Professors Challenge Cost of Textbooks -LAT

Criticizing the high cost of college textbooks, hundreds of professors at UCLA and nationwide asked a publishing firm Thursday to stop printing frequently revised editions of its textbooks that the teachers say hike prices and make cheaper used books obsolete.

In a group letter to Thomson Learning Inc., about 700 math and physics professors from 150 universities expressed particular concern over the cost of the company's introductory physics textbook.
.....
"It's not that we don't want textbooks changed; we just want it when it's justified," said UCLA assistant professor Rainer Wallny, who teaches an introductory physics course.
.....
Bruce Hildebrand, executive director for higher education with the Assn. of American Publishers, which represents many publishers of college textbooks, said that the CALPIRG figures are skewed and that Thursday's protest was another unmerited attempt to criticize the industry.

"This is an absolutely free market," Hildebrand said. "A professor can choose to buy or not to buy any textbook he or she wants. There are literally thousands of choices."

http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-textbook8apr08,1,6334126.story?coll=la-headlines-california

*not sure this is LBN, but I've never seen a coordinated protest about this particular (growing) expense of education.

i think he has a point with the frequent revised editions. it's very noticiable in math books also. i can understand the changes due to use of computers but even then they continue doing it . and there isn't much difference between what one actually learns in the books.

When I was in college, in the late 1970s and early 1980s, I recall that one physics textbook I had cost me $75. Five years later, my brother ponied up $125 for an English Literature compendium -- and everthing in it could be found for free on Gutenburg today.

Yes, it's an absolutely free market. And I'm sure that within a few years, free on-line textbooks will start showing up.

--p!

That was the estimate given to me about two months ago for the cost of books for a 30-credit-hour teacher certification course.

For one of my final classes in 2003, we had six assigned texts that came to a total of $250. All the books were brand new. At the end of the semester, the bookstore would buy back NONE of them, because NO ONE ELSE IN THE FREAKING COUNTRY was using them. After three weeks, the prof determined that the majority of the students in the class were insufficiently prepared for her to be able to use three of the texts, so she revised her syllabus and eliminated readings in them. We never once discussed any of the material in them.

College textbooks are a racket. They ought to be investigated under RICO!

If they don't change the textbook from one semester to the next (no buyback), the rate of exchange is HORRIBLE. We paid $125 for a brand new textbook (sold out of used ones) and we only got TEN DOLLARS in a buyback. Why bother?

Last semester, my older daughter's friend went to work for a textbook company. We ordered our younger daughter's books through her with her employee discount. MAJOR difference. It was almost cut in half. Tell you something about their markup?

for English 102. I tell my students about it and say they can buy it if they want it, but they don't have to because every story, play, and poem we will be studying is also avaiable free on the internet, so they can use links I have collected for them and print off their own copies from the net.

The only book they actually need is the novel we study, and they can usually find it free in a library or in a cheap used copy. I don't care if they all have different editions. If a student has a problem finding a specific passage in his edition, I just take his book for a second and locate it quickly for him.

I also save my old instructor's copies of the books I use in another class. Then, when some students can't afford the textbook, I lend them a copy. Yeah, it's an older edition, but 99% of what they need is in there, though they might have to use the index to find it because it's on a different page.

Where I can, I protect my students from the outrageous prices of textbooks.

Bravo to you for working around the racket of the textbook market. Maybe if more instructors took your approach it would send a message. Take care. Susan

It is the professors who assign the textbooks. If they would only assign older edition textbooks, students would be able to purchase them used for much less money.

One of my history professors back in college used to assign books that were several years old, so that students could buy them cheap.

Publish or perish in many cases causes professors to continually "revise" a textbook they wrote so as to add another book to their bibliography.

Textbooks are the biggest rip off scheme going.

For classic books, such as literature and philosophy, don't forget to check used bookstores where you can often pick them up for less than a dollar. Many local used bookstores also sell through amazon, barnesandnoble.com, abebooks.com and other websites.

'Publish or perish' is really about getting academic papers published in academic journals. This is usually expected of faculty at research institutions and liberal arts colleges, but not necessarily at schools where teaching is the emphasis (such as community colleges and state schools).

