet usually includes the cost of copyright permission as well as the cost of printing. The total packet may feel like it costs a lot, but it’s much cheaper than buying all the books in order to read a chapter. Academic books nowawdays often cost $40 or more. I still own some books from my undergraduate days when they cost $2.95. Nowadays, $30 is cheap.</p>
<p>I’ve seen the use of electronic course packets at colleges. Students have access to articles, stories, etc. I don’t know if it’s included in the cost of their course, a separate fee or if the student has to purchase access but it eliminates the physical nature of documents that have to be read for courses.</p>
<p>we used them back in the 80s at my University. They were called “readers”, were published on site and cost less than a textbook though sometimes we had both.</p>
<p>For the electronic packets, I believe the universities pay a license. It’s cheaper than have hard copy packets, but lots of students don’t like reading online (they could, of course, download and pint out the excerpts). It’s the same as the universities paying for e-journals.</p>
<p>I think that course packets are costing more because universities have become very strict about copyrights after the Kinko case back in the 1980s or 1990s.</p>
<p>Pizzagirl, I just had an reason unrelated to this thread to review the Kinko’s case – the full name and citation is: Basic Books, Inc. v. Kinko’s Graphics Corp.,758 F.Supp. 1522 (S.D.N.Y. 1991).</p>
<p>I believe it involved profs (at Michigan?) making many copies of articles or parts of books for their students without prior permission of the publishers. The publisher sued Kinko’s where most of the copying was done, and I believe the university also, for millions and won the case. This was widely reported, so universities have played it safe ever since. Last year, I found out that, if a library has only one copy of a journal, it can only have put copy of the relevant article on reserve. Think about courses with hundreds of students, all needing to read the same article at the same time! I also heard that some scientific journal subscriptions cost nearly $20k per year!</p>
<p>Huh. Is there a tipping point (one chapter; 10% of the number of pages; whatever) at which copying out of a book violates copyright law? Is it related to the use of the copies? (e.g., if I’m a student and I make a copy for myself out of the reserve library copy, cool, but if I’m a professor and I make 20 copies for my students, not cool?)</p>
<p>Pizzagirl, US copyright laws are some of the most confusing things to try to understand. I work at a copy center, so we had to be trained on various means of reproduction and the different types of materials that can’t be copied. US copyright laws state that copyrighted materials can be copied, so long as the use of the copy falls under the definition of “fair use.” However, “fair use” has never really been defined properly, so it really is best to just not copy it in the first place. You can check out this [Fair</a> use - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia](<a href=“http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fair_use]Fair”>Fair use - Wikipedia) link for more on “fair use.”</p>