Our bookshelves are loaded with various textbooks we accumulated in college, Margie’s grad school, and my own teacher’s certification work. I remember the Evils of High Textbooks Prices even in those golden days of the early 80s … and it’s gotten both better and worse since then.
The average price of a book is around fifty dollars, and many, particularly in the sciences, will run you well over a hundred. A General Accounting Office report released this summer found that, since 1986, prices have risen at a pace of six per cent a year?double the rate of inflation. For critics, such numbers are proof that the publishers are manipulating the market. The dearth of competition in the business is an issue, but the fundamental cause of the price spiral is what economists call an agency problem: professors pick the textbooks, but students have to pay for them.
On the one hand, textbook publishers are encouraging profs to choose new, expensive versions with lots of flashy extras, posters, CDs and the like.
On the other hand, the Internet is also letting students more readily buy textbooks from abroad (where the same book can be significantly less expensive), and deal with the $2 billion/year used textbook realm.
Publishers are responding by forcing quicker revision cycles through registration-coded expiration-dated Internet and CD material.
Students are retaliating by simply not buying books that are on their “last year” of publication.
Publishers are …
The vicious cycle continues. I’m scared to think of what things will be like when Kitten gets of an age.
(via kottke)
Saying the problem is just an “agency problem” is a great oversimplification. Some professors are very aware of the cost of textbooks, myself included. It’s hard not to notice when your students don’t have the required books because they could not afford to buy all the books for their classes. The cost of a textbook is one factor that I use in deciding what textbook to use. All other things being equal, if I have a choice between an expensive text and a less-expensive one, I will choose the less-expensive one. For example, if I have a choice between a hardback and a paperback of the same book, I will choose the paperback every time.
Unfortunately, publishers and the college bookstore can drive student costs up in spite of my best intentions. When a publisher puts out a new edition, the college bookstore will not order the old edition, even if I explicitly request it. There are plenty of the old edition laying around, and it would save the students’ money, but I can’t use it because the college bookstore won’t order it, and if it’s not in the college bookstore, most of my students won’t have the book when classes begin.
I can sometimes use classic texts printed in inexpensive editions that have not changed for years (Hackett Publishing Co is a good source of such texts). These are suitable for students to keep since they’re classic texts, and they are small paperbacks so the cost is not great. In addition, the texts don’t change over the years, so students can almost always sell their used books at the end of the semester. However, I can’t always use these texts. For many classes, such an approach won’t provide me with the texts I need.
Unfortunately, pedagogical considerations can also drive up the cost of textbooks. Sometimes two editions of the same text will be dramatically different in quality because they use different translations of the same original text (e.g. some translations of Aristotle’s “Nichomachean Ethics” are much harder to read than others). The cheaper edition is often less satisfactory from a pedagogical point of view. Old translations with expired copyright are free to the publisher, while newer and better translations cost the publisher money. I sometimes choose the more expensive book in order to make it easier for the students to understand and easier for me to teach.
This is just the tip of the iceberg. To say that textbooks are expensive because professors don’t care how much their students have to spend is to oversimplify the situation and I think it does most professors a disservice. Most professors I’ve spoken to are aware of the cost of textbooks, and are aware that they are making purchasing decisions for their students.
Working in academia, I know that professors DO care about the cost of textbooks. But there’s an industry pushing and pulling on availability of texts, right up to the sales counter.
With topics like calculus, WHY hasn’t some wonderful classic risen to the top, been tweaked and perfected as a pedagogical tool, and put out as a $10 Dover books edition?
My dad wrote several textbooks in his career. They sold like wildfire in his field (we’re not talking Harry Potter here, and the royalties probably added up to, oh, half a car all told. And he didn’t buy expensive cars.
You’ve made an interesting post here, Dave. I’m another academic who, in this case, teaches engineering. My students are saddled with some pretty high textbook costs too. Even though I teach engineering, the material I teach doesn’t change rapidly. I deal mostly with fundamentals, and those just don’t change.
As it turns out, I’ve been thinking about textbooks a lot lately. This is mostly a response to my observation that there aren’t many good texts in my field. There are several textbooks that are decent, but most of them try to do too much and so much of the material goes unused, at least in my classes.
I’m concerned about the cost of books, but there isn’t much I can do about it, except mention that the older edition will work (half.com is a boon sometimes) for students on a tight budget. There are things I’d like to see changed about the book industry. We’ll see what happens over the next decade or so.
I think the potential distribution system of the internet may effect some changes. I’ve been considering producing one or more texts of my own, retaining the rights to that material, and selling it in PDF form over the ‘net. The trick will be bringing the right people on board to help me in the production. I want to produce a professional product with high quality illustrations and good editing. The end-user could have the PDF printed and bound locally if so desired.
And now look what you’ve gone and done… I’ll have to write this up on my own weblog and ruminate about it for awhile… Argh! 😉
On this very topic, a friend of mine recently suggested an alternate model of textbook purchasing to me. Simplifying, he suggested that profs buy a bunch of textbooks and rent them to students at very low rates until the costs are recouped, then just loan the books to students for free using a cash deposit to ensure that the prof gets the books back in good shape.
This would lower the cost to the students and puts the prof in charge of when to change from one edition to the next. The publishers won’t like this since it cuts into their sales, but it seems to me that they are driving costs up unconscionably, so I’m not too concerned about cutting into their profits. This also seems ecologically sound since it seems to put fewer textbooks into the waste stream. Managing all this would be another burden for the prof to take on, but if the number of students involved is small, it might not be too great of a burden.
For that matter, there’s no reason why a school itself couldn’t buy a sufficient supply of books, with the same idea. A college would be in a better position to deal with the financial side of things than an individual prof.