There has been an increasing focus on the cost of textbooks in the mainstream media this year, and I don’t think it is the case that I’m just becoming more sensitized to it. Take for example the editorial from the Washington Post on February 7th. The second paragraph succinctly describes the issues being debated most often:
There are several reasons that textbooks are so costly. For one, even though there have been no major advances in fields such as calculus and elementary physics in decades or even centuries, publishers still churn out new editions of textbooks on these subjects every three or four years. The changes are typically superficial, but they prevent students from being able to purchase used, older editions. Publishers also frequently bundle unwanted additional materials such as CD-ROMs and study guides with textbooks. Professors rarely assign these extra materials, which drive up costs, and students often cannot sell the books back to bookstores once the shrink-wrap has been removed. Publishers can get away with these shenanigans because there’s a fundamental disconnect in the textbook marketplace: The people paying for the books (the students) are not the ones choosing them (the teachers).
The editorial goes on to suggest that what is needed is regulation “to ensure that both students and professors are able to make informed choices” — regulation of the kind proposed in House bill H.R. 4137 (covered on DLTJ earlier).
The New York Times has a posting on their editorial blog on April 10th that follows up on the federal legislation. It says that the House and Senate versions are currently being reconciled in a conference committee, and goes on to summaries the key points of the House-proposed legislation.
The public radio program Marketplace had a feature on April 15th that covered textbooks. It also had a statement that I hadn’t heard in other stories:
[Executive director of Higher Education for the American Association of Publishers Bruce] Hildebrand says it costs a lot to produce multi-color glossy pages and the other materials teachers want, like lecture notes, PowerPoint slides and exam questions. In effect, students are paying higher prices to make life easier for their professors. They usually don’t even know what the prices are.
While I’ve heard the claim before that professor’s don’t know the true costs of textbooks and have a hard time finding that information, this is the first time I’ve heard that “students are paying higher prices to make life easier for their professors.” I’m not necessarily buying that. In fact, there was a comment from a listener who teaches biology that was broadcast on yesterday’s show refuting that. The listener says “That is completely ridiculous. Even if I were to use only the slides that they provide, it would still take me hours per lecture to write a lecture the first time.”
Then there was news on April 16th about the Public Interest Research Group announcement that they had reach 1,000 signatures on an online petition to make textbooks affordable including the use of open textbooks, when available. The trade periodical Inside Higher Ed was one that published an article about the PIRG’s accomplishment. AAP’s Bruce Hildebrand praised the effort (that would ironically reduce traditional publisher revenue), saying “any faculty member or group that is willing to make that level of commitment to provide a free textbook, I applaud them.” He then goes on to caution that content creators are assuming the role of publisher, along with all of the duties to keep the content updated and integrate it into instructional systems. This article also lists several examples of how Open Educational Resources is gaining ground, including a description of a management school professor who stopped using traditional textbooks 10 years ago.
Lots of activity here; it is definitely worth keeping an eye on.
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15 Comments
Jester, you said:
“…this is the first time I’ve heard that “students are paying higher prices to make life easier for their professors.” I’m not necessarily buying that.”
Well, you can buy it or not, but if you really dig down into this topic–and I mean really get into it–you’ll see that it’s true. Scratch below the surface a bit, and you will discover that the proliferation of “ancillary” materials–all the multimedia resources, testing and assessment programs, transparencies, instructor’s manuals, Blackboard cartridges, custom teaching plans, “syllabi conversions,” lab manuals, test-banks, solutions manuals, author fly-ins for training seminars, free video offers, ‘professional development grants’ (i.e., kickbacks), etc., etc., etc.–is one of the most important reasons that textbooks have become so expensive.
Ancillary programs, especially in the ‘hard’ sciences, often run into the very high hundreds of thousands of dollars to develop. Add to this the explosion of complex art programs (again, most noticeable in the sciences), insane advances paid to some authors, and the ever-increasing costs involved in the design, typesetting and manufacture of the actual texts, and the result is that a new text in a field can end up costing a publisher two or three million bucks before the first copy leaves the warehouse.
