Everyone in academia knows it: textbook publishers abuse the system. Jim Fiore decries the high cost of college textbooks, and I have to agree completely. Basic textbooks at the lower undergraduate levels do not need a new edition every year or two, not even in rapidly changing fields like biology.
Churning editions is just a way for the publisher to suck more money out of a captive audience. It makes it difficult for students to sell off their used textbooks, it gives faculty the headache of having to constantly update their assignments, and if you allow your students to use older editions, it means we have to maintain multiple assignments. It’s extraordinarily annoying, and to no good purpose at the university (to great purpose at the publisher, though).
Right now, I do tell my students that I allow them to use the current or the past two editions. I also tell them where they can pick up copies online, and I even encourage them to get them used. I am doing my best to subvert the publisher’s evil schemes.
On the plus side of their ledgers, though, I also urge the students to keep their textbooks once the course is over. These are valuable reference books that they may well find handy throughout their college careers and in their life afterwards. I’ve never quite understood the rush to dispose of those books the instant the semester ends — I kept my undergraduate biology and chemistry books until they fell apart (another gripe: the increasingly cheap bindings of these books), and I still have several of my old history texts on my shelves.
I know I regret selling a lot of my undergrad physics books – wound up replacing them later and use them everyday to remind me of stuff not in my field, or just because they are fun to look through.
Is there a good, cheaper alternative to college textbooks that people, like myself, who are out of college but would like to improve our understanding of the sciences (Bio, Chem, Ecology, Geology, Physics, etc.) could pick up? My local library has the new Science 101 series by the Smithsonian, but those books use two pages maximum to cover most topics (and about 1/3 of each page is graphics and illustrations). The only other books my libraries has are 20+ years old… I suppose for some things that is okay, but when the physics books talk about the ‘new’ space shuttle that NASA is currently testing, I’m thinking there is going to be a lot of material that is horribly outdated.
I got smart about selling back books, using Half.com instead of getting ripped off by the U. bookstore. (More profit for me, lower prices for students–win-win.) That said, I wish I could’ve kept all of them. Alas, poverty.
As a historian of the mathematical sciences (mostly Renaissance) I try at least to have a basic understanding of the history of other sciences and other periods, so when you recommended it I acquired a copy of Moore’s Science as a way of Knowing (thank you for the tip). I found a used copy in the web for less than two dollars. My best find to date was an Anthony Aveni Conversing with the Planets for 67 cents plus postage! It always pays to shop around.
This is one of the reasons I have a tendency to use monographs rather than textbooks. I’ve become quite skilled at using those books and tying them to theoretical issues in my lectures/class discussions. Of course, that only works for certain classes. (Then again, I never get assigned to teach intro, which might alter my decision). But, it does make it easier to keep costs a bit lower (even if assigning more books) because it’s much easier to get used books.
Get the math teachers to teach calculus the way R. L. Moore did, and the students can miss paying for that text entirely:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moore_method
Basic textbooks at the lower undergraduate levels do not need a new edition every year or two, not even in rapidly changing fields like biology.
Now imagine how we math teachers feel about getting new texts every four years or so.
I think a lot of professors are sensitive to the high price of books. I’ve had some who haven’t used any book (including in one case his own book, which the publisher had just bumped the price of) in the class for this very reason.
also: a lot of classes with no book, but a website with assignments and links to explanations online. Of course this is a lot of work for the professor.
Would they have counted as history books when you bought them?
Bob
Completely OT.
Why did This flower remind me of you?
Because it is so beautiful?
Bah. Exploit Fair Use as it was meant to be used. You can violate copyright for instructional purposes, so buy one book and photocopy that sucker! Sell it off to the kids for a dollar or two (enough to cover the cost of paper and toner) and let that be that.
Speaking of high costs of textbooks…When I was taking my Security Systems Technician program in college, we had to purchase a text book for a ungodly sum of $600.
This text was special ordered from the publisher by the instructor and we were threatened that if we didn’t buy it that there would be academic penalties associated with that action. Ethics of that aside, he ended up having to take the year off for medical reasons two weeks in the the first term.
Long story short, we never touched that book in any of the classes for the rest of the program. Most of the content did not relate to the program and even the program coordinator thought it was a bad choice.
Worst part, we couldn’t sell them as used because there was no market for them in the college.
Now imagine how we math teachers feel about getting new texts every four years or so.
Same with Accounting 101 & 102… The basics of modern accounting in form and presentation haven’t changed significantly since the 1930’s. There have been supplemental pronouncements, mostly introduced in the 1950’s, since then. But that’s all Intermediate and Advanced anyway, dealing with things like pensions, intangible assets, etc. in a much more in-depth manner.
Or scan it and make it available electronically. Especially useful when excellent books are no longer in print.
I can sympathize with the burden this places on the students, having been one myself, but I can also sympathize with the textbook publishers, being currently employed by a company that assists textbook publishers with the publishing process.
As anyone in these fields knows, it isn’t easy or cheap to get a lot of these technical books published. You’ve got to get someone to write it, then send it out to qualified experts in countless fields to check it, then get the permissions for the art, then check everything again and again and again, ranging from consistency to fact checks–it’s a long, arduous process that eats up a lot of time and resources. (Thankfully, I’m doing my part in keeping these prices low by working as a publishing assistant for a mere pittance. You all can thank me later!)
With regular books, you can publish them and people will hopefully buy them–and you generally don’t have to worry about people reselling them. If anyone wants it, they usually buy new, for the most part.
