Inside Higher Ed has a short news story on a new report on textbook prices that finds the big publishers failing to offer low-cost books:
In reviewing the catalogs of each of the publishers, the group looked for 22 frequently assigned textbooks, which had an average cost of $131.44 per book. Of the 22 textbooks, less than half had a comparable lower cost book. Two of the books were available in a low-frill format, while nine books were available as e-books.
Of course, the publishers are a little upset,
Bruce Hildebrand, executive director for higher education at the Association of American Publishers, said that it was “complete spin” to suggest that major publishers have not created or advertised low-cost versions of textbooks. “PIRG has once again taken pieces of misinformation to create a mistaken image of the publishers,” he said. “If you put it into perspective, there are hundreds of low-cost options available [to professors].”
Both of these statements contain some truth– a lot of times, there are cheaper alternative books out there, but they usually require some hunting, while the publishers actively push the latest, greatest (and coinciedentally most expensive) books at faculty.
At the same time, Janet Stemwedel considers the idea of cheaper textbooks supported by ads. I pretty much agree with her assessmen (below the fold)t:
Yes, the reduction in price comes from delivering their textbooks with advertisers’ messages. But at least among college students, please note that they seem to be remarkably good at tuning things out. (Really, you should watch some of them in class!) Also, while copying services and coffee are the kind of things college students may well consume more of than your average consumer, to my eye they don’t have a great deal of brand loyalty here — they’ll go for the best balance of what’s cheap and conveniently located (i.e., there’s time to access it between classes). But, they like coupons.
The problem of textbook pricing is a tough one. I go back and forth as to whether it’s worse at the introductory level or for the upper-level classes– in the intro classes, you have a greater variety of possible texts, and a better resale market for the students who go that route, but the books are all big and expensive, and many of the students already resent having to take the class, even before they find out what the book costs. (“Are we going to use this book for any other classes?” is on the list of questions I’d rather not hear again…)
On the other hand, upper-level classes offer many fewer options for textbooks to be assigned, and the market for the books is small enough that the price-per-page gets a little ridiculous. A friend who was a math major had a book for one class that was 150 pages, and cost $120. At those rates, it’d be cheaper to Xerox it in the library at ten cents a page. But by the time students get to the point of taking those classes, they’re pretty far in, and somewhat more likely to consider the books an investment, rather than an annoyance. Somewhat.
A lot of times, there really isn’t much choice. the textbook for our intro courses was chosen a few years back, and we’re locked into it at the moment (especially since they just changed editions). Everybody teaching that course assigns the same book, because it’s the one that covers all the topics we need in roughly the order we want. There’s nothing we can do about the price.
In the upper-lvel classes, we get to pick our own books, and there, I do try to choose cheaper things. But this is limited both by the small market for advanced physics books, and by the fact that I really don’t have a great deal of time to spend on researching textbook offerings, along with all the other things I’m supposed to be doing. I do try, but a publisher wouldn’t have to work very hard to keep me from finding a cheap alternative, if they wanted to do so.
Back when I was an undergrad, the college had a nice program (funded by a gift from the class of 19mumble) to loan textbooks to students on financial aid. You could take them a list of your classes, and they would pull out old copies of the assigned texts, that you could use for that semester. The would also provide vouchers for (if I remember correctly) $40 to buy texts that weren’t already in their collection, and those books became part of the lending library for future classes. I got a lot of books for my humanities and social science classes that way (math and science books, I bought and kept).
Of course, these days, students are pretty savvy about a lot of things, and many of them know of on-line sources that will let them get their textbooks at lower prices than the campus bookstore offers. Which is why we get deluged with “What’s the textbook for ________?” queries about two weeks before the start of classes every year.
I’m not sure about the ethics of abetting their purchase of copyright-infringing Chinese knock-offs of expensive textbooks, though. Maybe Janet can help out with that…
I got my copy of Griffiths “Intro to QM” for 50$ (Amazon wants $111.49) by getting from a discount web site.
It has a bright yellow banner across the front saying it’s not to be distributed outside India.