(Now add to these external costs the salaries of the people working hard for the publisher–and yes, by god, these people work hard and are not paid impressive salaries–to edit, market, and sell these books, and divide all those costs by the rather-unimpressive number of copies that even the most wildly-successful college text sells, and you will finally see why textbooks cost what they do these days, and incidentally, what a crappy way to make money this whole business of publishing textbooks is.)
All right then, so who’s to blame? Who, exactly, has called for this explosion of pedagogical support, both in the book and around it? Overworked and underfunded faculty, naturally. Not that I blame these folks for demanding more from publishers. After all, their only real power, in this age of administrative cost-cutting, is represented by the fact that they can band together and choose a single text–whichever one is best supported by goodies that make their teaching lives less onerous–for every section of their over-enrolled, under-funded course. Interestingly enough, faculty members on campuses that are, for lack of a better term, lower-prestige institutions are often the ones for whom textbook publishers are creating and marketing all this stuff. Ask anyone in the industry, and they’ll tell you just how powerful and ‘important’ the faculty at UNLV or Blinn College (TX) have become, precisely because they have been burdened with supersized survey courses. They’ve definitely taken the lemons doled out to them by their administrations and made some pretty yummy lemonade out of it—-forcing publishers to jump through lots of hoops and provide them with most of the material and ideas needed to teach the course effectively, and even getting the publishers to route some cash their way to pay for photocopying and other essential department functions.
This really is a fairly straightforward cause-and-effect chain of events: Administrators, keen on cutting costs, offer less and less in the way of teaching support, but they simultaneously push faculty to teach more (and larger) sections than ever before. Faculty, overwhelmed by the enrollments and the lack of administrative support, find that they have no energy or interest in constructing their own teaching plans, lecture outlines, multimedia assets, quizzes or tests, and therefore push publishers to provide them with ready-made versions of these things. Publishers (despite the grumblings about ‘monopolistic’ behaviors among uninformed critics of the industry) compete against each other to produce ever more elaborate and ‘helpful’ ancillaries, art programs, etc., thus engaging in a counter-productive arms-race. Is it any surprise that the direct result of this chain is a precipitous increase in the cost of developing a new textbook, and, finally, higher prices from publishers?
Yes, there are other factors at play, but this very subtle shift of responsibility for creating teaching materials away from colleges (and their faculty members) and onto publishers’ shoulders is one of the top three or four factors that have increased the price of textbooks for students over the last decade or so.
And by the way, the Colorado CC decision that you report on elsewhere is just a further step down this road. Kinda funny that some of the initial reporting on that decision has made it sound like a good thing for students.
Wow, Peter, that is quite a lot to digest there. You didn’t give your full name or affiliation, but I gather that you are among the faculty community in this conversation — perhaps one among the lower-prestige institutions you described.
Please pardon me for taking your comments with a grain of salt; they don’t yet reconcile well with my own experiences and observations. You present a compelling argument for the rise in the cost of textbooks being fueled by demands on publishers by faculty overworked in new excesses of teaching loads imposed by administrators. Along each link in the chain of the argument, I find that I’m less certain about the likelihood of the positions you lay out. I appreciate your perspective, though, and will add it to the list of things I’m looking out for in this continuing exploration.
No. I think Peter is a publisher he sounds like a marketing manager for a large publishing company.
What he says is essentially correct, professor’s whine about expensive books, but they will not choose the “Yugo” of textbooks, they want the “Ferrari”. They want the bells and whistles. There are plenty of low cost versions of textbooks that are rarely looked at by faculty.
But, a successful book that goes into new editions will turn a reasonable profit eventually, some of them will become cash cows that pay for the rest and get published long after the author has retired. Also, sales in a foreign market will add to profitability. So, don’t feel sorry for the publisher.
In fact, the rise in the cost of textbooks is because publishers are for profit companies and their market is erroding. The big joke is that all the student PIRG groups and faculty members seem to think publishers should behave like they are not for profits…and that’s just not going to happen.