In the textbook industry, though, the reselling issue is huge–most students flock to resell their books, and most students will choose the used book over a new one if it’s in the store. That’s a serious drain on profits. So even though the publisher can have a reasonable estimate for how much they will sell initially, and there is little guesswork–with reselling it becomes painfully clear that there’s not much room for profit beyond that initial release, unless you release newer editions.
Peronally, I think the optimal solution is to do what biology has done with organisms like the fruit fly–make their lifespan incredibly short, forcing “new” replacements. The publishers should just design textbooks to last a semester, and then the glue in the binding starts coming off and the pages crumble to dust. That takes care of the reselling issue nicely.
Ah, the wonders of capitalism–encouraging companies to produce shoddy products!
I had a speech prof who had his own text whipped up in the campus print shop (had to be purchased there, too) and was very reasonably priced. He also used one h/c text that had to be pretty old, as there were very few pristine copies in the campus bookstore and I’m one of those eager beaver students who has all my books the week before classes start.
{OT}That is a nifty flower!
Can we nickname it “land octopus flower” to begin counterbalancing all the ocean life burdened with “sea”-whatever names? {/OT}
Xanthir, is that right? I can copy anything I want and give it to my students? That would sure change the way I operate in my class. I’m sorry to admit I have no knowledge of fair use rules. Somebody elucidate!
Archaeopteryx,
Making copies of 100% of a work that hasn’t entered the public domain, is not ‘fair use’, even in an academic setting. Partial copies are okay (not sure what the maximum percentage is off hand), but cover to cover copies are not… Of course if you place a copy of book on reserve at the library and tell the students to read the whole thing, they will photocopy the whole thing themselves, but you can’t/shouldn’t distribute something like that through official channels (yourself/library e-reserve, actually the library would most likely refuse to do so).
The way Congress and SCOTUS are operating, nothing will ever enter the public domain again.
My favorite textbooks are for English survey courses. Literally everything is in the public domain and yet we are still expected to buy expensive anthologies.
I’ve often found that, in university, I’ve almost never needed a textbook, and have been well-served by buying many different used, older editions to allow me a heterogenous and deep reference library for topics being studied.
The only problem that’s arisen is in classes where a professor hews to the textbook chapter-by-chapter, example-by-example, such as in my Biology 102 and Physics 101 classes (the latter, you’d think, would be entirely independent of texts – but his exams were quite dependent.)
Even so, after having spent $200-$500 a semester on books, I just started downloading illegally scanned versions and using Open CourseWare. Between the two I’ve not had to buy anything else, save only for specific literature classes wherein the professor wishes us to have a particular translation or set of annotations.
Hey, without the money from the textbook sell-backs how are we going to afford NEXT year’s textbooks?
Probably because several hundred dollars per semester is a substantial amount of money to most undergrads.
If you are a student who had to use the latest edition of a book for a class, I recommend selling that one at the end of the semester and buying the previous edition to keep – there’s often a difference of $100 or more.
Yeah. Like my $90 (in 1976!!) Organic Chemistry text that later found a new niche as a replacement for a leg of my sofa.
Right you are Engles. Like most historians, I’m a staunch defender of fair use, but a 100% copy will get you a “cease and desist” from a publisher faster than you can spit (and yes, the library will refuse to blatantly violate copyright, since they’d be liable too.) And don’t even think of trying to scan it instead and put it online, since that’s even more likely to get you the above reaction. The DMCA is a pain for more than the Rational Response Squad.
That said, there are ways around textbook costs for students if you work at it and have a cooperative library (and good librarians.) The most obvious is electronic texts purchased by the library (or dual book/ebook purchases such as can now be made from Oxford UP and Cambridge UP.) A good university library system can then serve these to your students as electronic reserves at no cost to them and only the cost of the purchase to the school. Unfortunately, this is still largely confined to monographs, though there are a few textbooks available this way (I don’t know of any in biology or the other sciences, but I haven’t looked either.) I often use them this way for upper division classes where we only use monographs, and I’ve even been know to copy the files (they’re .pdf’s) onto CDs and distribute them to the class that way, along with a lot of other content. It keeps down the cost and avoids the problems of traditional reserve books.
The other obvious solution is for professors to opt out of the whole process on textbooks and start writing them specifically for the public domain using a Creative Commons licence. There are already moves in this direction in history, and we should be encouraging them in every field.
(/lurk)
As is typical in grad programmes in the humanities, my professors prefer to have the local copy shop put together a course pack, or put readings on electronic reserve through the library, than require students to buy an expensive anthology. The course packs, in the past, have been extremely reasonable — on the order of $1 for every 10 pages, or $25 for a typical 250 page pack.
That changed this AY, when the university decided that (a) EVERYTHING in a course pack had to be cleared through an independent (and for-profit) copyright clearinghouse, and (b) all course packs had to be sold through the `university bookstore’ — which was of course sold to the Follett Corporation two years ago — rather than directly out of the various copy shops on campus that actually produce them. The bookstore therefore cheerfully imposes a 30% markup on students for the privilege of the inconvenient walk to the building on the far end of campus that houses the bookstore.
As a result, the course pack for my Science and Social Values seminar this term, containing less than two dozen articles and composed of just over 200 pages, cost me $67.
(lurk)
Especially silly when students should place more emphasis on the original peer-reviewed sources. Couldn’t the publishers, or someone, reproduce textbook material, or at least outlines of the material, online?
I had a lecturer who simply copied chunks of material from textbooks, new and old, anyway, and incorporated them into his class-issued ringbinded booklets.