The professors who write these books want to revise them because they don't get any more more money when a used copy of their book is sold.

because for the vast majority of textbooks available, nobody buys them. The only way a publisher can make money is by adding a big markup. It is a racket and this part does have to do with publish or perish. Getting in journals is not enough in a lot of places. I'm a grad student and every one of our profs have had books published. One of my profs, who is quite well respected, publishes in journals often, and whose book is sort of medium-known and medium-used, has made a grand total of something like 200 dollars off of his book. Of course profs put up with this because you can't get books published without this system.

For the very low percentage of books that get used by a significant number of courses as a textbook, then there is lots of money to be made and things work as you describe.

Websites like half.com are changing this dynamic. Publishers might respond in the medium-term by jacking costs even more on new books that don't have much hope of selling because they know the number of books after the first few semesters is going to plummet as students find them on the Web.

The ones I know that have written them--linguists all--have written them because they hated the pre-existing crop of them.

Sometimes the publisher asks for revisions after enough time goes by or after the list of errata gets long enough, sometimes the profs want to revise because they think they can do a better job with certain bits that aren't very effective.

The Czech way of doing things involves scripta (sg. scriptum). The faculty write them for their courses, they're cheaply offset print and perfect bound. No index. No fancy graphics, no fancy formatting, the charts tend to be simple. Downside: they're used by small numbers of people, reflect just one professor's point of view, and the students get the same point of view in their classes.

Narrow scholarly works that sell very few copies, and mass-market texts that sell millions. The leading calculus text (James Stewart) has half the US college market. He must have made serious money -- there is a building with his name on it where he taught. (Of course, there are textbooks that sell but only a little; a colleague of mine jokes about his double-digit royalty checks. On the other hand, my PhD advisor bought a new Mazda 626 years ago off his textbook royalties; he was the co-author of a popular book on discrete math at the sophomore level.)

Not all disciplines expect book-writing. Most mathematicians only write journal articles. Books in math tend to be summaries or expositions of already-published research.

but pretty much everybody winds up taking the big general ed or nearly universally required classes.

The linguistics class for the general ed linguistics class I TAed for for two years went from 4th to 5th edition ... and I think hit 7 before the professor/co-author died a couple of years later. But she still never saw much income from it.

...are out of print, so they quickly disappear from book distributor warehouses, etc. I've managed to do that a couple of times, using books for a couple of years after they go out of print, but eventually the bookstore can't find enough copies for the class.

I take a different view than many students do (but remember that I formed that perspective when I was a student). I view textbooks as lifetime investments. I still have, and still use, many of my college texts. They're a valuable part of my professional library-- so much so, that I've paid to ship them around the country several times.

That said, I do agree that the cost of texts is exorbitantly high. That's certainly the case for the ecology and entomology texts that I use. Frankly, I wish I had time to develop my own texts, which I would make available electronically. In the current academic work climate, at least at my institution, that's a pipe dream.

I teach math at a university and a community college. We want to keep the same book for as long as possible so students have the opportunity to buy used copies and save money. But there are never enough used books to satisfy the demands for the next term since some books are too damaged to use, some students keep theirs for future reference, enrollment goes up, etc. So, when the publishers stop providing enough new books to fill up the shelves because that edition is out of print, what are you going to do? This year we ordered only used copies of our business calculus text book from a distributor and the publisher refused to provide the support they provide when you order new books from them: no free desk copies, no free instructor,s solutions manuals, no test bank software.

and give them out at the beginning of the semester. It saves us a lot of money.

I had one that photocopied all of the required texts for a political philosophy class, and it only cost $20 each instead of $200+.

Many professors at realize the textbook industry is a racket.

I worked as a secretary at a college so I am very familiar with the book adoption process.

The bookstores at the colleges (at least the college system I worked in) are a major, national chain. They will NOT stock old editions, so the professors HAVE to adopt the new editions as they come out.

The bookstores say it is too hard to find the old editions on the market, in order to sell them to the students. This may or may not be true. If the publisher stops publishing the book, then the bookstore company has to locate old editions on the market, which may be very time consuming and costly, because not every single student sells their textbooks back.

Believe me, the professors I worked with wanted to keep the old editions, because every time the book changes, it creates a lot of work for the instructor to change all the assignments and lesson plans.