Bookstore Guy has me partly pegged. I’m an editor for a mid-sized publishing company that is almost never mentioned in the various articles and blogs about college textbooks. My company consistently offers lower-cost options in the disciplines in which we publish, and we’re doing just fine, but it is pretty striking how often the very big “unit” adoptions (the UNLV, Blinn, and other schools where the survey courses have 500+ students using the same book) go to the expensive books.
And believe me, I have very little sympathy for my much larger conglomerate competitors. Nonetheless, I can’t help but become exasperated as I read article after article (and blog after blog) on the topic of textbook pricing without seeing any evidence of this very important sub-topic. It is absolutely fundamental, and nearly invisible.
Thanks, Peter, for giving a little bit more of your background. It helps to know where your coming from. As I said in my original post, the nature of faculty choice being driven by the extras bundled with choosing a more expensive textbook is part of the ecosystem that I hadn’t encountered. This is probably something I should try to explore more and add to my later posting, The Complex World of the Textbook.
Thanks, too, for your perspective, Bookstore Guy. I’m not certain that the PIRGs are out to change the commercial publishers as much as they are trying to cut them out of the loop entirely based on a model of open access textbooks. As someone coming from the bookstore part of the ecosystem, I’d be interested to know your take on how bookstores can/could become local service providers for operations like Flat World Knowledge.
It has always seemed to me that the PIRGs have unrealistic expectations for publishers and if they think they can cut publishers out of the loop entirely, then they are again ignoring reality.
Flat World Knowledge is hoping to make money by providing (selling) alternate media formats of their open source textbooks. I’m not sure this is a realistic model. I think FWK is going to find it difficult to develop content that will meet the standards of the faculty of most universities. And I doubt that there are that many faculty who are willing to spend the time and effort to properly develop a wiki textbook with little or no financial remuneration. I just don’t see it happening unless universities change the job description of faculty to include creating wiki textooks for their students and we know that most tenure seeking faculty are not encouraged to publish basic level textbooks.
Your last question is the crux of the digital future. The bookstore needs to remain the focal point and the agregator of course materials. After all, we do not want to send our students on a cyber scavenger hunt to find their required course materials, do we? Can you imagine going to 5 classes and getting 5 syllabi, each with an URL to a website which requires you to download your course materials? And then going to the bookstore to pick up the few extra books that just aren’t in digital format yet. Crazy.
My vision of the future entails a student registering and then receiving a link to a bookstore website or a Learning Management System (Ohio and California already have these in the works.) which will allow them to see, purchase, and download all required digital course materials at one time. It will also provide the opportunity to place an order or reservation with the bookstore for any additional physical textbooks as well as provide the opportunity to review and purchase any ancillary materials that would be of benefit to their education. In such a scenario Flat World Knowledge would simply become another digital book to download. I’d imagine bookstores could work a deal with FWK in which the bookstore would charge the student a nominal fee to enable the transfer of any wiki textbook. Bookstores could also be involved in providing print versions on demand since we already create custom coursepacks and therefore have the mechanisms in place to provide this service.
The download itself will be possible because the bookstore will continue with it’s current role of gathering course material information from the faculty–this is our toughest job. And anybody who wants to jump into this process better be aware of the thousands of hours that go into collecting and verifying faculty course material requests.
BTW, most of your forward thinking bookstore are already selling digital books and early signs indicate that we are on the cusp of the future. It is going to grow slowly until we see somebody bring to the market a really good digital book reader and then it’s going to happen so fast that we will be amazed.
Re: “cut[ting] commercial publishers out of the loop entirely”:
It amazes me how blithely the work of hundreds of publishing professionals is dismissed or, even worse, not considered at all in discussions of textbooks and textbook prices. If only those who speak so knowingly and optimistically about “open source” or “wiki” alternatives could see just how bare-bones, badly-written, and pedagogically moribund most textbook manuscripts are in their first (and even second) drafts, and if they could see just how many of the great aspects of the truly great textbooks (books like Campbell’s BIOLOGY, for example, or Gardner’s ART THROUGH THE AGES, and many others) originate with the publishers of those books, they might appreciate how much value–real, palpable value–publishers add to the material that the specialist-authors produce, and they might not be so sanguine about the possibility of open source content replacing teaching resources that are professionally edited and designed.