That is exactly why I tried to sell my books back every semester (except when I knew I’d need the book again, Russian History and Soviet History using the same main textbook, for example). Far too often I wasn’t successful. My freshman year I pre-ordered used books, the bookstore selected them for me and I just had to pick up a pre-packed box. However, these used books THEY selected for me, were damaged and when I tried to sell them again, in the same condition they were in when I got them, they wouldn’t buy them back. When I took a physics course, we used two books, one was $150 and one was $30, they bought back the $30 book, but wouldn’t take the $150 one because it “wasn’t going to be used next term”. Next term rolls around and the $150 book is the one being used (forcing all the students to buy new copies of the same edition we had just tried to sell back, or buy from us directly if we still had the book) and the $30 book wasn’t used at all.
I hear ya man. I am teaching an intro to zoology course, part of a 4-course intro biology sequence. We use a single text for all 4 courses. So the students bought one edition (let’s call it the 7th) for the first course in the sequence, and so I made it the oficial text of my course. Problem is, I have a lot of transfer students who don’t have the 7th and now they can’t get it at the bookstore, which stocks only the 8th. Two sets of reading assignments is the least of my problems–the phylogeny of protostomes is TOTALLY DIFFERENT, so whenever I show a slide from the 7th ed. I then have to put up the corresponding, different slide from the 8th. I’m trying to make it a teaching moment–science marches on, phylogenies are hypotheses, etc., but it’s really cramping my style.
I kept all my college texts too, and there’s 2 sides to that coin. On the one hand, I figured there must have been SOME reason they made me suffer through a whole year of organic, so I kept the book; have never even glanced at it. On the other hand, I treasure my first edition of Suzuki’s genetics text–it’s got flipbook movies of meiosis and translation in the margins! What a great idea, now abandoned.
The new scam at our bookstore is “Custom Editions.” This term, three out of four of my classes required them. These are versions of the texts modified so slightly as to raise the price (my texts averaged $120) and embolden the campus monopoly. You can’t get them used and they won’t buy them back, because they’re only used for one term (mostly).
The “custom features” are ridiculous. One just has the solutions manual (which was formerly optional) bound with the text. The two others just have examples and exercises which include the names of local businesses and landmarks. This is institutional tenacity at its worst.
You are so right. For the Anatomy and Physiology class all I think the do is put the couple on the cover in a different gymnastic pose lol.
My original copy of Thomas’s calculus text set me back only $12.50 in junior college in 1969. The current edition of Thomas lists for around $150. That ain’t all inflation.
A lot of textbooks today (at least in math) are now huge packages that include a plethora of ancillaries: CD-ROMs or DVDs, on-line support, test banks, solutions manuals, computer project manuals. I ignore most of that stuff, being old school enough to be satisfied with decent explanations (too rare!) in the text to supplement my own classroom presentations and an ample supply (more common) of exercises to give my students enough practice on the basics. But my students are still paying the costs of developing the ancillaries because that’s built into the pricing.
My dept makes a habit of placing copies of each textbook on reserve in the library for on-campus use and in the tutoring center for use during study sessions. Some of our students can manage by referring to those texts, although they have to buddy up with fellow students during class because they don’t have books of their own to use (and I wouldn’t adopt a book unless I found it useful in class).
The biggest problem is with developmental math courses, where a one-semester algebra book costs more than $100. Older editions are difficult to keep in use because page and exercise numbers get changed just enough to mess up homework and reading lists. It’s a pain.
The problem is less with calculus books, as overpriced as they are, because they are typically used for multiple semesters. They may be fat and expensive suckers, but a three-semester text for $150 is a steal compared to a one-semester text for $100.
By the way, don’t expect a successful revolution against textbooks and their high prices. My dept, for example, despite its mitigating effort with library reserve copies, is firmly wedded to traditional textbook adoption. We have lots of adjunct instructors teaching courses as well as junior faculty fresh out of grad school. Officially adopted textbooks and syllabi give structure and uniformity to the courses that can be maintained across a large dept like ours and would be astonishingly difficult to give up. Not going to happen. We’re reduced to nibbling about the edges of the problem and negotiating discount pricing for our students on large adoptions (which, as we are a big school, is one of few bargaining chips).
the development of textbook compilations and pricing schemes seems to me like watching a mirror image of how the health care industry pricing schemes have developed.
somewhere along the line, we as a country have apparently completely abandoned the idea of sustainability as a concept, in economics as in other areas.
I wonder what’s going to happen when it costs the average college student over 100K in loans to make it through four years.
I remember doing my undergrad work in the 80’s, and my grad work in the late 80’s/early 90’s, the vast difference in costs even between those two periods of time, both spent at univesities within the UC system.
now, it would cost me almost 3 times what it did then, and of course a significant part of that is textbook costs.
*shakes head*
maybe we will end up outsourcing our own universities?
:p
SIUE, Southern Illinois University at Edwardsville, has a textbook rental system which makes a substantial saving for the student. Check out the website.
My college education was four decades ago. I did get lucky in that a merit scholarship paid my tuition. The rest I earned myself working part time during school and full time summers as a laborer doing hot, hard, heavy, and high jobs. (Danger and pain pay well.) Most all of my textbooks came from used-book exchanges, where you’d buy a $20 book used for $10 and then sell it back for $5. Also, back then, student loan programs were reasonable.
Nowadays the lending business is predatory at the hungry hyena level, and I suspect one of the drivers behind the insane cost of books is that the sellers (and authors) know that students who can’t afford those prices now can always go deeper into debt and pay away that debt for much, or all, of the rest of their lives. Consider that the publishing business in the last 40 years have made it a race to the bottom on corner-cutting, so they are at their greatest efficiency ever, and thus are producing books the most cost-effectively ever. This maximizes the profit based on what the market can bear.
Paradoxically, to bring the prices of tuition, housing, and books back to fair prices would require outlawing student loans. A textbook market that cannot bear debt would see the profits narrow and the costs come down.