Textbooks are a big racket. Publishers gouge students because they’re a captive audience and they’ve got deep pockets.
andy.s: I was going to comment on similar lines…
I’ve been in school in both the US and the UK. The first thing I noticed about the textbooks in the UK was that they are a bit cheaper than the same books in the US (they average out to about 30-40 quid for those huge first-year physics and maths texts, new in the shop). The second thing I noticed was that loads of them are published as ‘International Editions’ with the following splashed across the front: NOT FOR SALE IN THE US.
Highly suspicious, if you ask me.
In my experience even as prices go up, the physical quality of textbooks (like binding, paper, etc.) has gone down a bit.
I bit the bullet and bought a few textbooks as reference, only to have the binding start to fall apart.
What a racket.
Simple solution: deflate the salaries of the administration to around $30-50,000, use the savings to buy common-use textbooks like we had in high school, and if the students really want a copy for their own, let ’em buy one by all means. When you consider how obscene some universities’ endowments are, it just becomes more inexcusable that students have to waste so much money on textbooks, especially when the newest edition is ordered for the next term — like they discovered a new fucking planet or something in the mean time.
Textbook publishers provide extremely reduced price textbooks for India and surrounding countries – in the $5 range, so the folks higher up in this comment thread were actually getting ripped off. Quite a few of my labmates take book requests before heading home for visits.
My brutal lesson in textbook sales came my first semester of undergrad, when the bookstore wouldn’t buy back the textbook written by the professor I took the class from. The class? Introductory Economics.
I almost never bought books either as an undergrad or as a grad student. I used the copies in the library.
I am a professor of cognitive psychology and a textbook author in that field and in history of psychology. I’ve also paid for texts when my daughter went through college. My PhD is from 1974, so I’ve been around awhile. When I was an undergrad, thextbooks were about the same cost as trade hardbacks. The great increase in text prices began after about 1975.
The reason is the secondary market in texts, i.e., used books. There was no secondary market when I was an undergrad, and it was just beginning to develop when I was in grad school, and has grown ever since. From the publisher’s perspective, the problem is this: A book comes out in, say, 2005. It sells a lot of copies. Then, sales crash because the books sold in 2005 are resold, undermining and even destroying, the primary market for new copies. Thus the publishers try to recoup their costs and collect their profits in the first year of sale, rather than doing so over a number of years, as in the past, making the initial price very high. This is also why revisions are done so quickly even in fields such as history of psychology that don’t need to be cutting edge. I used to revise about every 5 years. now it’s down to 2-2.5 years. I’d like to mention that I tried whenever possible to buy for my daughter only new copies of texts for the benefit of fellow authors.
I don’t know if this is true, but I suspect that outside the US, the secondary market is less developed, so the books are cheaper. Supporting this hypothesis is that when I’m late in my revision cycle, most of my royalties are from overseas sales, either as translations or through sale of rights.
One comment refers to online books. One editor at a respected trade (and a few textbooks) house in psychology and related fields thinks that the future of publishing texts may lie in a iTunes model–selling chapters separately over the web.
I’m taking the following courses at my university this semester: Abstract Algebra, Thermodynamics, Classic Applied Analysis, Physical Chemistry I, Organic Chemistry I, Organic Lab I, and the cost of all the texts combined came out to about $700.
Brandon: sounds like a fun semester.
As frustrating as the high prices and constant new editions (updated sections on the latest versions of MatLab and Mathematica, anyone?) is the dropping of useful parts… in my past two textbooks for EE courses, the answers to the problem sets weren’t in the back. They were online, requiring a username and password. So second hand books have no solutions, unless someone was thoughtful enough to write the username and password inside the cover. And if I go back to the book in ten years, what’s the likelihood that the solutions will still be accessible?
So second hand books have no solutions, unless someone was thoughtful enough to write the username and password inside the cover.
That’s ok. As we found out last year, the instructor’s solution manuals for a lot of intro textbooks are readily available on eBay…
Textbook prices have more than doubled in the past 15 years but few professors care, or have even noticed. The US has a North Korean textbook market: those who order the things (the professors) get them free, and the ones who buy them (the students) are captive. If you think that I am wrong, ask yourself why high school texts, which are both specified and bought by Boards of Education are really cheap. (Links include links to various studies on textbook prices)