This isn’t to say that textbook authors are clueless dolts or horrible writers. Instead, the point is that producing an effective textbook is not something that just comes naturally to anyone, not even the most talented and beloved teachers. The ‘genre’, if you will, functions in very specific ways—some of them counterintuitive—that don’t correspond to the ways that a good lecture or class discussion functions. The people who work in publishing possess a deep institutional well of knowledge about the structures that animate that particular genre. Ask anyone who has authored a major college textbook how deeply their publisher was involved in the process. Anyone who is honest (and whose book is truly a *major* college text) will respond in one of two ways: 1.) “those guys were a royal pain in the butt”; or 2.) “I can’t thank them enough for everything they did.” Both responses are evidence of the same thing: dozens of publishing professionals devoting thousands of hours of work to helping the author publish an effective and (one hopes) successful textbook.
I don’t presume to know the world of library science so well as to declare that you all are obsolete in this new era of “new media, new tools, new techniques, and new expectations” (quoting one of your other posts). Instead, I assume that librarians are working incredibly hard to adapt their skills to those new media and new realities, and are thereby ensuring that they will continue to offer a valuable service to other knowledge-workers well into the future.
How do you imagine you would feel, however, if the entire public discourse about your profession was essentially reduced to a sweeping declaration that your services were no longer needed, and that the ‘value’ you claim to add to the information-stream is non-existent—-a mere figment of your imagination?
Just sayin’.
In reading through both of the recent comments, I’m reminded of Clayton Christensen’s phrase: “performance oversupply”.
It would seem to me that the producers (meaning both the publishers and the bookstores in this context) in the textbook marketplace have overshot the demands of certainly their least demanding customers and perhaps even their most demanding customers. (Somewhere between points ‘a’ and ‘b’ on the graph.) Each actor continues to pile on more features and services that aren’t really needed by the consumers (both students and instructors), and as such the market is ripe for another actor to disrupt the ecosystem with what Christensen would call a not-yet-good-enough product that is improving on a fast trajectory.
Openly licensed textbooks could be that disruptive option. They certainly are not good enough now, but have the potential to become good enough very fast. If so, the least demanding customers will leave the incumbent producers — and the incumbent producers may respond with a “good riddance.” As the disruptive option gets better, it becomes good enough for the most demanding customer. If the disruptive option competes favorably now on both price and performance, the incumbent loses. (Point ‘c’ on the graph.)
And, Peter, believe me when I say that I think academic libraries are facing such a disruption from Google in particular and the internet in general. I’m not surprised by declarations that the profession’s “services [are] no longer needed, and that the ‘value’ [librarians] claim to add to the information-stream is non-existent.” I’m hip deep in it enough to say some of those very things about this profession. (Hence the use of the Jester moniker in this blog — to poke at the profession from within the castle walls.) Whether academic libraries survive in a recognizable fashion is a debatable point; it is by no means a certainty. From what I’ve seen, so far, of the college textbook ecosystem, much the same could be said about its principle actors.
And — it should also be said — thank you to both of you for a very stimulating and useful conversation.
“Performance oversupply” is an interesting concept, but your use of it in this context gets the situation exactly backwards.
The complex ‘educational solutions’ that depend on new media delivery systems, aggregated collaboration, user customization, end-user initiated decision-making, and constant updating of both the content and the technology through which the content is consumed are MUCH better examples of “performance oversupply” than the textbooks that these educational solutions aspire to replace. Survey after survey, focus group after focus group, faculty themselves tell us (and by “us,” I mean my company) that the various new initiatives create more work for them and produce no discernible improvement in students’ learning. These systems, so beloved by administrators and IT managers, offer too many features requiring too many separate decision-points, with not enough payoff.