DING! DING! DING!
The transformation of higher education from grant-based to loan-based has screwed students at every level, and hard. But it’s made bankers money, so that’s all that really matters.
The others who have responded to my comment are correct. 100% copying of a copyrighted text is, indeed, illegal under copyright law. But seriously, how often are you using the entire book? In most of my classes, only about a third of the chapters in a book are actually used. Of those, not even the entire chapter is usually necessary.
That should fall within the % allowed by legal precedent. Seriously, don’t be afraid of copyright law. Go crazy with it. Your students deserve the education, even if authors *do* get 90+ years of protection under copyright.
We never used textbooks at Imperial College, London. The professors wrote their own courses.
If you don’t like textbooks, then use teh internets.
We used custom textbooks where I was a grad student, and they were actually cheaper for the students because they cut out all of the chapters that weren’t used. In an intro course where the texbook is 30-some-odd chapters and you only use about 15 of them, that can be a substantial savings.
For me, I make the textbook optional and then put the previous edition on two-hour reserve in the library. Haven’t had any complaints.
Oops, screw up the blockquote tag… My last post should have looked like this:
90+ years of protection thanks to the efforts of the Walt Disney Company… You know, the fine folk who make animated movies based on public domain fairy tales. :(
I was always a fan of just waiting until I absolutely needed a book, buying it new, and returning it a week later. Then again, I take cramming to the extreme sometimes, and have been known to stuff an entire course into my brain over a period of two weeks. Obviously, this won’t work for everyone, or for every course.
I’ve also had more than a couple profs who definitely took advantage of legal copying. I know things work differently in the US, but I have at least two or three nicely bound texts that were reproduced by my university in full (legally) under CANCOPY, and many more packages of photocopied chapters and excerpts.
#2″Is there a good, cheaper alternative to college textbooks that people, like myself, who are out of college but would like to improve our understanding of the sciences (Bio, Chem, Ecology, Geology, Physics, etc.”
If you are looking for not very advanced stuff (layman, first year college level) check out the Teaching Company (teach12.com) they have excellent courses very reasonably priced when on sale – they keep rotating the sale items so you do get a chance to get nearly everything at sale price.
Text book prices
It seems to me the way to get rid of huge textbook prices is to bypass the publishers. Have good writers do this stuff online and have students pay a modest fee for download rights. The texts can easily be kept up do date without major expences.
It would take a number of profs getting together to use the same material so you had say 500-1000 users they each pay $10-$20. If they had the prospect of keeping the material up do date and so the next years lot bought in this could be a very nice income over the years.
The big problem from an economic perspective is that the professors choose the books, but they don’t pay for them. I’m not saying that they professors *shouldn’t* choose the books any more than they should pay for them, but it means there’s no incentive for publishers to compete on price.
What we really need is an open source / copyleft solution. What if some philanthropic organization started to offer grants to professors to write open source textbooks?
O.K. I’ll wade into this mess. The ranting about textbooks–rather about costs or as pedgogical impediments seems to be a big crowd pleaser. I used to be part of the mob crying for the abandonment of books and decrying their costs. However, I’ve joined the industry (I know for some I’ve sold out) because it occurred to me that there must be something to the data that text book companies compile as they introduce new products. Their business livlihood is dependent upon an accurate appraisal of their product’s viability. There’s much to be learned about the education system of this country.
Look, can you imagine any biology text book publisher coming to your campus with the storyline, “We’ve decided that our 4th edition (published only 12 short years ago) is the all time best answer to covering introductory biology for majors. For this reason you have the choice and only this choice to go with a classic–our flagship product, tried and proven”. How many books will your faculty buy? Imagine for a moment how nice it would be as a publisher if you could just sell your inventory and not go through the incredibly laborious and costly process to recreate it every 2-4 years.
Over the past 10 years I have talked to 100’s if not 1000’s of biology instructors from high school to grad school trying to figure out just what they would like to see in their ‘perfect’ text or teaching resource. I really enjoy this because so many folks have such wonderful ideas and I really like trying to make those ideas become a reality for them. However, I have yet to talk to one that didn’t want the very latest edition, the latest updates and the latest media.
I agree that texts are sky rocketing in costs and the students pay the price but take a look in the mirror. We are all part of the system. Books are successful because folks like yourselves find them useful. They are published by publishers that must respond accurately–let me repeat accurately to the market in order to stay in business. I have been working hard over the years to conceptualize and create non-text based products but believe it or not the market still seems to be a little reticent to buy into this kind of idea–but things may be changing. I hope so.
Publishing is a very cut throat business with few big successes and many casualties. A market economy filters products in a manner very similar to way natural selection filters adaptations–you don’t often get the best solution, you just get the solution that works within the historic and economic context. If you truly wish to break the text book cycle, then become part of the solution. Develop and create your own materials–it is easier today than ever and then let your publishers know. They are always looking for new talent and believe it or not new ideas–anything to stay just a bit ahead and stay in business.
BW
This is just as true in the UK. When I did my first degree I had a list of books to buy and read each week and rarely did I need more than a chapter or two from each one, and often they were needed for one tutorial of discussion and not for any exam, and sometimes not needed at all.
I remember one psychology lecturer actually saying that the book we needed (he was one of the authors) was now sold out on campus but still in Waterstones book shop down in the town, and he would happily sign a copy for us should we go and buy it. I didn’t buy it. It was entirely unnecessary for our first year needs.
I’ve just started a Law degree and have a list of books as long as my arm that are supposedly “core” and necessary, and some of them come out next month so I can’t even scour eBay for cheap versions (although, truth be told, this has actually worked for some of the texts – I emailed ahead and got the reading lists before everyone else and got some £36 books at £5 – yipee!).
