I work in the textbook industry. I see article after article about how students can get free or lower-cost textbooks by renting or reading online, complaining that so-called traditional textbooks cost too much and add too much of a financial burden to students pursuing degrees. You even have sites like 'Textbook Revolt,' founded by two former university students, where students can swap textbooks for free. People definitely seem pissed off that textbooks are so dang expensive, and they're mad as hell and not gonna take it anymore! Or something like that.
How exactly did textbooks become the de facto symbol of the Man in the realm of higher education? While it is true that publishing companies in the past decade have been bought up by conglomerate corporations, only interested in shifting units and increasing the bottom line, what else has changed?
If you ask me, the undue focus on the cost of the textbook is a device designed to keep students from asking questions in the right places, and to keep people from seeing the real problem. Almost no one defends the textbook or extolls its virtues, and the work that goes into creating a textbook is 'invisible' and therefore not valued. That work is devalued not only by the post-secondary academic audience, it is also devalued within the publishing company itself, with workers increasingly being laid off and replaced by offshore vendors. Those workers who remain must now do the job of at least 2 people, thus straining the quality and attention that can be given to any one product at a time. That's right, it's no longer a 'textbook,' it's a product--an abstraction that accounts for numbers in a spreadsheet. Now in publishing we have editors who don't edit, they product manage, and we have production folks who manage vendors in India to copyedit, typeset, and publish these products, work that used to be done here in America. It's easy to be cynical about textbooks these days because the undue attention paid to textbooks in the past 10 years has made the publishing industry into the monster that people claimed it always was: treat textbook publishers like evil incarnate corporate monsters, and over time, they will more and more resemble that monster.
By saying textbooks are too expensive, are people really saying that the knowledge that they contain isn't worth diddley-squat? Most students don't realize that one factor that goes into the cost of the textbook is the cost of producing FREE instructor supplements to help them teach the course, especially at the community college and career levels. These things cost money to develop, and the cost is rolled up into the sticker price of the textbook. You want fancy software with that textbook? That costs money too--someone has to develop that software, it doesn't just appear out of thin air. We have to float the cost of so-called 'free' supplements for instructors just to get them to adopt the textbook. We have to make their transition to our textbook as easy as possible, because if we don't, a competitor certainly will.
All of this aside, it was the well-organized used book market was really responsible for this dramatic shift in the way textbooks are viewed. A company invests capital into producing a textbook, and doesn't see the return on its investment why? Because instead of selling new copies, bookstores are selling ever-increasing amounts of used copies, and not at a significant reduction in price, either. This led directly to increasingly shortened revision cycles, and ever-inventive ways to cheat the used-book market out of a sale--online supplements, tear-out passcodes in textbooks, software in the back, you name it. In his article, Why Are Textbooks so Expensive?, Henry Roediger III expresses it best: "many factors used to "explain" the high prices of books are probably effects, with the cause being the organized used book companies that prey parasitically on the host publishing companies and threaten to destroy them." His article goes on to say that college bookstores have also driven publishers to sell on the net price, allowing the bookstore to set the list price, and they often drive the costs up 30 to 40 percent, not helping the perception that textbooks are outrageously priced, even though publishers don't see a penny of that money. And those free CDs and supplements publishers add to require students to buy a book new rather than used? The bookstores have been known to take those packages apart and charge extra for those as well, thus defeating the publisher's intention. Oh, and instructors contribute to this by selling their complimentary desk copies to organized retailers who then resell them to students as well. In response, publishers are starting to produce a certain amount of books with covers that say 'instructor copy' on them to combat these sales. Publishers have to become ever more creative in order to stay ahead of crafty people trying to make a buck off of their product.
And now there's the HEOA laws which require publishers to slice and dice their textbook offerings even further. If your book comes with a CD, you'd better make a non-CD version available, dammit, or suffer the consequences! Students have a right to purchase just the book or the book with CD for a higher price...funny thing is, we price ours the same either way, it's the bookstores that jack the prices up, but you don't see anyone stopping them or slapping them with legislation. It's those evil textbook publishers at it again!
What about the tuition costs, aren't those astronomically high and getting higher? What about those earnest promises of employment after graduation in this economy? Recently the government took for-profit colleges to task for the rates at which they were graduating students into fields that weren't hiring. Students were amassing huge student loans, then going out into the world, degrees in hand, only to find that they weren't employable in their immediate region, and then defaulting on their federally-backed student loans. But by and large, no one questions that large tuition bill, perhaps because they 'pay' for it with loans anyway, and the cost of higher education just continues to increase.
Saying textbooks should be cheap is like saying that banks should provide their services for free. I mean, consider all of the knowledge and expertise of the author, all of the time and money spent creating supplements like test banks, PowerPoint presentations, online courses, instructor's manuals, student software, websites to accompany the text--these things are 'must-haves' in the current competitive textbook environment. Instructors want cheaper textbooks? Then start creating your own PowerPoints and tests for class, stop demanding a full-color display for your so-called "visual learners," stop demanding that publishers kill themselves in the race to supply you will all of the tools you need just short of a robot to teach the class for you, in order to secure an adoption of their book. Don't wanna do that? Didn't think so.