Interestingly, many of these new initiatives are doing precisely what Christensen would say is the wrong thing: trying to effect a wholesale revolution all at once, attempting to unseat traditional textbooks + ancillary packages completely, instead of heeding Christensen’s main point, which is that they should be focusing on a very limited (and different) “performance dimension” from the one that the big textbook publishers currently operate on. The ‘kitchen sink’ quality of so many new-media educational initiatives is easy enough for existing publishers to undermine and simplify, as they surely will.
And for those of us operating in the small- to mid-sized space in educational publishing, we’re finding that we’re picking up significant market-share with one-color, just-the-basics books (yes, traditional books–still the primary way that most people become acquainted with Clayton Christensen’s ideas, by the way) that undercut the big publishers in price by 50% or more. Imagine that. No doubt the big three will continue to undermine their *own* established four-color behemoths with these sorts of ‘essentials’ texts, too, as publishers have always done. Publishing has been pretty good that way—-always back-filling market niches with new, less expensive and more bare-bones alternatives that then are ‘improved’ in subsequent editions with additions and ancillaries requested by their ‘best customers’. The fact that the publishing industry manages not only to move one product up the performance curve but ALSO create new products that fill in the space further down the curve seems to me to argue for seeing publishing as pretty good at managing the ‘dilemma’ that Christensen describes.
Peter — I think we are talking about nearly the same thing. I said “each actor [publishers and bookstores] continues to pile on more features and services that aren’t really needed by the consumers…” I went on to describe how openly licensed textbooks is a potentially disrupting innovation (from Christensen’s perspective) to that ecosystem.
It is interesting to think about your own strategy as well. His book also speaks of the “Basis of Competition” — four stages of product competition. He uses a hierarchy devised by Windermere Associates in which there are these four metrics that a consumer uses to measure products: performance, reliability, convenience, and price. When all other factors are equal at one metric, the basis of competition in the marketplace shifts to the next factor. It sounds like your company is making a conscious decision not to accelerate along the functionality trajectory (and the corresponding rat-race) and is instead focusing on the other factors of competition.
I am glad I stumbled upon this site, like the Jester said, this is a very informative discussion. Have been doing some research into the world of textbooks. I am a former student from a big 12 school that was very displeased with my textbook experience and have been tossing around ideas of a sort of alternate-bookstore.
I had forgotten all about this thread.
Consider the disruptive technology i.e. open source textbooks. They will be replacing a medium whose management is paid for directly by students. Collecting the textbook list from the faculty of a university and then providing those course materials for sale is a very expensive task. Open source textbooks would likely shift costs from the bookstore to the University and that means the students still get to pay, this time in the form of additional tuition.
One would assume that an open source textbook needs to be developed by a university faculty member. Realistically, the time spent developing and maintaining the textbook would replace time that a faculty member would have spent doing something productive for the university. This will be an invisible expense at first, but soon the university will figure out why certain faculty are not as productive as they used to be.
The more obvious expense comes from the fact that the bookstore would be unable to sell open source textbooks. Thus, the course materials department for a bookstore would not be able to sustain itself. It would then have to turn its course materials aggregation and distribution duties over to the university. Granted, the extent to which the university chooses or needs to pursue these new duties may be very different in the distant future, but in the near future this could be a huge expense.
So, the question that needs to be answered is which is the more efficient model?
If nothing is sold, as is potentially the case with open access textbooks, what is the point of collecting textbook lists from faculty? Isn’t developing course material a valuable thing for a faculty member to do? (It might not be as highly valued in the promotion/tenure process as research and publication at this point, but there are signs that this is changing.) If content distribution happens online and is a faculty-driven activity based on the needs outlined in the faculty’s syllabus, are there any more course materials aggregation and distribution duties?
That is the disruptive nature of open access textbooks.
I seem to have lost my better written reply. Here’s the short version.
Having read thousands of syllabi, I’m not sure you want to leave this task in the hands of the faculty.
Also, aggregation is necessary to ensure that course materials can be used by disabled students. I think California has been heavily involved in this.
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