{"id":507,"date":"2006-08-17T11:22:58","date_gmt":"2006-08-17T11:22:58","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/scienceblogs.com\/principles\/2006\/08\/17\/the-high-cost-of-assigned-read\/"},"modified":"2006-08-17T11:22:58","modified_gmt":"2006-08-17T11:22:58","slug":"the-high-cost-of-assigned-read","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/2006\/08\/17\/the-high-cost-of-assigned-read\/","title":{"rendered":"The High Cost of Assigned Reading"},"content":{"rendered":"

Inside Higher Ed<\/cite> has a short news story on a new report on textbook prices<\/a> that finds the big publishers failing to offer low-cost books:<\/p>\n

\n

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.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Of course, the publishers are a little upset,<\/p>\n

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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].”<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

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.<\/p>\n

At the same time, Janet Stemwedel considers the idea of cheaper textbooks supported by ads<\/a>. I pretty much agree with her assessmen (below the fold)t:<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

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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.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

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…)<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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).<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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,… Continue reading The High Cost of Assigned Reading<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"1","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-507","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-academia","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/507","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=507"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/507\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=507"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=507"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=507"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}