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(a)yahoo.com>
To: "text" <textbook-l(a)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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