College students look online for cheap books
By Jaime Lutz
Michelle Simunovic
College of Communication senior Monica DyBuncio needed to buy a
textbook for one of her classes. The initial price was around $200 at
the Boston University bookstore, but DyBuncio had another plan.
“I went to www.half.com, the eBay website, and I was able to buy it for $10,” DyBuncio said.
DyBuncio’s story is becoming much more common as students look for solutions to combat the high cost of class materials.
Textbook prices are rising at four times the rate of inflation,
according to Department of Labor statistics, and several studies show
that the average college student pays anywhere from $600 to $1,000 a
year on textbooks.
Many academics said students can only do so much to beat a system that requires them to spend large sums of money on textbooks.
“Faculty members or universities clearly have to change their behavior
for students to really become better off,” James V. Koch, president
emeritus at Old Dominion University, who has written extensively on the
economics of textbooks and testified before Congress on the subject,
said.
THE PROBLEM
Koch said the high price of textbooks is a result of professors
deciding to require students to buy books which they are not purchasing
themselves.
“There is lots of evidence that the typical faculty member does not
know how much his book costs,” Koch said. “The people who are buying
these things are not very sensitive to price changes.”
Bundling, Koch said, is when textbook publishers package supplementary
items like CD-ROMs, atlases or other materials along with the main
textbook. It is another practice that is driving up the cost of
textbooks according to Koch.
“Faculty members say it drives up learning, and it can be a real positive, but it makes things more expensive,” Koch said.
Additionally, many textbooks release new editions frequently, which
precludes students from saving money by purchasing used books.
One such example is the textbook for the COM course Introduction to
Advertising. The eighth edition of “Advertising: Principles and
Practice,” which is required for Professor Christopher Cakebread’s CM
317 class in the spring, will cost students $193.75 if they buy it from
the BU bookstore.
Cakebread said it is important to have the latest edition of a book for advertising classes.
“In the sciences, the information you’re getting doesn’t change that
much, but our industry changes all the time,” Cakebread said. “The 2009
textbook is already useless,” in some areas.
Cakebread said he has offered students the chance to buy an electronic
copy at half price, but few have taken him up on the offer.
“I offered for years an electronic copy at half the price, but few students took it up,” Cakebread said.
FIGHTING FOR CHANGE
In recent years, the price of textbooks and supplemental materials
gained the attention of the federal government, partly due to the work
of several student advocacy organizations.
One of these groups is the Massachusetts Public Interest Research
Group, which has student chapters that are funded and directed by
students, Eileen McGivney, a professional organizer hired by MASSPIRG,
said.
In 2008, MASSPIRG and other student interest groups nationwide
supported efforts to get affordable textbook legislation passed through
Congress, resulting in the affordable textbooks provisions in the
Higher Education Opportunity Act.
The act, signed into law by former President George W. Bush, requires
textbook publishers to disclose the price of textbooks to faculty and
offer textbooks and supplements such as CD-ROMs separate and unbundled.
It also urges colleges to give students complete information about
required textbooks before class registration.
Judith Schotland, chair of the BU’s Teaching, Learning and
Instructional Resources Committee, said the university has informed all
professors that they have to comply with the act. Schotland, a clinical
associate professor in Sargent College, said professors have also been
encouraged to order their textbooks earlier.
“If textbooks are going to be reused the next semester, and the
bookstore knows in advance, they can buy back the students’ textbooks
and resell them,” Schotland said.
NEW SOLUTIONS
Aliza Vaida, the president and founder of BU’s MASSPIRG chapter and a
senior in the College of Fine Arts, said there is still more work to be
done to reduce textbook prices.
MASSPIRG plans to focus on informing faculty and students about the
option of “open textbooks” –– free or inexpensive textbooks with an
“open” license that are usually available in a variety of formats.
Professors can adapt them to fit specific needs.
“If every student were able to use open textbooks it would make it easier for more people to go to school,” McGivney said.
One open textbook publisher is Flat World Knowledge, which has the
tagline: “Remixable textbooks by expert authors, free online and
affordable off.”
“We had worked in traditional college textbook publishing for a long
time,” Eric Frank, the co-founder and chief marketing officer for Flat
World Knowledge, said. “It was so clear to us that in publishing that
no one was happy. Students intensely dislike the industry that they are
supporting. Faculty had moved from ambivalent to feeling like they were
participants in a market that does not really work anymore. And writers
were frustrated that high costs were keeping people away from reading
their product.”
Out of this frustration came Flat World Knowledge, which makes its
books available in a variety of formats at different prices. Online a
book is free, but students can also buy print books in color or black
and white for a low price, get a copy for a kindle or an iPhone, get an
audiobook version or even buy the book a chapter at a time.
Professors, meanwhile, are able to choose the content that goes into
the books, thanks to the books’ Creative Commons licenses. This can
mean changing the order of the chapters or deleting some chapters
altogether, adding supplementary material, or even changing a sentence.
“The problem with authors in the traditional industry is that they have
to sell their book at a really high price first semester, and every
semester after that they see their sales plummet from students selling
used copies of their books,” Frank said. “In our model we sell the same
book and make less money per student, but we make it from more students
more consistently per semester.”
Some, however, question this model. Joyce Macario, an assistant
professor of advertising and public relations in COM, looked at the
website for Flat World Knowledge, and said she could not imagine
publishing through them.
“It’s hard to go through what it takes to get a book published and then provide it for free,” Macario said.
Her book, which is a full-color paperback titled “Graphic Design
Essentials: Skills, Software and Creative Solutions,” costs around $50
new and is considered relatively inexpensive by students in her class,
Macario said. The book is unique, she said, in that it combines design
fundamentals with software techniques.
“It is a better expenditure than getting a mediocre book that is cheaper,” Macario said.
Schotland said BU has been contacted by different publishers offering
to build books from components that professors choose, which would be
much less expensive than a full textbook.
“I think faculty are acutely sensitive to costs,” she said.
Schotland did not say if professors would be told to pursue cheaper alternatives.
OTHER OPTIONS FOR SCHOOLS
Even without transitioning to new publishing platforms, universities
can lower the burden for students simply by adding more competition
among booksellers, Koch said.
Koch pointed to the University of Montana, where he once was president,
as an example of a university with a better system. There, the
bookstore is nonprofit and the school website provides links to other
booksellers such as Amazon.com so students can compare prices.
“Many universities have a financial interest in the current system,”
Koch said, noting the large number of universities who either own their
own bookstore or, as in the case of BU, have a cooperative relationship
with a bookstore like Barnes & Noble to get a percentage of that
location’s sales.
Another option is textbook rental systems, which Koch called “one of
the best hopes out there,” a system that would reduce textbook prices
by about two-thirds.
This system works best in large introductory classes, Koch said, and
requires these classes to use the same book and edition for several
years, which is rented out by the school to students.
However, professors often do not like this system. “Faculty members
sometimes argue that this a violation of their academic freedom,” Koch
said.
And some professors feel uncomfortable with any restrictions on their
ability to pick material for their classes, even if it makes textbooks
more affordable.
“As a student, you, and your parents, pay quite a lot of money to get
teacher-scholars who know the world of books in their field and thus
have appropriate criteria for selecting among them. Students do not,”
Michael Aeschliman, a BU professor of educational development, wrote in
an email. Aeschliman said that he nonetheless tries to consider a
textbook’s cost to students.
College of General Studies freshman Karen Johnson estimates she paid
$650 to $850 in books for her first semester in college. She said for
the spring she is going to pursue online alternatives rather than going
to the BU bookstore.
“Next time I buy books I am definitely going to look around to get better prices,” Johnson said.
