Posted on 08/23/2010 9:01:57 AM PDT by SandRat
College is back in session, and students have a bigger voice than ever on the topic of costly textbooks.
University of Arizona students start classes today. Pima Community College students will go back to class on Wednesday.
Here are three new trends that students will see in the changing world of college textbooks.
1. Book prices are listed in class schedules - by law
Federal law now requires publishers to disclose textbook prices to professors and requires them to sell compact discs and other extras separately instead of as a bundle.
It also requires colleges to list the prices of required books on the schedules students use to choose classes. Students will notice these prices on the UA and PCC class-schedule websites for the first time this semester.
The government got involved with textbooks because it invests billions in federal student-loan programs, said Sen. Richard Durbin D-Ill., a textbook-affordability advocate. Those loans help students pay for books in addition to tuition and fees.
A more economical approach to textbooks means less cost to taxpayers and less student debt, Durbin said during a news conference this summer about the textbook provisions taking effect in this school year.
2. Students are campaigning for textbook cost awareness
Some members of the Arizona Students' Association asked their teachers to acknowledge that textbooks are a big expense for students and to pledge to use the same book for several years, making it more likely that the title will be available used or for rent.
Eduardo Atjian, a senior public-administration student and former student senator, said he got involved in the campaign because he was upset by the "misuse" of textbooks, such as requiring an entire book when only one chapter was used in class. Atjian estimates he spends $300 per semester on textbooks.
The faculty members whom Atjian talked to had mixed reactions, he said. Some were supportive; others said they didn't have time for this.
The students collected about 40 pledges from UA faculty members. The UA Faculty Senate also endorsed the pledge last fall.
3. Professors are beginning to try online textbooks or no textbooks at all
PCC chemistry professor David Katz has assigned the same edition of a textbook for several years in one of his classes, so all of his students are buying used books, which are less expensive.
He'll stick with it as long as enough used books are in stock, because new editions of that textbook have been issued with mostly cosmetic changes, he said during an interview in May.
Katz keeps a website for his classes at chymist.com It's loaded with tutorials, slides from lectures, reading assignments, lab experiments, links and extra information that's free to his students and anyone else who is interested.
He also teaches two courses without a textbook. Instead, he sends students to websites, does a lot of hands-on activities in class and asks students to print out some lab worksheets.
"I decided to teach without a textbook because I believe in hands-on learning. I'm just not equipped - yet - to teach the regular chemistry course without a textbook," Katz said. "I'm getting to the point where I'm approaching a textbook online.
"I'm not trying to put any publishers out of business," he said. "I'm just trying to supply information to my students inexpensively. I think it's cool.
"We're all trying to keep prices down for the students," Katz added. "It's kind of scary when the textbooks, especially here at the community college, cost you more than the course you're taking."
Contact reporter Becky Pallack at bpallack@azstarnet.com or 807-8012.
Tuition is the real steal.
Buy the books and skip the school.
“PCC chemistry professor David Katz has assigned the same edition of a textbook for several years in one of his classes, so all of his students are buying used books, which are less expensive.”
“I can’t wait for kindles to wipe out the college text book market. It is a total scam.”
The economics of college textbooks are not good at all for the publishers and authors. A large majority of costs are up-front editorial costs in developing the manuscript and making it ready for publication. Then in order to get college professors to adopt a new book they must be given sample copies, many of which get sold into the used-book market. If a new book is successful in being adopted it must make back all of its costs in the first one or two years, since after that most sales will be of used books on which the author and publisher make no money. That’s why the publisher does their best to bring out a new edition with minimal changes very frequently.
It sounds very strange, but if the sale of used textbooks was banned by law then new textbooks would cost less than used textbooks currently do.
The economics of textbooks is a little bit like prescription drugs, except instead of a 17 year patent on the new drug before you have to compete with generics, you get at most two years on a new textbook before used book sales take away the profits.