The worst miscreants of this system are Poli-Sci professors. Here in my CSU commuter school we have a gas bag professor who requires that students buy *his* text(s) on the California political system. Thin, poorly written, and next to useless this pedant “updates” it every year and assigns essays out of it every semester. Furthermore this bastard teaches required freshman classes and so intimidates and exploits the weakest of the student population. You would think one of the few tenured prof’s would want to spend more time with upper class students and graduates, but every one of them avoid him like the plague.
When I TA an Art History class, I assign readings from JSTOR. It accomplishes two things, no/low cost class and exposes the students to research using journals.
A response to #47: Did you know the “international edition” of certain textbooks is often cheaper (I had one that was 50% cheaper) than the American edition. That international edition was – you guessed it – published in the UK.
Oh and one of the most expensive books I had to buy was ironically, for a class in ethics. At least we used it every class session.
Here an answer for #2, a layman looking for textbooks. One benefit of the current system is how cheap fairly up-to-date textbooks are. In biology, textbooks 2 editions back (7-8 years old) cost less than $5. And at the online used book dealers every textbook is available. Go back one edition and a book sells for a quarter of the price of the current edition.
A free resource (for biology) is the PubMed bookshelf:
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/sites/entrez?db=Books&itool=toolbar
though if you have a real interest in a topic it is worth getting a textbook.
“I also urge the students to keep their textbooks once the course is over. These are valuable reference books that they may well find handy throughout their college careers and in their life afterwards.”
If nothing else, they make great door stops.
Perhaps other colleges have done the same, but this year at the University of Oklahoma, the Library has purchased multiple copies of textbooks for many undergraduate courses so students can use them there and avoid the increasing costs.
To be sure, they will not have the books to keep for the future and can not make marginal notes,etc., but for students who just can not afford the outrageous prices, it is a real help. Perhaps this is something that all colleges should consider.
We had a psych prof at my school who put together his own little statistics primer (not necessarily a bad thing) and required his students to buy it directly from him (a very bad thing). There was a bit of a dust-up as colleagues and administrators told him he had a transparent conflict of interest. (If he had produced the primer through the campus duplicating office and sold it through the bookstore for the copying cost to the school, it would have been okay. Selling it out of his office, however, was seriously uncool.)
Side note: I heard about the psych prof’s little business when the math dept was asked if his stats course was “equivalent” to our stats course (that is, transferable to the Cal State University and University of California. The psych prof refused to let us see his text. We eventually got a copy from a student and discovered it was a pretty dreadful thing to be charging money for (let alone making it a required text and making them buy it).
By contrast, I know a UC math professor whose dept adopted his textbook for a big course with lots of sections. Whenever he taught one of the sections, he began the first class session by giving every student with the textbook a dollar by way of returning his royalty to them. That was many years ago, as you can tell from the amount of money involved.
Paradoxically, to bring the prices of tuition, housing, and books back to fair prices would require outlawing student loans. A textbook market that cannot bear debt would see the profits narrow and the costs come down.
that’s an interesting thought, but on examination sounds a bit extreme.
what if we did a similar thing and outlawed medical insurance?
would that end up breaking the endless cycle of exponentially increasing medical costs?
probably. not quite sure whether even the temporary downside to that would be worth it though.
still, it’s worth thinking about just from a theoretical cost/benefit analysis.
What with my daughter going off to college in a couple of years, it’s heartening to me that more and more professors are starting to take notice of the textbook industry scam and its effect on students.
When I was teaching undergrad genetics back in the day, I DID develop my own lecture notes- which I distributed at no cost to the students. At no time then or now would I ever be interested in letting bloodsuckers like your employer get their hands on it so they could rip off my students. Indeed, you have sold out. If you can nonetheless live with yourself- well, bully for you.
K Engels (#2),
I recommend looking into Dover reprints. They are fairly cheap (between $10 and $25 USD) and very informative. They span not only science but philosophy and literature as well.
Dover is probably my favorite publisher because of their reprints. Granted, the texts are circa 1950 to 1980 editions, but they are classics in their respective fields (for example, Fermi’s thermodynamics or Schrodinger’s stat mech book).
Saint Gasoline wrote (#16):
This is exactly what happened to my new copy of Thornton’s and Rex’s Modern Physics. Screw your method; I actually liked that book.
;-P
A point of clarification….
I’m not an employee for any publishing company. I work as an author or on a consultant basis. Most of the work I do is actually “given” away as part of the product’s sales. I didn’t get into the business to make money–and I’ve been successful achieving that ;-) So, if I sold out I did so for bargain basement prices.
I did get into the business because I eventually saw that through publishing I might be able to accomplish some of the science education reform goals that I had tried for years to accomplish through normal academic channels. One good hit in the publishing industry reaches more folks than any of the academic reforms I’ve been a part of. It was like a ‘duh’ moment when I finally allowed myself to admit to this rather obvious fact. Now, I am really excited about the development in web-based communication, web publishing (for example this blog), creative commons licenses, open source software, publishing etc. There seems to be a sea change in the works but for now U.S. policy makers and apparently many profs prefer to pay for products–maybe so they can have someone to hold accountable. The U.S. educational systems remain a market driven economy.
If we can step back from individual examples and look at the entire system we can see that there apparently is a perceived need for these products. Correct me if I am wrong but with the exception of pre-college education I am not aware of any institution requiring a prof to assign a book. If so it must be rare, on the other hand I seldom see courses without texts and resources of some sort. Why is that? Publishers products, inadequate though they are must be doing something right or folks wouldn’t keep buying them.
