College of Communication senior Monica DyBuncio needed to buy a textbook for one of her classes. The initial price was around $200 at the Boston University bookstore, but DyBuncio had another plan.
‘I went to www.half.com, the eBay website, and I was able to buy it for $10,’ DyBuncio said.
DyBuncio’s story is becoming much more common as students look for solutions to combat the high cost of class materials.
Textbook prices are rising at four times the rate of inflation, according to Department of Labor statistics, and several studies show that the average college student pays anywhere from $600 to $1,000 a year on textbooks.
Many academics said students can only do so much to beat a system that requires them to spend large sums of money on textbooks.
‘Faculty members or universities clearly have to change their behavior for students to really become better off,’ James V. Koch, president emeritus at Old Dominion University, who has written extensively on the economics of textbooks and testified before Congress on the subject, said.
THE PROBLEM’
Koch said the high price of textbooks is a result of professors deciding to require students to buy books which they are not purchasing themselves.
‘There is lots of evidence that the typical faculty member does not know how much his book costs,’ Koch said. ‘The people who are buying these things are not very sensitive to price changes.’
Bundling, Koch said, is when textbook publishers package supplementary items like CD-ROMs, atlases or other materials along with the main textbook. It is another practice that is driving up the cost of textbooks according to Koch.
‘Faculty members say it drives up learning, and it can be a real positive, but it makes things more expensive,’ Koch said.
Additionally, many textbooks release new editions frequently, which precludes students from saving money by purchasing used books.
One such example is the textbook for the COM course Introduction to Advertising. The eighth edition of ‘Advertising: Principles and Practice,’ which is required for Professor Christopher Cakebread’s CM 317 class in the spring, will cost students $193.75 if they buy it from the BU bookstore.
Cakebread said it is important to have the latest edition of a book for advertising classes.
‘In the sciences, the information you’re getting doesn’t change that much, but our industry changes all the time,’ Cakebread said. ‘The 2009 textbook is already useless,’ in some areas.
Cakebread said he has offered students the chance to buy an electronic copy at half price, but few have taken him up on the offer.
‘I offered for years an electronic copy at half the price, but few students took it up,’ Cakebread said.
FIGHTING FOR CHANGE
In recent years, the price of textbooks and supplemental materials gained the attention of the federal government, partly due to the work of several student advocacy organizations.
One of these groups is the Massachusetts Public Interest Research Group, which has student chapters that are funded and’ directed by students Eileen McGivney, a professional organizer hired by MASSPIRG, said.
In 2008, MASSPIRG and other student interest groups nationwide supported efforts to get affordable textbook legislation passed through Congress, resulting in the affordable textbooks provisions in the Higher Education Opportunity Act.
The act, signed into law by former President George W. Bush, requires textbook publishers to disclose the price of textbooks to faculty and offer textbooks and supplements such as CD-ROMs separate and unbundled. It also urges colleges to give students complete information about required textbooks before class registration.
Judith Schotland, chair of the BU’s Teaching, Learning and Instructional Resources Committee, said the university has informed all professors that they have to comply with the act. Schotland, a clinical associate professor in Sargent College, said professors have also been encouraged to order their textbooks earlier.’
‘If textbooks are going to be reused the next semester, and the bookstore knows in advance, they can buy back the students’ textbooks and resell them,’ Schotland said.
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NEW SOLUTIONS
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Aliza Vaida, the president and founder of BU’s MASSPIRG chapter and a senior in the College of Fine Arts, said there is still more work to be done to reduce textbook prices.
MASSPIRG plans to focus on informing faculty and students about the option of ‘open textbooks’ ‘-‘- free or inexpensive textbooks with an ‘open’ license that are usually available in a variety of formats. Professors can adapt them to fit specific needs.
‘If every student were able to use open textbooks it would make it easier for more people to go to school,’ McGivney said.
One open textbook publisher is Flat World Knowledge, which has the tagline: ‘Remixable textbooks by expert authors, free online and affordable off.’
‘We had worked in traditional college textbook publishing for a long time,’ Eric Frank, the co-founder and chief marketing officer for Flat World Knowledge, said. ‘It was so clear to us that in publishing that no one was happy. Students intensely dislike the industry that they are supporting. Faculty had moved from ambivalent to feeling like they were participants in a market that does not really work anymore. And writers were frustrated that high costs were keeping people away from reading their product.’
Out of this frustration came Flat World Knowledge, which makes its books available in a variety of formats at different prices. Online a book is free, but students can also buy print books in color or black and white for a low price, get a copy for a kindle or an iPhone, get an audiobook version or even buy the book a chapter at a time.
Professors, meanwhile, are able to choose the content that goes into the books, thanks to the books’ Creative Commons licenses. This can mean changing the order of the chapters or deleting some chapters altogether, adding supplementary material, or even changing a sentence.
