Outraged by the cost of textbooks, college students
from across the commonwealth banded together Tuesday to push for
legislation to lower the cost of texts.
Christine Davis, a freshman at Massachusetts College of Liberal Arts, knows firsthand how expensive textbooks can be.
"I had to buy all new editions. They're exactly the same book, but the
page numbers just might be different, Davis said. "The only difference
is that they just may correct the spelling errors. It's just stupid and
unnecessary."
Members of the Massachusetts Student Public Interest Research Group
(MASSPIRG) told the Joint Committee on Higher Education that
publishers' practices such as bundling books — shrink-wrapping
textbooks with additional materials such as CDs, pass codes or
workbooks — unfairly drives up the cost of college textbooks.
The U.S. Government Accountability Office reported in 2005 that the
average college student spends about $900 per year on textbooks, about
20 percent of the cost of tuition and fees at four-year public colleges
and universities. Textbook prices are rising at about four times the
rate of inflation.
The committee is considering the College Textbook Affordability Act, a
bill filed by state Rep. Steven Walsh, D-Lynn, after college students
from Northshore Community College brought the issue to his attention
three years ago. The bill would require publishers to provide a product
list and wholesale prices and to estimate the time that each product
would remain on the market. It would also require that bundled
components be made available for individual sale.
More than 40 students, wearing their college T-shirts, attended the
hearing to show their support for the bill. Matt Cabral, a freshman at
Westfield State, said after the meeting that he spent about $350 for an
environmental biology book bundled with unnecessary disks.
"The CDs were just a PowerPoint that highlighted the different
chapters, but there's no relative information on them," he said. "All
this allows them (publishers) to do is jack up the book price.
But Sandi Kirshner, a chief marketing officer of Pearson Education
publishing company, told the committee that most of her company's
products can be purchased separately.
"This is such an emotional issue, and I'm totally aware of that, but
the charge that our products are only available as bundles is just not
true," Kirshner said.
After the meeting, she said she disagreed with the blanket statement
that publishers don't change material from edition to edition.
"We do carefully revise the books," she said. "We have a commitment to
make sure that students are using the most up-to-date materials in the
classroom. It is an unfair characterization of what we do as
publishers."