BW
Certainly I can agree that lazy faculty members using overblown, overillustrated, overpriced textbooks and associated materials (like canned exam questions) as a crutch are a big part of the problem. But the pricing and the unnecessary churning of editions are still scandalous.
I learned about this the hard way just last week. My son needed a business law textbook which was in its 20th edition and sold for $190 at the school bookstore. Last year’s 19th edition is available for $35 or $40 online. The teacher did tell the class that they could use the 19th edition, although they might be at a slight disadvantage in the class. Who wants their child to be at a disadvantage? We got him the 20th edition.
My favorite activity prior to the start of the semester is to look at the text lists and begin “poaching” the books of interest (eg. buying books for classes not enrolled in). I buy the best-conditioned used version I can find, and I am often successful. I’ve only sold one book back, and it was an anthology that I should have never have invested in. I found all the works and much more online, and I have those saved on my computer for good reading.
Prices are ridiculous, though. I think I’ve spent a total of $3,000 on texts for my classes (this does not include the texts I poach for pennies to the dollar). There have been many a month when Raman was my diet to make ends meet.
PZ: Learn book binding. It’s a rather easy hobby to pick up and quite fun when you can start binding your own stuff. That way when a good old book falls apart, you can just rebind it to a new and better cover.
Saint Gasoline: I wouldn’t mind teh cost of buying a text book of the majority of them explained the topic in a decent manner. But let me use an example as to why people hate the textbook market:
This year I had to buy a book for Engineering Economics. It is called “Capital Expenditures in Economics for Managers and Engineers.” It cost me $212 for a new copy. Used copies were no where to be seen. Now, 212 is fine by me for a text book I plan to keep.
However, this book wasn’t even bound properly for a $200+ dollar book. It was a soft cover. On top of that, the binding was standard trade paperback binding. For $212 I better get a god damn library quality edition. On top of that, it does a poor job of explaining the topic. For instance, it says in one part that “You must remember to use N and not n in this equation.”… WITHOUT EVER EXPLAINING WHAT THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN ‘N’ AND ‘n’ ARE.
So now, in addition to that $212 book, I am going to have to buy a $20-$30 book on top of that just to explain the pieces the really expensive oh so important text-book left out.
THAT is why we students hate text books. When they are good, they are really good, but most are over priced, under quality, pieces of crap that can’t explain the topic in a manner consistent with the level of the class it is to be used in and use crappy binding to boot. And then they force new editions on us every 3 or 4 days so we can’t find a used copy when in reality the only damn thing they change is to add colors or split a section into two sections.
Hark, what’s that I hear? Faintly, in the distance? Could it be the sound of the world’s tiniest violin?
Saint Gasoline, after hearing how much trouble it is for the poor, poor publishers (who, after all, could go into some other line of work) to produce a textbook, I really have to wonder why they wouldn’t want to make all that work last a few years. As for all of us readers out here who buy books (of which I am, lamentably, an example), many of us buy used books, and many more just check books out of the library. Where I live (college town), there are several very good used book stores. Almost the only people who buy new books are the poor students being forced to purchase the latest edition. And I’m so glad I’m not one of them, or I’d never be able to afford food.
I taught college for seven years, and I resolved this problem simply by REQUIRING a previous (“outdated”) edition. That way, I could maintain one set of assignments for all students, my current students could buy used books, and my previous students could sell theirs back to the bookstore (because there was an order for them for my class). The loss in “improvement” of the book was negligible or nonexistent.
One semester, I proposed a plan under which I would buy all of the used books from the previous students and sell them at the same price to the new students. I wouldn’t make any money, but would simply act as a middleman between two groups of students who needed to find each other but had no real way to do so. The administration vetoed my idea under a policy that prohibited selling books anywhere on campus other than the bookstore, and by anyone other than the bookstore.
Everybody won under my approach except the “authors” of the “new” editions, which is okay because the new editions generally serve no purpose other than to enrich their twenty-two co-authors, all of whom agree to require their students to buy the book.
Besides, in political science and Constitutional Law, which I taught, new editions tend to place far too much emphasis on current events, simply because they are new and thus represent an “update.”
And on a personal front, I sold, gave away, or donated ALL of my law school books after I graduated (except my citation guide). Haven’t missed or needed any of them in practice, but then, law school bears no resemblance to law practice.
And to complete the picture, I should add that I figured out the lack of connection between law school learning and law school books early on. (After all, the cases are on-line and don’t need to be read in any event.) Thus, in my last two years of law school, I bought a total of three books (all of which I regretted buying after the class got underway). My advice to incoming students who simply want to get their degree and get a job (as opposed to clerking, being a judge, etc.): “Don’t buy books, don’t go to class, don’t study.”
Worked for me. I graduated from a Top Ten law school with a decent GPA and got a job with a Top Ten law firm in my choice of city.
And I read a lot of good books and saw a lot of good movies during law school, in addition to traveling to Vegas twice a month to make a living at blackjack. Law school was so much fun!
I’ll first state that I’ve read just a few of the comments on this topic, so I might be inadvertently repeating some sentiments.
I never rid myself of a single textbook when I was an undergraduate (1971-75). I wouldn’t even have considered doing so. I know many current and former students who feel the same way (and act upon it by keeping their growing personal academic libraries), in spite of the now-compelling financial considerations. Hope springs eternal, and often makes itself concrete.
I’m also bothered by the extraordinarily high prices that are now charged for textbooks for routine college courses, along with the incessant stream of new editions. I’m becoming less and less comfortable with telling my students that they need the new edition rather than the one that came out a couple of years ago.
