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Sunday, July 27, 2008

Not Law - Problem of high college textbook costs continues, students and publishers at odds

The ILB has had several past entries on the high cost of college textbooks. This entry from 2004 talks about "Students Find $100 Textbooks Cost $50, Purchased Overseas." Unfortunately, $100 would now be a real bargain.

This entry from 2007 quotes a textbook author who "explains" that the recent market in used textbooks has driven up the costs for new books:

He does not suggest lower-priced text books. Rather he urges licensing textbooks, as is currently the case with software. The university would collect and pay the licensing fee to the publisher. This would be on top of the cost of the textbook. Incredible.
This long July 10th article by John Hechinger of the WSJ reports:
Publishers are pushing "custom" textbooks designed to be unique for each school.
• The special texts make it harder for students to buy and sell in the used-book market, so they often end up spending more for course materials.
• Schools often receive a royalty payment on each book sold.
Today the NY Times has a story by Randall Stross about students resorting to textbook piracy, using the tools of music piracy. The headline: "First It Was Song Downloads. Now It’s Organic Chemistry." A quote:
More students are choosing used books over new; sales of a new edition plunge as soon as used copies are available, in the semester following introduction; and publishers raise prices and shorten intervals between revisions to try to recoup the loss of revenue — and the demand for used books goes up all the more.

Used book sales return nothing to publishers and authors. Digital publishing, however, offers textbook publishers a way to effectively destroy the secondary market for textbooks: they now can shift the entire business model away from selling objects toward renting access to a site with a time-defined subscription, a different thing entirely.

The transition has already begun, even while publishers continue to sell print editions. They are pitching ancillary services that instructors can require students to purchase, just like textbooks, but which are available only online on a subscription basis. Cengage Learning, the publisher of Professor McMurry’s “Organic Chemistry,” packages the new book with a two-semester “access card” to a Cengage site that provides instructors with canned quizzes and students with interactive tutorials.

Ronald G. Dunn, chief executive of Cengage Learning, says he believes the printed book is not about to disappear, because it presents a large amount of material conveniently. Mr. Dunn predicted that textbook publishers were “headed for a hybrid market: print will do what it does best, and digital will do what it does best.”

Whether students will view online subscriptions as a helpful adjunct to the printed textbook or as a self-aggrandizing ploy by publishers remains to be seen.

See also this July 21st article from Kim Clerk of US News titled "Four Reasons Textbook Costs Will Drop."

Posted by Marcia Oddi on July 27, 2008 09:59 AM
Posted to General News