Student Groups Pressure Colleges Over the Insane Cost of Textbooks

[Purveyor]

by Akane Otani
12:39 PM EST February 27, 2015

College students shell out hundreds of dollars on textbooks every year. The average price of a new textbook was $68 in 2012, according to the National Association of College Stores, and the College Board suggests students budget between $1,225 and $1,328 a year for books and supplies. That can amount to as much as 40 percent of tuition for community college students, but there may be a way to chip away at that expense, a new report says.

Switching one of their dead-tree texts out for an open-source one—a book available for free online or to print at a minimal cost—saves students an average of $128 per course every semester, said the Student Public Interest Research Groups in a report (pdf) published Tuesday.

The Student PIRGs, a group of state student advocacy organizations, crunched data from five colleges that have introduced open textbook programs to estimate how much students save by using open books. With more than 11 million full-time undergraduates in the U.S., and upwards of 160 open textbooks on the market, the group says students would save $1 billion a year if they all replaced a single book with its open-source alternative.

Of course, if finding an open-source book right for a specific class were as simple as running a quick Google search, more college students would probably be doing it. There's no sense downloading a free calculus book if your open-textbook exams are based on the pricier alternative. The report acknowledges as much.

"Many faculty members are not aware that these alternatives exist and are ready for classroom use," the report says, and "in making the transition from publisher-prepared materials to open textbooks, faculty often need some assistance in finding open materials for their course." The report adds that it can also be tough to find open-source versions of books for more advanced, niche courses.

more...

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-02-27/student-groups-pressure-colleges-over-the-insane-cost-of-textbooks

[Man from Pickens]

1. I was just considering this issue the other day

I couldn't come up with a good reason why textbooks continue to exist, except as a method of additional gouging of already-heavily-indebted students.

A modern educational institution should be distributing its textbooks electronically.

[tridim]

4. They exist because they are cash cows for campus book stores and textbook publishers.

If you go to school for fine art or architecture be sure to add $500-$1000 per semester for supplies. Nobody told me about that before my Freshman year. I was broke as could be because of it.

[DustyJoe]

2. out of control is right

Grandaughter is enrolled in pre-nursing at the local community college.
She is in the 2nd semester of her freshman year.

Tuition for her 12 credit hour (4 classes) was $780.00
Her books cost $625.00.

This was for

Freshmen Reading Comp
Freshmen Writing
Medical Terminology
Psychology 110

Her first semester the tuition/book ratio was about the same. The used book pricing was only about a 10% saving if you could find them.

[Coventina]

3. I can only speak for my discipline: Art History.

The high cost of textbooks in my discipline comes down to one thing: the insanity of copyright law.

Every image in an art book has to be paid for, making the textbooks outrageously expensive.

Think education falls under "fair use"? Think again!! The educational institutions are terrified of being sued for using someone's photograph of the Mona Lisa that hasn't been licensed. The only way to be safe is to buy from a publisher that does all that front-end work for you.

Personally, I am planning on moving all my classes to ArtStor. It is an online database that does all the work, and you simply pay a fee to access it. Because our library has ArtStor, my students can access it for "free" with the cost of their tuition.

[eppur_se_muova]

5. I remember when the *total* price of my textbooks was $68 for a semester ...

(actually, I think it was $65). That was ~1978, and general inflation accounts for only a small fraction of the increase.

[hunter]

8. My experience was similar.

Not only that, a grant, not a loan, paid for them.

[KamaAina]

6. Public universities and community colleges in particular should be switching

that would be, in effect, a much-needed tuition cut.

[Blue_Tires]

7. long overdue...

[Initech]

9. Cengage and Pearson got to make those precious billions, you know!

[dilby]

10. Moving the books to electronic will only so slightly reduce the costs of books.

The reason Text Books are so expensive is that the audience for them is so small so Publishers charge crazy prices to turn a profit. If the publishers sold a million copies of the books they could drop the prices down to $20 but when you are just selling a couple thousand they are going to be extremely high in price. I have technical books I buy every so often for my trade and I am paying $100-$200 for them. I hate having to shell the cash but I also realize the Author needs to eat and he is not going to be making much money when he is only selling a couple hundred copies.

[aikoaiko]

11. I'd look at an open source text but I'm suspicious of them

I often choose texts by eminent scholars in the discipline. Others are written by lesser known faculty who are presenting the material in novels ways. I like supporting their writing efforts.