Guest Column: Want to pay less for textbooks?
I was just visited by another textbook buyer – the third in the last two weeks. I send them all packing. Meanwhile, I haven’t seen a publisher’s representative in five years or more and thereby hangs the tale I’ll tell.
Every semester there’s much anguish and not a few letters to the editor about the high price of textbooks, but few writers have an understanding of why prices are so high. I have been a college textbook user-as student and teacher-for 40 plus years, so I bring a rather long, historical perspective to this problem. As I look back, I see two distinct phases: BUB and AUB, before used books and after used books.
Before I talk about how much textbooks cost, let me talk about their worth. I don’t always use textbooks, but, as a teacher, I appreciate how valuable they can be. No faculty member can stay abreast of their entire discipline-we are explicitly rewarded for specializing in narrow areas of research. A textbook gives me surety that the material I offer to students is comprehensive, up to date and standardized. This last point is critical because it means that if you have, say, Psych 1010 on your transcript, it can be “cached in,” at any other college in the country; its worth inevitably validated by a widely used and accepted textbook. I would never be able to fulfill my research and service obligations to the university if I had to develop, for all my classes, the full suite of texts and illustrations that a textbook typically incorporates. And the copyright issues in building a home-grown text are formidable. Textbooks typically come with a variety of teaching aides for the instructor and study aides for the student, often at no additional charge. I’ve always appreciated prepared test questions, for example, as writing good questions is extremely difficult. College education would be significantly weakened were we to lose textbooks published by reputable nationally recognized publishers. Now let me turn to the cost of textbooks.
First, I would acknowledge that textbook prices have always been relatively high, compared, say, to works of fiction. They aren’t the most expensive books, however, since scientific monographs and reference works are more expensive. The price of these books is elevated by the need for illustrations such as diagrams and tables or photographs. Facts and formulas must be checked by a team of copy editors. Imagine that, with a text in civil engineering, for example, the student may later use that text as a reference work to draw on in designing a bridge, and you can see how critical accuracy is in a textbook. All other things being equal, textbooks tend to be longer, havev a larger format and be more durable than other kinds of books-all of which drive up the price.
Second, I must acknowledge that textbook prices have risen much faster than inflation, indeed, even faster than tuition. These costs have been influenced somewhat by added bells and whistles like CD-ROMs, but even texts without these, have increased dramatically in price. Authors’ royalties are certainly not to blame as they have remained stagnant or even fallen. Generalizing from conversations with colleagues who, like myself, have written textbooks, I’d say we earn less than a dollar an hour for our labor as it is the rare text that sells enough copies to yield really substantial rewards for authors. Nor are publishers making big money. On the contrary, there has been massive consolidation among academic publishers and there are far fewer in business today than there were when I started teaching in 1968.
Up through the 1980s, I could count on regular visits from publisher’s reps who were extremely knowledgeable about their own books as well as the market in general. They often alerted me to potential texts that I wasn’t aware of and were useful “informants” about trends in teaching particular courses. But, alas, publishers can no longer afford to employ these individuals. They are among the many casualties of the used textbook business.
The reason I believe textbooks have gotten so expensive seems pretty straight forward. Whereas in 1968, a publisher could bring a book onto the market and expect to sell a steady stream of copies over several years, now a text can be sold at its retail price only at its inception. Sales fall off precipitously because the used market is so efficient at recycling and, unlike TV programs that go into re-runs, there is no requirement that publishers or authors be given “residual” payments. Hence, publishers must re-coup their investment in the very first semester. In 1968, a publisher that had invested $250,000 in a book might count on selling 10,000 copies at $25 over four years and, thereby, break even. Today, they need to sell 2500 copies that first semester at $100 per copy to earn back their investment. No doubt another factor driving up the initial or retail cost of the book is the lack of competition, as fewer and fewer publishers can earn enough from their books in one semester to cover costs and they go out of business.
But, while the cost of new textbooks has skyrocketed, used books are hardly a bargain for students. The process of recycling books from where they aren’t wanted to where they are has become a huge industry. Think of all the middle men involved: the store or buyer that buys the used book and the clerk who packages them for shipping to a warehouse where they are organized and sorted by a large workforce who then ship them back out to be sold to the next round of buyers. Many of these people must be making good money because the frequent book buyers who visit Old Main seeking to buy any complimentary textbooks the faculty may not want to keep are well-dressed and clearly middle-class.
There’s now a “shadow” textbook industry that is extremely profitable (or else it wouldn’t have grown so fast), but contributes not one cent of its profit to the cost of making its “product.” So, from my long-range perspective, the used textbook industry is a parasite feeding off the legitimate industry and, if my hypothesis is correct, the net and overall effect of this parasite has been to drive up the average cost of textbooks. That is, any savings a student might enjoy in buying (and then selling) a used textbook is more than offset by the higher cost of the new textbooks they must occasionally purchase. I believe that the cost of textbooks would be substantially lower today if the used book market were to be, say, legislated out of existence.
Dr. David Lancy is a professor in the anthropology department and a 2001 Carnegie Professor. The second part of this series, detailing the future of textbooks, will appear in Monday’s issue.