Textbooks built to fit student budgets
Schools, nonprofits, and publishers go digital in an effort to create less-expensive textbooks.
By Gregory M. Lamb | Staff Writer for The Christian Science Monitor/ October 17, 2008 edition
John Kehe/Staff
Reporter Greg Lamb talks about a website that featured college textbooks that was forced to shut down.
Reporter Greg Lamb
Kevin Hegarty knows firsthand about the high cost of textbooks.
His older son, now in law school at the University of Texas, paid almost $600 for books this semester. His younger son, a junior at Texas majoring in business, paid nearly $900.
College students have long complained about the high cost of books, but recently they’ve had good reason: The cost has risen twice as fast as inflation, nearly tripling in the two decades from 1996 to 2005, according to a US government study.
To be fair, textbooks today are more elaborate than in the past, often containing workbooks and CDs with additional content. Publishers also are testing the waters of digital delivery, creating products that can be accessed online, including videos, simulated laboratory experiments, and other materials that stretch the meaning of the word “textbook.”
In addition, colleges are beginning to experiment with what’s possible in a digital age. Beginning next semester, the University of Texas will provide 1,000 students with free digital textbooks for up to two years in a partnership with publisher John Wiley & Sons Inc. Students will be able to access the books online or as files downloaded to their laptops, says Mr. Hegarty, a vice president and chief financial officer at the university, who spearheaded the agreement.
If all goes well, digital textbooks eventually will be offered to all of the school’s roughly 50,000 students for a nominal fee. Many printed textbooks today cost more than $100 apiece. Even at $40 or $45 per digital copy, Hegarty says, students could see substantial savings. For those who prefer to read (and take notes) on paper, the school expects to offer inexpensive printed versions, perhaps loose-leaf and spiral bound.
More than cost is involved in the transition to digital texts. Not only do they save on paper, printing, and shipping (an environmental plus), they can be more up-to-date. “Anything digital can be updated on the fly based on what the researcher who wrote the book learned yesterday in the lab,” Hegarty says.
While going digital creates a new set of opportunities, it has also led to new challenges. Once a book is in digital form, it becomes easy to copy and move. Illegal textbook swapping online, Napster style, has gained the attention of publishers, who are vigorously trying to stamp it out. The textbook-sharing site of one online Robin Hood was just put out of business for the fifth and final time. (See interview, below.)
Others are thinking even more radically about textbooks. Richard Baraniuk, a professor of electrical engineering at Rice University in Houston, has founded Connexions, a nonprofit website featuring free “open source” textbooks. Their authors ask for no payment, only that they be given credit for their writings and that the material remain free of charge. A 300-page textbook on the fundamentals of electrical engineering, for example, can cost $120 from a textbook publisher, Professor Baraniuk says. To print out a similar free Connexions textbook would cost about $20.
Baraniuk started with his own textbook on signal processing, which has been accessed at Connexions (cnx.org) more than 2.8 million times.
“Basically the whole system is broken, the system by which we conceive of writing books,” he says. The material in Connexions is divided into chapter-like modules of information, some 6,500 so far, that can be accessed individually or combined to form about 350 full textbooks.
Giving students traditional textbooks is like taking them to a clothing store and giving them all the same suit off the rack, despite their obvious differences. “In the future, each individual book is going to be customized to each individual child … and that’s hard to do with the traditional model,” he says.
The CK-12 Foundation, in Palo Alto, Calif., is trying to do something similar for younger students. CK-12 (ck12.org) already has created 15 free open-source textbooks that it calls “flexbooks” for use in high school classrooms – and hopes to have more on the way. The foundation uses high school student interns, as well as classroom teachers and experts, to vet the content of books. Students or teachers can easily search and customize the content for their own purposes, making flexbooks “the next evolution of the textbook,” says Neeru Khosla, who founded CK-12 last year.
She envisions, for example, that students might print out only the material that they will need for the next week or two and carry it bound as a single book in their backpacks.
Traditional textbook providers are also responding in a variety of ways, including a project called CourseSmart, founded and run by five of the largest publishers. Thousands of books, about one-third of the most popular college texts, can be accessed or downloaded at about half the cost of traditional texts, according to information on the website (coursesmart.com).
Hegarty says he talked with several textbook publishers in the course of setting up the new program at the University of Texas.
“All of them admit that their former model for publishing textbooks is changing before their eyes,” he says. “This is all in its infancy, which is probably one of the most exciting parts.”
