What’s happening in the college textbook market? Students believe that conspiring profit-motivated publishers, money-grabbing college bookstores, and lazy professors are conspiring to make them spend $1,000 a year on textbooks. How long can a market stay the same when the customers hate the vendors and technology is making alternatives available?
The simple solution is for all textbooks to be available online, for free or for substantially lower cost.
Unfortunately, the problem and the solution are more complex.
Data compiled by the National Association of College Stores points out that no one is ripping off anyone else. Between the bookstore and the publisher, there is only a 10% profit. Publishing and marketing a college textbook is labor intensive and expensive. The publishers face high and rising costs as they try to get recognized authors, conduct peer review, and provide extensive editing and fact checking. In addition, they must produce ancillary materials in order to be competitive, such as question banks for professors to use to create tests, lecture notes, and slides. With traditional textbooks, they print on high quality paper with expensive binding and in color. Then, they must recoup their costs and make a profit in the first year, because used-book sales net them no additional revenue.
Yet, with textbooks often costing over $100, students are demanding changes in the marketplace. What are the different options being tried out by students, publishers, and professors?
Used Books
Online open source textbook
Online textbook subscription
Less expensive printing
Custom printed textbook
Online course environment
Scanned free textbook
Direct to student sales
Frequent updates
Subscription to ancillary materials
Use of available online materials
Alternative hardware devices
Sharing textbooks
Not buying textbooks
Below are informal notes on each.
Used Books
If the same textbook is being used by the same university in the subsequent year, the bookstore will typically buy back the textbook for half it’s original price. They then mark the textbook up again, but will still buy it back if it is being used again.
Obviously, textbook publishers are not enamored with the used textbook market; they only receive revenue from new textbook sales. They either have to adjust their prices on the new textbooks to take into account the lost sales, or they have to devise other strategies like those below.
If the textbook has been customized for one class, if there is a new edition, or if there is an additional fee for an online subscription, the students don’t actually get 50% of their cost, which contributes to their antipathy toward the industry. Recent legislation in a number of states is requiring that publishers declare when new editions are going to be available and what is changing with each edition. The purpose is to lengthen the cycles between new editions, allowing for a vibrant used book or book rental market. These laws are new, so no one knows the results yet.
Online open source textbook
Individuals or groups of professors are creating free textbooks online that students can read or print. These include wikibooks and California’s open source textbook project.
One variation on this type of publishing is to copyright the online textbooks, offer them free online, but charge for printing or audio versions. O’Reilly Media has been using this type of model successfully for years with its technical reference books. A printed black and white textbook from Flat World Publishing might cost $30, or $50 printed in color, substantially less than the cost of a traditional textbook.
Free open source textbooks generally do not come with the extensive question banks and ancillary materials that many professors rely on. Most are just text and pictures, and students would rather read from a book than from a computer screen. But extra practice, animations, video, audio, and interaction could also be offered for an extra price. For example, if the author created animated explanations of key concepts, students could subscribe to those for an added fee.
In addition, these textbooks are not necessarily peer reviewed, extensively edited, or fact-checked. This doesn’t automatically make them inaccurate or inferior, but it may be safer for a professor to just go with an established publisher.
Finally, many professors have spent years refining the way they teach from a particular textbook. The professors are often loath to completely changing their notes and lectures to accommodate a different textbook, one that could change significantly or even disappear.
On the other hand, except for the optional cost of printing, they are free.
Online textbook subscription
Many education publishers are offering students the option of a semester or year online subscriptions to textbooks. A publisher can do this directly, go through the college bookstore, or go through a service such as CourseSmart.
Because these are subscriptions, there is no used textbook market, a benefit for the publishers. Because publishers receive subscription fees, professors still get access to the ancillary materials and do not have to change the way they teach. And because there is no cost of printing, the students spend less money.
But, if the online material is merely a representation of the printed textbook, most students are not interested unless there is a substantial cost reduction (my informal poll of 50 students pointed to 60% reduction in cost as a reasonable trade-off). And, if the textbook is to have interactive capabilities, there needs to be a critical mass of textbooks using the same technology. There will not be mass acceptance if students have to log onto different sites, with different sets of commands and functions, for each textbook.
CafeScribe, recently purchased by Follett, offers a third option. CafeScribe wraps community, discussion, note taking, searching around the online textbook. It will be interesting to watch as they increase the content available.
Still, students do not want to have to go to different sources to purchase different courses, thus the market is likely to demand that the college bookstore be included, and once the student-cost incorporates the bookstore’s markup, it will be that much harder to provide the substantial savings. Without savings, until there is significant added functionality to online material, the market will not reach its potential.
Less expensive printing/Custom printed textbook
One thing students hate, it’s buying a 750-page textbook for $150 and then only using half of it.
Many publishers are offering professors the option of selecting certain chapters, and then printing only those chapters, often in a lower cost binding on lower quality paper with no color. This can cut the cost of a textbook by a third, or even more.
The advantages for the student, though, may be deceptive. While the initial cost is significantly lower, there is generally no resale market for these texts.