I do now possess the object to which PZ referred to as a “book” in a post a while back – The Deep. A most worthwhile object to possess – were I to have my life to live over, I might become a deep ocean biologist (or a botanist or a poet or a historian or…).
Oh, well – I’ll just have to make do with what I have, which is pretty much ok.
A wonderful music-history professor of mine did a simple but very helpful thing – in her syllabus, where she listed all the reading and listening assignments, she gave page numbers for both the new and old versions of the text (yes, even music history changes from year to year, or so they’d have us believe) and track numbers for the old and new anthology CDs. She also gave out photocopies of the very few additions that weren’t in the old books. And as most professors do, she made sure several library copies were reserved for our class.
It takes no extra effort for a professor to give out the old page numbers along with the new ones, because she already has them handy anyway, and it’s not that much work for a TA to photocopy a few selected pages a hundredfold. It’s just not something most professors think to do.
I went to CMSU (Central Missouri State Univ., now known as UCM) in the early nineties and they offered rentals for nearly every class. It cost just under $14 per book per semester. If you decided to buy the book you could have the rental price applied to the purchase cost. That was a great program and saved me a lot of money, especially considering back then we didn’t have the online resources available to students today.
Considering the costs some of my friends have told me for their books, I can’t help but wonder how many hundreds or perhaps thousands of dollars I saved during my four years there.
I’ve often wondered why profs don’t get together and simply agree to commit to an edition for X number of years. They could then communicate this to the book publisher: “We have decided we will continue to use the 3rd edition for the next 5 years.”
National and international organizations exist that gather profs together to hammer out consensus on things like technical standards, curricula, etc. Reviewing and agreeing on the lifetime of a textbook edition seems like pretty small potatoes in comparison.
So far, only comment #64:
has touched on this.
Several of my professors wrote their own texts. That was nice.
Actually, that is what we do here at Appalachian. All major texts are purchased by the university and then rented to the students (the rental fee is in their tuition bill).
Departments are required to reuse the texts for three years, after which they can (if they so choose) to adopt a new one.
The students absolutely love this arrangement, and it does allow us to avoid having to replace our lecture materials from the ground up each year.
It sounds to me like the textbook publishers have over-adapted to their current marketing niche, exploiting the economic weakness of current students and professors. The thing is is, the effects of their exploitation are becoming an increasingly severe problem for not only students, but professors as well.
If any widespread problem gets bad enough, somebody’s likely to try and solve it. The first few solutions may be local and/or temporary, but eventually somebody will roll up their sleeves, and invest whatever resources are needed for a permanent, general solution. At that point, most of the publishers in question will discover that their captive market has escaped them altogether — and given their abusive history, the folks they’re used to dealing with may not want to deal with them.
NJ, the rental approach you describe is certainly cost-effective, but it sends the message to students that textbooks are not the sort of thing people would actually want to own. That’s reasonable for grade school, but much less so for those coming out of, say, intro calculus.
In any event, it is certainly not the common approach at colleges, and I’m still hoping to hear from others. My inner cynic tells me that colleges and publishers are generally in cahoots in trying to separate students from their money. I can’t imagine any other reason why it isn’t the norm that a good calculus or physics or History of W. Civ. text wouldn’t have a 10 or 20 year run. Even if a well written text deals with something like neuroscience, use of supplementary handouts should enable a 5 year run.
So I really see no compelling reason to hold to anything other than a conspiracy theory. The only other candidate theory — gross incompetence — doesn’t quite satisfy me here.
One question that I have always had for the students who sell their textbooks, now be honest, How much of the money that you received for selling your textbooks made it to the following semesters’ textbook purchases? How much of the money went to purchase beer the evening after you sold the books? If the latter more cynical answer is the case, then I do not feel sorry for you because you are getting a short term benefit, but are creating a long term problem. If the former is the case, then you are to be applauded.
In all seriousness, my feeling is that if students held on to their books, textbook prices would come down because the publishers could make back their costs over two to three years as opposed to one year. If we assumed that the cost of production is similar for each edition, but you can amortize the production costs over more years, then costs would come down. I can understand selling books for General Education classes, but to sell books in your major baffles me.
As a professor, I am more sensitive than I used to be about requiring a textbook for a course. I now take advantage of online resources and make the expensive textbooks optional.
I wish more professors would use cureholder’s previous edition requirement. I was shaken down for $160 on a fraking college algebra book my freshman year. That one still makes me mad. I thought, “For Christ’s sake, this information was old in Ben Franklin’s day and you want 160 bucks for it?”
I don’t know how well this works for textbooks (I always used half.com) but if you’re looking for the best price on books in general, check out everybookstore.com / allbookstores.com (same site). You search for a particular book and it will give you a comparison of prices at various online book-sellers.
Enjoy!
Mentally going down my list of textbooks purchased for lower and upper division courses across two majors, I think that the likelihood of a given book being worth keeping was roughly 1/4. Part of that is the fact that general education courses often tend do produce texts that simply aren’t worth owning (Who wants a paperback edition of a random collection of public-domain essays by philosophers?) but part of it is simply the fact that a given book in a given field is highly unlikely to be a “classic” that one can refer to for years to come.
My core bookshelf contents are roughly a 50/50 mix between the books I used in school and books that I bought to replace poorly written textbooks that I used in school. Not every textbook can be a timeless classic, but I have to wonder why so few professors use the classics that already exist when most of their students are reselling their books and then buying the classics for reference after graduation.
The Colombo Public Library, here in Sri Lanka, is loaded with American textbooks, courtesy the Asia Foundation. Maybe some of them are old unused textbooks passed on free to us? After all, all those obsolete editions have to go somewhere.
