An oped in today's New York times complains about the high prices of textbooks -- often over $100 a book. [Full disclosure, I'm a coauthor on a Contract law textbook].
But the big problem here is that professors pick the books but the students pay the price. So professors don't have incentives to think about whether the extra money for a text book is worth it. Like doctors ordering tests, many professors don't even know what the textbook they've choosen costs. Even worse professors (like me) get a kick back... I mean royalty... if we assign our own book.
A nice application of our "Why Don't You Feel My Pain" tool would be to have schools include free textbooks as part of the tuition. School administrations like HMOs would start paying attention to whether money was being wasted on extravagently priced books. T
I agree
No opinion
I disagree
Add your comment
Good idea but probably too much for already strained university/college budgets. Perhaps a better approach would be to have a sliding scale incentive whereby the student's marks dicatated how much the books would cost them. A GPA of 4.0 would mean full reimbursement from the school. 3.5 could be 75% reimbursement, etc. Great incentive for the students to achieve as high a mark as they could.
What is even worse is when a professor chooses a bad textbook to teach a standard introductory course (where there are many better and cheaper books available) because he wanted the kickbacks or decided to help a colleague get her own kickbacks.
A college may want to introduce the following policy. A professor must choose among the top ten selling books on a subject matter, or he must choose a book cheaper than all of them. This will encourage booksellers to compete on price, and not rely on a small and captive customer base.
The textbook industry has long been a powerful lobby. In public schools they have demanded regular updates of books even though in many fields good works can remain relevant for decades.
My personal experience is that the vaunted advantages and improvements of these mass texts is questionable. In high school I actually grasped more from reading a copy of Euclid than the formal book on geometry.
Not that I would recommend this as a text, but I do think in the last fifty years that many fine books on this specific subject have been produced. I would suggest public ad university systems gather up some of the best, negotiate cheap copyrights (if your book had been out of print 20 years would you accept a $100,000) start printing these and (for subjects were applicable) use them for years. Let teachers chose from a small number of basic texts for basic information. It would cut the cost for public scholl students by a hundred or so a year, college students significantly (especially since used books would retain value.)
In the social studies and other fields texts can be supplemented by books from the mainstream market issued in paperback. There is an awesome amount of good material out there.
The sciences and some technical studies present more problems, but they are only a fraction of books sold and flexible solutions can be found. It is now possible to put material on computer and have near universal access (in fact increased access for the blind with reading software.) At an advanced level an immense amount of free material is availible. And even at lower levels serious research is possible.
I don't think that on this issue the state should take on an existing private cost (college students purchase of books,) but restructure an existing private and public cost. I simply don't think the quality of the (average) text book I have encountered justifies a price tag of from 2 to 8 times the cost if production was managed by the purchasing institutions.
Nice idea, but why are the textbooks so pricey? Maybe as an author Ian can shed some light.
The same textbooks in paperback are available for 1/10th the price in Asia. The paperbacks are printed by the same publishers are decent quality, good enough for a couple of years.
I don't know why publishers cannot sell the same paperbacks in the USA. It is not like I want all my textbooks in hardback, they are going to be sold or will be safe in a box at the end of the semester.
Unforunately, a college or university that chooses or is forced to include "free" textbooks will make up the difference by increasing tuition. There are only two solutions to the problem, if you want to force the change: either legislation that prohibits professors from assigning textbooks that cost more than a certain amount, or legislation that gets textbook publishers' manipulative profits under control.
Why are the prices higher in the US? It might not be because they're being "manipulated," but rather because that's the cost of getting a book to store shelves. I could of course be wrong, but I'd like to see how government regulations and taxes affect the process here, if much at all.
And I agree with the poster who said that while this is a decent idea, schools would just raise tuition or their "instructional fee" (which isn't usually bound by state caps [where they exist]) to cover the cost... in that system somebody's winning and somebody's getting screwed too.
First an excellent discussion of cost issues for text books well thought out by all posters, I'd like to add that with online texts the ability to hyperlink refences would be invaluable. An online or downloadable version would save the printing costs and preserve the resources to make paper books. Also it would save a poor student's aching back. But I don't think the answer is to include the cost in tuition. It would only be shifting the expense created by a faulty system not fixing the problem itself.
How about in the public education sphere at least (both K-12 and college levels), we establish a nationwide, nonprofit open-source consortium to first agree on the content to go into a standardized textbook for a given subject, and then have the consortium produce the text itself (outsourcing the actual printing), with a specific directive not to update with unreasonable frequency. If a given subject changes drastically between semesters, professors are free to point students to the internet or amend the text in their own lectures.
In the private sector the same thing could be done, for both private and public institutions.
People do not vote intelligently in general and will never select school boards that will stop bowing to publisher special interests or stop being overly enamored with the latest fads or buzzwords in education (and the corresponding book revisions buzzwords necessitate). There are as many conflicts of interest among school boards as there are stars in the sky. Beyond that, the general demographic of people who gravitate (or will be elected) to this sphere of "public service" in general tend to be more starry-eyed idealists than fiscally responsible, and their enthusiasm for the latest buzzword is contagious to an intellectually lazy voting public (it ~sounds~ good). So the boards need to be circumvented altogether.