There is another custom printing option that does not attempt to lower costs, but to increase value. This is to tailor a high-quality print job to the way a professor teaches a specific course. In these textbooks, there is often little or no cost saving to the student, but the premise is that the textbook is better integrated into the coursework, so the student receives greater value. This option, though, is generally only available for the large survey courses, those with over a few hundred students in the different sections, because the cost of customization needs to be amortized over a base.
This high-value approach may meet with some resistance. One publisher’s experience is that if professors need to spend a lot of time customizing a textbook, many will just revert and use the standard book.
There seems to be more acceptance for customized content from the for-profit sector. These schools often centralize the textbook decisions; they are more likely to have custom textbooks or online course environment (see below) and use them as a competitive edge to support their branding.
Online course environment
Another option is to provide an online environment that enhances the student’s experience in a course. One example is a language course, which might include video that is integrated into the course. The online environment thus provides features or learning tools that are just not available in print.
Or, the large publishers will build custom environments for their largest selling courses. They will work with a school or professor to set up the materials, exercises, links, etc. that the professor feels will most benefit the students. Students purchase semester- or year- long subscriptions that are non transferable. From the publisher’s standpoint, they lock in that course for years while doing away with the used book market. For the professors and schools, they now provide a unique benefit to their students. For the students, they have everything they need to succeed in that course at their fingertips; providing that the materials really are engaging and valuable.
Similar to the high value custom printing above, this option is really only available to very large courses, and there is often little actual cost savings for the students.
Scanned free textbook
Some student buys a textbook. Scans it. And then posts it online so anyone can access it.
It’s illegal, but it’s free.
While this will never go away, it’s very unlikely that illegally scanned online textbooks will be the mainstream way that most students obtain their textbooks. But, on the other hand, I did get a compliment from my daughter last week, so nothing is impossible.
Direct to student sales
Enterprising students can find textbooks at lower costs online, sometimes buying international editions offshore, saving money from purchasing at the bookstore. Two problems: students prefer to purchase everything at just one location, and this takes more effort, and with multiple editions of textbooks, students can never be completely sure that what they are ordering is exactly what their professor requires.
Frequent updates
Historically, a textbook edition has lasted 5–7 years, but there is evidence that at least some publishers have stepped up the process, updating editions every 2–3 years. For the publisher, this reduces the value of used textbooks, for which it receives no additional money.
To the extent that the shorter cycle is market-driven instead of content driven, this is a short-term, shortsighted solution. It infuriates students and professors and has inspired legislation to limit the practice.
Subscription to ancillary materials
Some publishers are finding that the online ancillary materials are where a good part of the value is. For example, going back to the language course, perhaps students can purchase a used copy of the textbook, but they can only access the integrated video and exercises with an additional online subscription. A physics class might offer virtual labs supplied by the publisher, but only those with new textbooks or online subscriptions can access them.
The market is going to find some pricing balance. Obviously, if a new textbook with subscription costs $120, a used textbook costs $60, and a subscription-only costs $60, no student is going to purchase the used textbook.
Use of available online materials
Some enterprising professors are avoiding textbooks altogether. By mashing together online materials, their own content, and lecture notes. They set up websites, provide links to free materials, and/or have students post content. Most professors will not do this for most courses: it’s a lot of work, they don’t get access to question banks, and links have a funny way of becoming obsolete.
This can be especially valuable for smaller, advanced courses, allowing courses to be taught where no definitive textbook has been created, and allowing greater flexibility to professors, although with greater effort.
Alternative hardware devices
A book is easier on the eyes and is more portable than a computer, but alternative devices like future iterations of Amazon’s Kindle may turn the tables.
Certainly, it would be great to have all of your textbooks in a package that weighed less than a pound. But, you would also want the ability to take notes and view color and graphics. Adding the ability to interact, view your professor’s notes, access the Web, transfer notes to your desktop, and watch media; and making it easy to access and search through all your textbooks with one click could tilt the scales in favor of these devices. Somehow, I don’t think Apple is going to stay on the sidelines while this market unfolds.
Sharing textbooks/Not buying textbooks
Even worse than buying a textbook and only using half is buying the textbook and finding that all the material the student needs to learn can be gleaned from the professor’s lectures.
In the first semester of Freshman year, virtually everyone buys the textbook that the professor recommends. By Senior year, the students have become more sophisticated. For some courses, the textbook is an integral part of the course, adds value, and is worth purchasing. For others, a group of students can just purchase one textbook, that they can all share. Anecdotal evidence suggests that in about a third of the cases, students believe that they can learn what they need and get the grade they desire without purchasing any textbook at all.
Conclusions
These are all different options for combating the high cost of textbooks. Each has advantages for part of the market. No one solution has the critical mass that propelled Windows in the 90’s, or the iPod 5 years ago. Certainly, more of the content is going to be available online, but it’s too early to pick the winners.
Of course, universities are happy to see the debate on textbook prices. As long as everyone is focused on the cost of textbooks, maybe no one will notice the high cost of tuition.
