Here are just two comments from a long thread on www.slashdot.org that was triggered by the NYT article that Karl pointed to. Here's the URL for the entire thread. http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=03/10/22/0010203&mode=thread&tid=...
Below find two long comments form the Slashdot thread. (note that the second comment has one or two paragraphs that end without resolution...no doubt an omisssion by the author, who was trandposing to slashdot from an article he had written on the subjecy). In any case, both are informative, and fully corroborate some my experiences in the academic textbook industry.
Sanford ******* Here are the above-mentioned comments (from Slashdot), in toto. Comment #1 - Speaking as a professor (Score:5, Insightful) by kurisuto (165784) on Tuesday October 21, @07:00PM (#7277507) (http://www.ling.upenn.edu/~kurisuto) I sure don't get any kickbacks for "forcing my classes to use 'upgraded' textbooks". I've never heard of such a practice. These days, I'm lucky if I can even get the publishers to follow the traditional practice of sending me a free desk copy for evaluation purposes; more and more often, publishers want me to pay for the text before I consider creating a captive market of 40 student customers for them.
I share your anger about the problem of publishers charging unreasonable prices for textbooks. If I could find a low-priced textbook which is a reasonably academically sound choice, I'd choose it. Unfortunately, for every course I've ever taught, all of my choices have been overpriced. So what I'm forced to do is to make the best tradeoff I can between picking the most academically suitable text vs. saving my students as much money as I can.
The only other option I see is to create my own inexpensive in-house textbook, but this is a huge amount of effort; it's much easier for me to simply use a prepackaged text. Producing my own text would be easier is if someone in my field would organize a single, well-ordered, referreed online repository of open-source chapters, exercises, etc. If such a thing existed, and if the college infrastructure existed so that I could just hand off my camera-ready pages and have the bound text effortlessly appear on the bookstore shelf without my having to rassle with copying, binding, and pricing details, then I'd consider putting the extra time into doing this.
However, unrefereed course packs don't count as publications, and if you don't have enough publications, you don't get tenure--simple as that. If I spend time creating a cheap alternative for my students instead of writing research articles for peer-reviewed journals, then I'm significantly reducing my propects for my own survival. Those are the pressures I'm responding to.
It would be nice if students organized and lobbied the administration to change their tenure evaluation criteria on this point. If it helped us to get tenure by creating inexpensive in-house texts, more of us would be doing it. Unfortunately, I don't foresee students doing this; the point is probably too abstruse from the perspective of students who never come into contact with the tenure process.
Comment #2 (a few paragraphs don't resolve). This is hardly just Britain. (Score:4, Insightful) by neko the frog (94213) on Tuesday October 21, @05:59PM (#7277094) This is a rather long essay I wrote a while back on the subject, so bear with me on this.
Deep within downtown Seoul, on the bottom floor of one of the city's innumerable high-rises, is the Kyobo Bookstore, the largest of its kind in Asia. Along the West wall of this 2.3 million title shopping center is a selection of English books, and a selection of college textbooks larger than that many American campus stores. A visiting American student majoring in for example mathematics would be astounded upon browsing the selection, not because of the wide variety of books available, but because the exact same book which he or she spent over $120 on for the previous semester is available here for $30.
Many of the business practices of the textbook industry are well known, if only subconsciously, to all college students. The nearly oligarchical cartel in the textbook industry drives the price of schoolbooks to unreasonable levels, between three to five times fair market value for equivalent non-scholastic texts in North American school bookstores (even though they can be purchased cheaply overseas), by means of a captive student population who does not have a choice in which textbooks they much purchase and price-control mechanisms such as frequent yet marginal revisions to short-circuit any used book market and "value-added" features such as subscription-based Internet site access, partly so as to satiate an expectation of high profits by textbook authors in an over-saturated industry.
The fact that textbooks are extremely expensive is difficult to debate. A quick browse in Amazon.com's textbook section shows that the average price for the top five books in each of their categories, is currently $89.47. Only one book in their top Mathematics section is sold for less than $99--and that book is only available used (Amazon). Since it is not uncommon for professors to require more than one book for a class, the financial burden on students can easy top five hundred dollars per semester. Furthermore, the cost of textbooks severely outpaces inflation: the United States Department of Labor indicates that the wholesale price of textbooks has increased 65 percent in the past decade, nearly six times the average increase in producer prices on the whole (Hubbard). In contrast, it is quite rare to find a hardcover book online or at a physical bookstore, even technical in nature, that retails for over $45.