‘The problem with authors in the traditional industry is that they have to sell their book at a really high price first semester, and every semester after that they see their sales plummet from students selling used copies of their books,’ Frank said. ‘In our model we sell the same book and make less money per student, but we make it from more students more consistently per semester.’
Some, however, question this model. Joyce Macario, an assistant professor of advertising and public relations in COM, looked at the website for Flat World Knowledge, and said she could not imagine publishing through them.
‘It’s hard to go through what it takes to get a book published and then provide it for free,’ Macario said.
Her book, which is a full-color paperback titled ‘Graphic Design Essentials: Skills, Software and Creative Solutions,’ costs around $50 new and is considered relatively inexpensive by students in her class, Macario said. The book is unique, she said, in that it combines design fundamentals with software techniques.
‘It is a better expenditure than getting a mediocre book that is cheaper,’ Macario said.
Schotland said BU has been contacted by different publishers offering to build books from components that professors choose, which would be much less expensive than a full textbook.
‘I think faculty are acutely sensitive to costs,’ she said.
Schotland did not say if professors would be told to pursue cheaper alternatives.’
OTHER OPTIONS FOR SCHOOLS’
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Even without transitioning to new publishing platforms, universities can lower the burden for students simply by adding more competition among booksellers, Koch said.
Koch pointed to the University of Montana, where he once was president, as an example of a university with a better system. There, the bookstore is nonprofit and the school website provides links to other booksellers such as’ Amazon.com so students can compare prices.
‘Many universities have a financial interest in the current system,’ Koch said, noting the large number of universities who either own their own bookstore or, as in the case of BU, have a cooperative relationship with a bookstore like Barnes & Noble to get a percentage of that location’s sales.
Another option is textbook rental systems, which Koch called ‘one of the best hopes out there,’ a system that would reduce textbook prices by about two-thirds.
This system works best in large introductory classes, Koch said, and requires these classes to use the same book and edition for several years, which is rented out by the school to students.
However, professors often do not like this system. ‘Faculty members sometimes argue that this a violation of their academic freedom,’ Koch said.
And some professors feel uncomfortable with any restrictions on their ability to pick material for their classes, even if it makes textbooks more affordable.
‘As a student, you, and your parents, pay quite a lot of money to get teacher-scholars who know the world of books in their field and thus have appropriate criteria for selecting among them. Students do not,’ Michael Aeschliman, a BU professor of educational development, wrote in an email. Aeschliman said that he nonetheless tries to consider a textbook’s cost to students.
College of General Studies freshman Karen Johnson estimates she paid $650 to $850 in books for her first semester in college. She said for the spring she is going to pursue online alternatives rather than going to the BU bookstore.
‘Next time I buy books I am definitely going to look around to get better prices,’ Johnson said.
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Oh, I am advocating pirating! In fact, I would go so far as to call this a free market response to the anti-capitalist corporate welfare (in the form of copyright rules that encourage publishers to keep churning out those new editions) that help keep prices so high. To be fair, the climbing price of textbooks is definitely due in some part to the exploding used book market that didn’t exist fifteen years ago. Students buy used books now, and the publisher and authors see nothing, prompting the publisher to raise prices and again speed up new editions. The bottom line is that whether you buy a used book or pirate a copy, nobody gets their just compensation, or else you help line the pockets of corporate slobs who don’t care about books or students and pay highly inflated prices. I choose to pirate, and yes, the authors get shafted, but it’s not my fault. Eventually the textbook publishers will follow the music and television industries toward online subscription content. You’ll pay a monthly or semesterly fee and have access to online text and interactive supplements. Textbook publishers, now parts of much larger conglomerates, undoubtedly will not learn the lessons for which the RIAA and MPAA paid so dearly. Instead of innovating, the corporate mindset prefers to duke it out on the side of the status quo. It’s a losing battle.
Stop fleecing struggling musicians and pirate your textbooks instead. You can easily find torrent downloads for most books required by college classes on Google. Download the PDF, print out what you need, and don’t pay those rich old fat dudes anything.
I ticked off a publisher, the last time I commented on the fleecing that is taking place in the textbook business. I understand costs and am an ardent capitalist. However, I have a real problem with the ethics of any business that is built upon the principle that “We can print it and charge them whatever we want because they have to buy it.” Here is the deal, you will never convince me that 300 pieces of paper with some ink, glued to a thicker piece of paper (paperback textbooks instead of hardbound) is worth $200! Factor in to this the sales volume of these textbooks which are being sold on hundreds of college campuses in the United States alone and the profit per book sold is staggering. Again, I am not at all opposed to making a reasonable profit, but I do hate fleecing students.