I agree that college textbooks are outrageously expensive, but one thing to remember here is that this is largely a function of a very small marketplace. The cost of writing and publishing a book that makes its way onto a bestseller list is spread among customers that number in the millions, so these books are typically very inexpensive.
In the case of a college textbook, the author and the publisher have to sell the book profitably despite the fact that they aren't likely to be selling more than a few thousand of them -- at best. This is the simple reality of the economies of scale in the publishing business.
I've been dealing with a similar issue with software for some years. I've got a great product that has been developed internally in my company for our own use, and it's far better than what is used in my industry. I'd love to have this become the industry standard for the engineering processes we use, but our field is so small that we could never make any money on it without charging tens of thousands of dollars for a software package . . . and at that price anyone in my business would (understandably) use alternative software tools that are adequate for the job and cost a fraction of what we would have to charge for our software.
Item 2 was always the biggest issue I had when in college. It seemed like every semester the professors were using brand new editions of books. So we could never sell our books back since they were no longer being used and we always had to buy brand new books cause there were never used ones. Worse still was when they came ‘bundled’ (ie. extra materials, CDs) that added a bunch more to the cost and we would never use those extra materials.
That’s what I used to do. I used to print out course materials packages, with only the readings you needed. Got the books off reserve, made a master copy, and made as many copies as I could sell.
Cost? Around 30 bucks for books that would have cost about 4x as much. My costs were around 10 per copy. So, sell to a class of 30 how much do I make?
Would it be possible to give away the software for free, or is it a significant competitive advantage?
The feds have already stepped in and said Kindles probably violate the Americans with Disabilities Act, the few institutions which were using them have stopped.
Well, there is some evidence in this article and from some of the replies that there are some who are doing the right thing.
There’s no way to give this software away for free without shooting ourselves in the foot. Even though the processes we use are not universally accepted across my industry, the software allows us to do a lot of the “standard” processes far more efficiently than our competitors.
Then why bother selling it? Just keep eating their lunch.
The Kindle “read to me” feature kind of makes the academia that have said that look stupid.
It may well make textbook publishers obsolete.
My sons books are all included in the price of tuition. So although we pay for it in the beginning, it is nice. His tution is less than UW Madison, but a little more than most of the other State schools.
The problem is with those clients who aren't willing to pay the price for top-quality work and are willing to pay far less for a lesser product.
I was surprised to learn that all UW campuses were not like that. Plus his tuition is a little less than Madisons.
Have you ever thought that the product has already "paid for itself" by the savings to your company? Therefore, you could sell it for cheap and make some money rather than no money?
We have a similar situation at my company: I cannot convince the bean counters that the software is essentially free because the development was paid for in savings to us over the last ten years alone. They still want to charge tens of thousands of dollars for it and wonder why there's only a couple of customers world-wide that have bought it......
Apparently there is no brail on the buttons. I didn’t read the article in detail but I think it was discussed here within the last year.
Here is the article
http://www.libraryjournal.com/article/CA6668651.html
“The plaintiffs claim that such usage violates Americans with Disabilities Act and the Rehabilitation Act of 1973 because the device cannot be used by blind students. The NFB and ACB also filed complaints with the Office for Civil Rights of the U.S. Department of Education and the Civil Rights Division of the U.S. Department of Justice.
NFB acknowledges that the Kindle DX features text-to-speech technology that can read textbooks aloud to blind students. The menu limitation, however, makes it impossible for a blind user to purchase books from Amazon’s Kindle store, select a book to read, activate the text-to-speech feature, and use the advanced reading functions available on the Kindle DX, according to NFB.”
Giving it away for free isn't going to help us win any more clients than we already have -- and in fact will only help our competitors replicate our services.
It's not mainly a function of the technology, mind you . . . it's simply a function of a very small market. Even if this became the standard process for our industry and every firm in our field had to purchase it (imagine if it became the "Microsoft Excel" of my field), it still probably wouldn't pay for us to sell the software.
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