The traditional method for students to offset these costs is the used book market, usually also facilitated by the campus bookstore. However, the industry has several methods of short-circuting this market. Most obvious is the frequent revisioning of textbooks, with as little as six months between versions, make previous versions economically worthless because even if the changes are as mundane as rearranged exercises (not uncommon in math and physics texts), publishers will stop printing the older edition, forcing professors to switch to ordering the new editions or risk alienating students who cannot find used copies of previous editions. or adding in "value-added" items such as CD-ROMs, magazines, or Internet Web Site access which are rarely used by instructors but serve to prevent used book sales.
In an effort to get instructors, departments and school boards to adopt a text, publishers go to great lengths to entice faculty. Perhaps one of the most ridiculous instances of textbook publishers trying to win instructor favor was an attempt to woo Richard Feynman, one of the most prominent physicists of the 20th century and a professor at the California Institute of Technology. Mr. Feynman was offered some 300 pounds of textbooks to review and recommend, and the promise that "We'll get someone to help you read them." One book he was asked to review was blank ("We just need a recommendation"), and when he delayed for several days (allowing a bidding war which cost the publisher two million dollars), Feynman was offered gifts ranging from fruit baskets to an all-expense-paid tour of San Francisco--including escort service (Feynman, 288-302).
It is clear that there is little motivation for the textbook industry to change within--textbooks are now a $7.8 billion industry (NCAS), and it is unlikely that monumental changes in the way that textbook publishers treat their primary consumers will come from the students. Furthermore, it is equally unlikely that startup companies can gain the capital necessary to enter the textbook market; as such, three publishers, McGraw-Hill, Pearson PLC and Thomson, control 65% of the textbook market (Canterbery), while about half a dozen other companies such as, Houghton Mifflin, Prentice Hall, Holt and Harcourt control most of the rest of what students read in the classroom (Paulson). The professors themselves need to let publishers know that high prices for student's textbooks should not be tolerated, and be cost-conscious when choosing required textbooks.
One of the ways concerned professors can relieve textbook financial burdens on students is also one of the Internet's best kept secrets. In 1971, almost a decade before the invention of what would become the Internet, Michael S. Hart was given $100 million of computer time by the University of Illinois on a Xerox mainframe. One idea he had for the use of computers was the storage and distribution of electronic texts. The idea grew into what today is known as Project Gutenberg, an electronic book depository where over nine thousand public domain works, mostly classic novels now out of copyright, are available for free. Professors who require for their course Darwin's "Origin of the Species," Albert Einstein's treatises on the Theory of Relativity, or even the complete works of Shakespeare (with a multitude of scholarly interperetations) need no longer require students to buy texts from the campus bookstore, and students who insist on a hard copy of the material can likely purchase one inexpensively at an off-campus bookstore.
The Internet provides a second way for students to obtain used books, when they haven't been obsolestetized. Students at George Washington University, for instance, have established VarsityText.com, a site to facillitate students selling books to each other, for a ninety-nine cent transaction fee (Wilen). While it is a step in the right direction, there are still some problems with this system, as students must rely on other, perhaps less reliable students for texts that may be necessary very swiftly; furthermore, there are no communication channels to compare one version of a textbook with another, to determine what changes there are in various editions so that students can feel confident using older editions of textbooks for a class.
The final alternative is less eloquent: student revolt, in the form of litigation if need be. This year, formal complaints have been issued by several groups to the top University of California and California State University systems allege that
Be that as it may, it is unlikely that the textbook industry will stop gouging students anytime soon. However, the Internet provides another, less legal means of distribution: peer-to-peer networks such as Gnutella could concievably carry illegally scanned textbooks, much like MP3s And those cheaper textbooks available overseas? They are still available at the Kyobo Bookstore, even online, and still much cheaper than Stateside prices (Kyobo, Amazon)--with a stern disclaimer in Korean warning that these cheaper books are not to be exported to the United States.
-- the opinions stated above aren't those of my employer. in fact, they're probably not even my own. you know what, just don't even bother reading it.
----- Original Message ----- From: "Karl Wick" karlwick@yahoo.com To: "text" textbook-l@wikipedia.org Sent: Tuesday, October 21, 2003 1:43 PM Subject: [Textbook-l] high textbook prices article
Link to a NYTimes article:
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/10/21/education/21BOOK.html
Also, perhaps the book on Theology that is on the site will be a test of NPOV.
Karl
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