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Comments
2. Anon | 10.18.08
Nonsense. The whole textbook industry is a cartel scam, where publishers heavily lobby the school administrators and department heads and the likes (such as take them out to Hawaii) and then they get this Juicy captive market - so who cared if the poor students had to forego spegatti and sauce to afford one??
Currently the publishers pay only a small fraction for printing costs. Thats why we can get so many other non-text books at book sellers for under ten bucks. They will merely save the few dollars on printing costs and still end up charging us high prices.
Its not about what it costs them, but about what they can get away with charging. And since students dont have a choice and cant choose a different book, there is no upper limit to this. Shame on Schools and colleges for allowing this. Why not just get the material elsewhere? With the internet there’s better information than any text can offer.
3. B. McKibban | 10.18.08
First, thanks so much for doing this story. It shows how wonderful Monitor journalism is and how much it is needed in the current information landscape. I hope there can be a solid middle ground found where creators of textbooks, authors and publishers, can make a profit while the consumers, students and others around the world, can have more affordable and convenient access to the information.
4. Jose Card | 10.19.08
It’s unbelievable for me to find that our students do not keep the books from K-12 and in college for the most part. Coming from a developed country, where everyone gets to keep their textbooks till they die, how can this be possible for a rich country like the US to render textbooks unaffordable?
We could have published the books in cheaper paperback format so it’s affordable. If a kid can keep their books in the summer, when things are slow, they may wonder back to the books around the house. Some of them only have a TV, video games, and now possibly a computer around the house. We can’t just tell the kids not to do drugs. Giving them something constructive to do is as important.
Although electronic textbooks are cheaper, they last the same length of time when students purchase them, that is just one semester or a quarter. Also, you have to think about opening them on the computer in the first place. With a hardcopy in paperback, it’s lighter to carry around than a hardcover book. If a student is taking three or four classes a day, they won’t carry 4 or 5 hardcover books around campus. I won’t, either. Paperback is the only type of book I will adopt for my textbooks.
5. S. Sandlin | 10.19.08
Faulkner once said paperbacks should never cost more than twenty-five cents and be affordable for everyone. And I believe you (CSM) once had an article comparing our textbooks with those made in Europe (which made me very upset, thinking about the weight and cost children here had to endure). No, there’s no excuse for the exhorbitant exploitation every corporate in this country takes on those who find themselves “held over the barrel” of necessity. What’s worse is when your course requires the newer edition of a text, making resale or buying used obsolete. Ah, well. I do remember when UC at Berkeley cost $75 a semester, musems were free, and you could go to the Metropolitan opera for under ten dollars…
6. Miami Mike | 10.27.08
Took a course in International Business (just to keep my hand in, I’ve been doing this for 25 years).
Textbook by McGraw Hill - $135.00. Absolutely RIDDLED with major errors of fact, blatantly unwarranted suppositions, and plenty of typographical errors - utterly shoddy product, and of course revised each year so last year’s text is valueless, and no good at all. Substandard product in every way, shape and form. McGraw Hill should be fined triple damages for each and every copy of this piece of garbage they crammed down people’s throats.
My favorite in this mess was “When Imclone’s new anti-cancer drug Erbitux is approved by the FDA . . . ”
I guess the FDA wasn’t reading the same book - and Martha went to prison because she drank the kool-aid and then bailed based on inside information. Of course, that wasn’t in the book, and isn’t in the next editions either.
College texts are an absolute ripoff, the entire greedy, tottering edifice of so-called higher education in this country ought to die of shame at the blatant exploitation of the poor students who are desperately trying to get an education so they don’t have to work flipping burgers.
Best thing this country could do for itself is make higher education free, or at least affordable - no more student loan slavery, people could afford to learn something and increase their income and everyone’s standard of living - it might even make America great again.
Education is expensive because it is based on the “shortage” model - few teachers, few classrooms, so it costs a lot. The internet changes all that - education can be widely disseminated to EVERYONE - and the society as a whole will benefit greatly, not just the venial text publishers and doddering fossils in their ivory towers.
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1. Michael L. Kent | 10.17.08
Textbook prices are so high because university bookstores buy back used copies and resell them over and over. The bookstore make a huge profit and the book seller, to compete, has to raise prices.
This may solve the problem of book publisher profits, and put university bookstores out of business, which few people have any sympathy for. But, in the end, the student who actually wants to keep his/her books, ends up with no books, and the publishers will begin making a ton of money again which will probably never be passed on to students or authors.
MLK