Multiple regression, the simplex method, the theory of evolution — learned a bunch of stuff off those books.
Cheers.
PZ, you are so far off base on this one.
First of all, consider this. Textbook publishers only make money the first year a book is out. After that, their sales fall precipitiously, and are essentially zero by the third year of an edition. Who makes money? The bookstores! Why should they profit? They buy books for $30, sell them for $90. I would call that pure greed. Thus, the MAJORITY of the profits of any given edition go to bookstores and resellers, with a MINORITY going to the publishers. Now consider who does the work? Surely you know the effort that goes into writing, revising, editing, and publishing a science textbook. Why shouldn’t the publisher make money? They’re the ones doing the real work, and since they make 90% of their profits the first year an edition is out, why not put out an edition every other year. They are a business, after all.
If it wasn’t for the used book market, the price of textbooks would fall 40% overnight. At my (Big-10) university, we have a deal with the publisher. They discount the book by 35-40% to the bookstore, and we try and force the bookstores only to stock new books and require our students to buy new books every year of the cycle by setting up a special package specific to our institution. This experiment has been a success. For example, for a textbook that costs $125 on Amazon.com, we have a package with the book, a molecular model kit, the student solutions manual, and access to publisher quiz and study software. This went to the bookstore for exactly $150. The bookstores charge $210-220 for this package (45% markup). This markup by the bookstores is several times the profit margin for the publisher. Who is ripping who off?
Several years ago with a different book but the same publisher, in response, instead of charging $90 for a used book (about the same price as the new book by itself), the bookstores dropped their price to $60. That, by itself, tells you everything you need to know.
What a scam bookstores are. Imagine doing no work, paying some student to hand over cash for used books, storing them in your basement, and then paying this same (minimum wage) student to sell them for a 150-200% profit.
Now, tell me who “suck[s] more money out of a captive audience”.
The solution to this problem is for publishers to make custom textbooks for each institution. The cost would be less. Either that, or the publishers need to sell directly to the students, bypassing the bookstore, sort of like Amazon.com.
Somehow, I’m not surprised that the defenders of the current inexcusable monopoly on student money are active in the textbook publishing market themselves. Neither the bookstores nor the publishers deserve any sympathy, given that they collude, knowingly or otherwise, to jack up textbook prices. Maybe there are some fast-moving fields like biology where it may really make sense to revise a book every 2 years, but in my field (physics), the basic principles of the core undergraduate curriculum have not changed in decades. Jackson, the electrodynamics bible, has gone through 3 editions in something like 40 years! On the other hand, a worthless text like Kittel’s “Intro to Solid State Physics” has gone through 8, with the pace of revisions increasing through the 90s. Tell you what, if you can’t get a physics text right after 3 editions, you shouldn’t even be in the business.
Most of the information contained in these texts is now available for free online at places like MIT’s OpenCourseWare site and others. Sean Caroll has a great free general relativity book, for example, and there are other similar texts for other fields. The greatest classes I’ve ever had didn’t even use formal textbooks; the professor had his own notes that he made freely available (I still have them) and wrote his own problem sets. I encourage everyone to do whatever they legally can to avoid paying for books; in my opinion, publishers and university bookstores represent a scam of the highest magnitude and anything that negatively impacts their sales can only be a good thing.
#44
Not only that – it takes a certain amount of effort to find out the cost of a textbook. (I’ve chosen the textbook for one of my courses by price, and ended up searching on Amazon to do the comparison. And, yes, I’ve taught some classes using only material on library reserve, or from peer-reviewed articles, but that isn’t always the best way to get the material across.)
I personally find that the extras used to sell intro-level textbooks are rather useless. I don’t want to use canned exam questions. I’ve developed my own teaching methods, thanks, and written my own labs. CDs help somewhat with visualization, but not enough to be worth the cost.
I’ve annoyed a lot of representatives from publishing companies by telling them that their extras didn’t matter, but could they please sell the books at a price that my students could afford. Textbooks aren’t particularly useful if half the class can’t afford to buy them.
It seems, here at Caltech, that less than half of the enrolled students will buy a new copy of the textbook for any given class — even in classes that do use new editions. Most people buy it from another student. Buying the new edition from the bookstore — or for that matter a used one from the bookstore — is mostly done under three conditions: (1) the textbook is a classic and people want to keep it; (2) it’s a class so obscure no-one’s got an extra copy to sell; (3) they’re just plain lazy and don’t mind paying the extra money for it. A student wrote a web utility that pricechecks any given book for those in the third category, since the bookstore does price-matching. It’s a decent system.
It seems, here at Caltech, that less than half of the enrolled students will buy a new copy of the textbook for any given class — even in classes that do use new editions. Most people buy it from another student. Buying the new edition from the bookstore — or for that matter a used one from the bookstore — is mostly done under three conditions: (1) the textbook is a classic and people want to keep it; (2) it’s a class so obscure no-one’s got an extra copy to sell; (3) they’re just plain lazy and don’t mind paying the extra money for it. A student wrote a web utility that pricechecks any given book for those in the third category, since the bookstore does price-matching. It’s a decent system.
I’ve always thought that I was fortunate enough to be able to afford to keep my texts and assigned books. I like going back to things from time to time.
At McGill there are (were?) some professors boycotting the campus bookstore and ordering books from a local store (a block from campus). Turns out to produce a massive savings to the students and also eliminate a lot of incompetence. And it isn’t as if the bookstore on campus isn’t outsourced.
I heard at CMU the bookstore there got a huge plunge in sales when B&N and Amazon etc. took off. Now they are competitive. I may not be a capitalist, but competition was useful here!