Why an expensive text?

It's a bit of a. . . rigged game.

Students have to have the texts. Regular bookstores don't carry them as there isn't enough demand in the general marketplace. Were there sufficient demand outside the educational market, prices would be closer to general norms for newly published volumes.

So, the publishers and the college bookstores have the whole thing to themselves. Each hikes the prices up to add to their margins. The poor students are stuck in the middle.

eBooks, textbook rentals, web libraries and CLEPs/DSSTs are changing up the dynamic a little but many students are still simply stuck playing the game.

 

The student market for texts is a huge market. Almost all texts can be used international with little or no adjustments -No need to feel sorry for publishers. Outside of tuition, universities should be morally responsible to provide the best value texts to students. It is just unfair that students should be stuck with increase debts because of unfair texts assignment. In some countries, the text is provided as part of the tuition. Normally, it will be an older edition but the goal is to reduce cost for the students.

 

I used to work as the textbook manager at a college bookstore. The margin for net-priced books was 26% (35% markup). That's really not much when you consider the space and storage requirements, staff wages, shipping charges, AND - dirty little secret - the commission paid to the university (not the department or professor) for each sale.

Another secret - bookstores actually love used books. If a book costs $75 from a publisher, the bookstore sells it for about $100. If they buy the book back from a student, they generally pay 50%, or $50. They sell the used book for $75. Therefore, the margin on used books is 33% compared to 25-26% on new. It also makes the students happy, and there's no shipping charges.

Of course, this leads publishers to find ways to circumvent the used-book market that cuts into their profits. Getting professors to custom-publish books is a sales rep's wet dream. New editions are also a great way of forcing students to buy new books. If it's too early for a new edition, the publisher will throw in a DVD or online access code to the existing edition and sell them as a package - the original book is no longer sold separately. This creates a new ISBN. Since most bookstores can't handle multiple ISBNs for the same book, they have to put the new ISBN in their system and on their buyback lists. Sorry students! We're not buying that book back, even though it's the same one that's on the shelf.

Another trick is for publishers to refuse to send desk copies to professors.
Professor: But I adopted this book for this semester! Why should I have to pay for a desk copy?
Publisher: Well, your bookstore didn't place an order for it [because they bought back used books], so the adoption doesn't mean anything to us. OR, you're saying there are 25 students but the bookstore only bought 5 copies.

It's only fair for publishers to protect their profits and I don't want to make them look bad (even though they are truly horrible and I think they usually run side businesses like making coats from panda fur or doing casting sessions for The Bachelorette). I just wanted to give a different perspective. Publishers have a lot of leverage in the adoption game. Bookstores aren't perfect, but they have very little say in textbook adoptions and that's not really where their money comes from.

Last dirty little secret - bookstores REALLY want you to buy their branded apparel. THAT'S where their money comes from - huge markups on that stuff.

 

That is what I suspected, universities benefit financially at students detriment for prescribing over priced texts. Also the customized text is just cruel. It means poor students can't recoup any expenses.

Another issue is the technology fee or online fees. What is up with that? State universities and nfp needs to breakdown barriers to education. The profit maximizing can be left to the private universities. As Reagan said to the USSR, break down that wall. Students are facing a wall of debt for education.

 

Logan, thanks for all your insight and collaboration on what many of us suspected. Can you share your experience with instructors/professors coming down and exploring various price points for the material they wanted to use for class, or maybe asking what kind of costs would be associated with adopting specific texts?

 

About 20 years ago, I took an economics course at University and learned a valuable lesson on the side. The book requirements were an expensive text and a very detailed set of course notes that cost a mere $8.00. The professor told us that as long as we knew and understood the material in the course notes and did all assignments, we should do well on the 2 exams.

I don't think that anywhere in her lectures, she referred directly to the text. I did as she said; I got an A.

Maybe more professors could teach this way!

Johann

 

We rarely heard from professors. The department admin assistant would compile and send the booklist to us. We would check pricing and availability and provide that information back to them. They occasionally switched to a new edition because the old one had insufficient availability, but it was rare that they changed books altogether. I can't say whether they worked with publishers to determine price beforehand. I think most adoption decisions were made between faculty and publishers; we had little input into the process.

 

It's shocking, I know! It was a wake up call for me when I made the transition from K-12 to higher ed. When I taught dual enrollment courses, I was the department chair, and it was the school's responsibility to purchase the books. When I ordered the books directly from the publisher, I got a discount because we bought in bulk. We paid about $125 for the text. At our campus bookstore, it sells for $50 more. That's a 40% markup.

My Western Civ textbook is $250. World Civ is $258. US History is about $186. Mind you, tuition for the a 3 credit course is only about $325. The books are almost as much as the class. In some of our science classes, the books are MORE than the tuition.

I'm very aware of the costs of books, and that's why I applied for the grant through the VCCS to make an OER course. (I got the grant, by the way.) If all goes well, I plan on turning my Political Science class into an open resource course and ditching the textbook as well.

-Matt

 

Go to your local university at the beginning of a semester and you will find massive trash bins right outside the book store resale area. USF has a special resale area during the first few and last few weeks of class. I stood in line many times wanting to sell back my books, hoping my $115 investment would net out $35-50. In many cases they said "sorry that book is no longer being used" so I would either choose to take it home as a memento or throw it in the overstuffed bins like other disgusted kids did.

This hurt me economically because those proceeds were part of my ability to buy the book for the next class.

Our professors warned us about buying the previous edition. He said we would fail the homework assignments because all the problems were mixed up. There were no other reasons for it. The professors were in on the game.

 

Something else I forgot to mention -

Our college uses Follett for the bookstore. As such, the bookstore is NOT run by the college. We have very little say in what goes on there. Furthermore, because of the contract the school has with Follett, we have to inform students to purchase books at the bookstore. We aren't allowed to say "Hey, go check on Amazon!" or anything like that. Many of our students end up going with the bookstore anyway, because of financial aid, but we do have a few who are savvy enough to go through Amazon, half.com or another site. The downside to their going online is that often the students end up with the wrong textbook because they only go by the title and not the ISBN.

-Matt

 

BRAVO Matt! That's huge. I hope you can convince many others behind you to do the same. I know not everyone is on board with ebooks (I prefer pages myself) but students are younger, and they use books differently than those of us north of 30. Times are changing, and open source books should be used if possible. Have you seen the list from Saylor? They have several hundred on there now that are open.

 

I think that distance students have an advantage because they are not on campus and MUST buy their books on the computer. In that case, entering info online to price shop is easy.

 

I think Trident (TUI) has an answer to this mess. No books to buy.

http://www.trident.edu/fall-2011-university-catalog#_Toc305678603

All textbooks and course materials are on TUI's cyber Library, and available to students at no additional cost.

 

CSUDH had a special library for student use that contained at least one copy of all required course textbooks (not of use to DL students). CSUDH had a lot of low income students and that may be the reason for this library.

 

North of 30? You're still a young pup.

 

We try to put a copy on reserve in our libraries as well. That definitely helps, but the students can't take them out of the library. The downside to that is it's only the book. If we have a class that also requires an online component, the student is still responsible for paying for that. It's my hope, however, that we can eventually develop our own materials and not have to rely as much on publisher materials.

-Matt

 

Both ERAU and UC Riverside used publications available on the internet for some of my courses. There is a surprising amount of US govt publications available for free or small cost. For example here is a book that was used in the last course I took:
http://www.blm.gov/pgdata/etc/medialib/blm/id/publications.Par.55953.File.dat/FieldGuide.pdf

 

I was trying to include Matt who is a bit my junior <cough>