Books cost too much, addendum

Dad the Emeritus Historian of Graeco-Roman Egypt suggested that I wander over to the Chronicle and read this article on reducing the cost of textbooks.  Now, I have not written a textbook, but for over a dozen years, I have been helping out said Dad and others with their textbook--what I call "one of the oddest lines on my CV"--and not everything in the article quite squared with this experience.  Obviously, YMMV. 

The author, David W. Lewis, is concerned that "colleges" are insufficiently involved in textbook purchasing.  His definition of "college" seems to be entirely administrative and institutional, as it appears to exclude the actual faculty--those people exerting their "own preferences" as to which textbooks to order.  So.  The faculty choose textbooks; the publishers "sell those selected textbooks to each student through bookstores"; and, last but not least, "the institutions usually take no ownership interest in the intellectual property that their faculty members create for textbooks, even when the resulting income to the faculty member is significant."  What he wants to do, then, is strip as much profit from the entire deal as possible.  Publishers charge less; faculty earn less (or, it sounds like, earn nothing); students, supposedly, pay less.     

What's really puzzling is this claim: "After a year or two, with investment at that scale, enough content would be in place that a modest student book fee of, say, $50 could be easily justified, and, within three to five years, that fee could rise to $100."  This is...odd.  Dad and his three co-authors signed a contract with Oxford in 1994; the first edition of their book came out in 1999.  This, he notes, is considered relatively speedy in the history textbook writing world (an acquaintance of his spent ten years writing a highly-regarded world history textbook).  Now, it might well be faster to put together an open-source introductory math text, or to anthologize content produced by other online sources, but a fully finished and fact-checked college-level history textbook, with maps, images, and charts (not to mention permissions from all the relevant publishers¹), will require much more than a "year."  In a year, you might have a rough draft.  (Of a few chapters.)  Moreover, Dad went on to point out, there's no sense here that a textbook counts as a book, with an actual "plot."  Even anthologies generally have some sort of plot.    (And, in English, "textbooks" are rarely useful; I need editions, anthologies, and the occasional monograph.  See previous "Books" post for why, so far, it's really difficult to teach using what's currently available online.) 

¹ Because once faculty move away from the informal "let's grab some articles off the web!" model and move to "let's generate content that's going to produce cash for the university!", things will look a little different. 

Comments

[Brandon Watson]

I was amused by the line:

"If colleges act decisively, they can reduce costs, enhance pedagogy, increase student success, and change how textbooks and related course materials are created, distributed, and used."

Keeping our promises modest and reasonable, aren't we?

One thing I found interesting about the article was the role that it presented for administrators (who, as you say, are =colleges in the language of the essay, even resulting at one point in the phrase "faculty members and colleges"): their role is to be 'leaders' who maintain 'control of teaching and learning'. Because, really, I can't think of any faculty members I know who think of administrators in quite this way; and I suspect this disconnect is a widespread problem.

[R Lapides]

The Kirkus and LJ reviews of your father's book make it very enticing.

[Stubbs]

As a former acquiring editor for a college text publisher, I have some reactions.

In the case of college textbooks, as you observe, the buyer does not select the product, and the person who does select the product suffers no penalty for choosing a new edition or a totally new book, either of which eliminates the possibility of the student buying a less expensive new or used book. And make no mistake of it, the marketing of just-off-the-press books always stresses that the new books are necessary for the professor to be teaching the very latest in the discipline. Publishers respond to the constant switching by bringing out new books and revising old ones on shorter and shorter cycles. And because those cycles are short, they must recover production costs quickly. That pushes price increases. Talk about a vicious circle!

The cost of books varies from discipline to discipline--a philosophy book almost always costs much less than a math book--and according to level. And while a student might find an obscure novel in the library, there probably won't be a needed principles of economics there.

Some schools ban the receipt of royalties from sales at that school by a local faculty member.

Finally, drawings, photographs, graphs, etc., add greatly to the cost of book production. (And weight: wonder why schoolchildren need wheeled backpacks to carry their textbooks?) When you next proclaim the beauty of lavish illustration, don't forget its cost.