The whole system works against the educators and the students.

I try to keep text costs down for students, but in some cases, that is all but impossible. In certain types of courses, there are only a few textbooks that would be best to use, and these texts cost anywhere from $50 to $120 per book. If the publisher continues to revise the texts, then the used books are almost worthless. The one thing professors can do is to continue to use old texts and monitor the changes in the revisions to make sure there aren't any major changes that will be problematic for those individuals in the class who might buy the new book.

It is a problem.

The student store there used to make a real effort to get used books for the students, and even tried pooling with other Calif. universities to make their own little used-book consortium. I knew the people in charge of their student store fairly well for a number of years, and they tried to balance the need for profit on the books with the need for flexibility and service to the community.

The textbook industry is hideously expensive and inefficient--and can't be otherwise, unless we change our expectations. Books that are simple--on text, trade editions--should be fairly cheap. But the trend's been for using long-lasting acid-resistant paper, fancy graphics, charts, indices, having wide margins for note taking, using nifty formatting to make salient points more salient, multiple colors on nearly every page, bound into signatures ...

They have rather small press runs for many books, and redistribute the cost of the small press runs over those with larger ones (else my grad level complex analysis book would have been $200, not $100, back in '81).

And handling the suckers is a nightmare: faculty want 20 copies, then have 25 students and need 5 more copies rushed by yesterday; or they want 200 copies, and get 25 students, and the store has to return the remaining copies.

And some faculty really don't much care that the textbooks are expensive, hard to get, or that their student store hasn't a clue. A Polish course I audited at Rochester wanted books ... from Poland. I started sitting in somewhere in week 2 or 3, and the books hadn't arrived. 5 days later, I had my copy from a Polonia, a bookstore in Chicago ... and the rest of the students were still waiting for theirs from Poland. When their books arrived, they cost $10 more each than my book did. The bookstore couldn't get the books for the course I was teaching ... I ordered them from Amazon, for less.

is sucking students bone dry.

I don't know about any of you, but my financial resources were streched pretty thin in college. I went to buying anything I could off the web.

I bought the new edition for the semester only to find that a new one was due for next semester. This cost my about $75 of beer money when I went to sell it back. The student worker in the book store told me the whole scam. The book companies weren't doing well and changed a few examples and put a new cover picture to call it a new edition. What a scam. I could understand if it was a current event driven subject, but not a whole lot changes in probability theory. I'm 99% sure. Not sure if that's a type 1 or type 2 error for all you statistics types out there who will get that.

that textbooks are a massive SCAM!!!

They revise about every other year, which always involves raising the price, and as the article says, making the previous version obsolete.

Also, these publishers send out THOUSANDS upon THOUSANDS of samples to the professors, trying to encourage book adoption. These are the $150 books that the students are supposed to buy, but they are sent out by the THOUSANDS just on the hope that the professors will look at them. They usually don't.

You wanna know what happens to them? They are intercepted by the secretaries, who sell them to book dealers for about $40 or $50 a piece. I don't know what the book dealers then do with them, but the secretaries make a nice little under-the-table profit that goes unreported and untracked.

****** I did not participate in this activity as I consider it to be mail fraud. But I saw it happen ALL THE TIME ************

As with all other sectors of the media, educational publishing is increasingly consolidating providing fewer choices as a result.

As one of my major gripes as an undergrad and grad student, this issue is a priority for me as a design my courses. In most cases, I have been able to work around the publishing scams and still provide quality reading materials for my classes. I'm aided in my efforts by the technological services in our library. This semester for example, I use an out of print, yet easy to find, text as the basic reader and supplement the reading with individual articles posted in PDF format on our library's "Electronic Reserve." Not only is this cheaper for the students, it allows me to tailor my curriculum to achieve specific purposes not always possible with more generalized texts. Win-win.

where they cost about 1/10 of what they would cost in US. These books are produced specially for India and other Asian countries for sale at a lower price.

buy book, go across the border, and have them copied and bound. They then return the book within the return time. Since many kids near the border are very poor and can barely make it...this is the only way they can afford books. That 'newer addition' was such a ripoff. after my soph year, I stopped buying books. Most of the time my notes and the reserve texts at the library were enough.