Textbook Scam
An article in today’s Wall Street Journal got me thinking. Okay, it got me mad. It describes how publishing companies, acting in collusion with universities, create “custom” textbooks in an attempt to suppress the used book market. Publishers get to increase their sales while universities receive a per book payment from the publisher. (Some call it a kickback.)
What do the students get? They get to pay, on average, double for a book with no real added value which could have been purchased used. In the article, an example is cited where the University of Alabama got $3 per book by allowing the publishers to include a 32 page section about the university’s writing program even though this information is freely available on the university’s site.
But do we even need textbooks? Having been to university myself and knowing what kind of information is found in those texts, I know that a great majority of it can now be found online, usually in a much more interesting, engaging, and rich format. Let’s face it; textbooks published by large corporations are going to deliver sanitized, dumbed-down, controversy-free, high-fructose filler for the masses. Clay Burell points us to an example of excellent, textbook-free content. It seems like in 2008, any professor or teacher worth their salt should be able to provide their students with a variety of free resources, avoiding textbooks in almost all cases.
Sergio Capursi, WSJ
The article describes how students are hurt financially by such egregious arrangements but completely neglects to mention how this system promotes environmental damage. Paper is a very energy and material intensive product to manufacture. It creates a lot of pollution and environmental degradation. To make a sheet of paper requires about 98 other sheets’ worth of resources. What better product to reuse than a book? Just ask any librarian.
This financial arrangement, besides showing a lack of vision and deep, connected thinking, shows a real lack of economic creativity on the universities’ part. Citing some numbers from the article, in the Alabama example, a book that could be purchased used for $30 becomes a required purchase of $60. The school makes $12,000 in royalties on the 4,000 books sold while students pay an extra $120,000—90% of which goes to the publishers. (Publishers explicitly prohibit the resale of these customized books.) Texts that could be reused end up collecting dust. A more sane arrangement (for any school believing it cannot do without the royalties from publishers—after, of course, having discarded other alternatives to textbooks) would be to simply charge students $3 to attend the class. This surcharge would provide money to the school while preventing students from having to spend $27 more, for effectively, the same book. It would allow the book to be resold on the national and international used book market, returning most, if not all, of the book’s purchase price. This arrangement would not only benefit students and schools; it would also be beneficial to the environment.
Universities that have entered into these partnerships with book publishers are completely ignoring the well-being of their students. They have hurt them financially while diminishing everyone’s ability to live well on a planet with a finite biosphere. Any school that enters into such financial agreements without actively encouraging the use of free, electronic resources, needs to question its purpose.
From WSJ article:
At the University of Alabama, Carolyn Handa, who until recently directed the school’s writing program, acknowledges that students can save money if they buy used standard editions or sell their books at the end of the term. But Prof. Handa says the university edition is designed as a long-term reference. “You don’t sell back your dictionary after your first year of college,” she says. “It should be a resource they have on their shelf.”
Professor Handa: Check out this link.
The writing program so far has collected about $20,000 in royalties in the two years since it started requiring custom textbooks, Prof. Handa says. She adds that she regularly declines pitches from other publishers offering even higher royalties. “I feel bad enough getting $3,” she says.
Hmmm. Doing good should not feel bad.
Prof. Handa says the royalty money helps pay for trips to conferences for graduate students and will underwrite teaching awards. This year, three graduate students received about $500 apiece to attend the April convention of the Conference on College Composition and Communication in New Orleans.
Professor, see my fifth paragraph above.
