Capitalism is not a perfect system. No method of encouraging productivity and fair compensation is. Rather than making the effort to sort through the complexities involved in the creation and manufacturing of a product or the delivery of a service, it is too easy to seize on a single issue and feel justified in some conclusion you have reached. I want to argue that this is the case in the public perception of the cost of textbooks.
Why am I writing about this topic? My motive comes from comments made in the reaction to the legal decision made against the Internet Archives and by advocates for Open Educational Resources. My intent to broaden the discussion a bit to address parts of the complexity that are often ignored.
I am the author of a couple of college textbooks and I was a college faculty member. This combination places me in a position of being able to observe both the actions of publishers, but also students, bookstores, and those who comment on various aspects of the book business and the use of commercial instructional materials. A little about me as a textbook author. While I wrote for a small, specific market, I would argue I was successful. The textbook my wife and I wrote had a run of five editions with major textbook publishers. Our book was imagined as a book that undergraduates in education programs would use in a course with a title something like “Technology for teachers”, but was also used in graduate courses and by individuals interested in the topic. We now have the rights to our book because we were unable to work out an arrangement that would offer a $29 Primer in combination with related web content. The idea was that we would update the web contentment continuously editions and organize this content to expand the Primer. In fairness and full disclosure, we wanted to be paid for the continual process of writing rather than a furious revision effort when a new edition was authorized. We now sell the Primer as a $9 Kindle trying to offer a version of our vision.
The issue of textbook cost and what the cost provides:
I have written about aspects of the textbook issue for years. One of my favorite posts was headlined “The beer money ploy”. While the title may seem unrelated, the post explored an aspect of the perceived cost of textbooks that is often ignored. I see parents and politicians talking about the cost of textbooks all of the time. Kids are paying $600+ a semester for textbooks in some fields of study. This seems possible. Our textbook was once sold for between $100 and $140 depending on the supplemental materials that were bundled and books of this type cost nothing compared to books in math and the sciences. Here is the thing about this cost as explained in the “Beer Money Ploy”. This is not the actual cost to the student. Nearly all book stores and many online outlets purchase used textbooks for 50% of the sales price. So a $600 bill at the beginning of the semester allows a resale of $300 to the campus bookstore or online outlet at the end of the semester. If you don’t explain this to your parents, you have $300 to spend as you wish. It is true that bookstores keep an eye on what books have been ordered for next semester and use this when purchasing used books, but the proliferating online services don’t worry about this for a given institution. Used book may be resold several times allowing bookstores and online services easy money for putting books back on the shelf or on the online market.
So, an author or the company paying the author a percentage of the wholesale price to the bookstores have to make their money on the original sale only. This means the company must jack up the price compared to what they would charge for a consumable item. Textbook companies have begin participating in the used market and now may lease textbooks. This solves their problem to some extent.
Textbook companies are not without blame. Textbook companies spend some of the money from sales on selling. Unlike a bookstore, textbook companies pay sales reps that visit campuses and individual instructors. Of course, this contributes to the cost of textbooks but seems necessary to get instructors to take a look at the books they consider. The effort instructors devote to the exploration of the multiple options they have for assignment is a related issue. Bookstores want instructors to continue with existing assigned books. Textbook reps promote their most recent offerings in a given space (large courses almost always encourage multiple books from a single publisher because of the amount of money involved) arguing for the value of current information. While this is true and there be other good reasons for considering a different book, new book adoptions are also how the company, author, and sales reps make their money. See above description of used book market. See previous comment on capitalism.
Publishers
What you pay for with a typical commercial in comparison to a roll your own approach:
A commercial publisher spends money on people who perform functions that may be diminished or absent in self publishing or the absent in the online material an educator might identify and patch together as an information source. When you develop a commercial textbook you work with an editor who comments on everything from writing style, the importance of content included or maybe not included, to embellishments such as when an example, feature box, or chart might be helpful. Sometimes they work with you to cut down the amount of material to meet some cost to page number target. They liked that I put content on the web to support my book because that became an option they could recommend for material I had spent hours to create and they wanted to drop.
Commercial publishers have specialists who check every reference to see that references you include are actually accurately cited at the end of the book and people who specialize in creating an index. They pay photographers to provide images appropriate to the content and people who transform charts and graphs from sketches authors might provide. Pages are carefully laid out translating the page after page of generic text into something that has a professional appearance. Is this worth it? I have different feelings about different things. I am constantly annoyed when I cannot find a reference that an author in a self-published book forgets to add. An appendix of key terms is helpful. The layout I like, but I read a lot of stuff in ebooks that lacks this feature. I read theses and dissertations that are hundreds of pages long and I clearly would rather read something in a more pleasing format. However, I can still read this material and I would not want students to spend time creating content that has a more diverse appearance.
I have already mentioned sales reps who bring free copies of textbooks (another expense) to the office of instructors maybe after they look up what you teach and quickly reading the promotional materials about books they have available on that topic. Necessary? Not in an ideal world, but I also know that few instructors spend time looking through even a few books to select the one they will assign. Some do, many just make a selection based on what they found acceptable in a previous edition, the scholarly reputation of the author(s), or a quick examination of a few topics of personal interest. I admit I tended to switch back and forth between a couple of books I liked so I kind of fall in the middle of this laziness continuum. Being forced to read the book I used at least every other year was my motivation.
One caveat to what I have said. My opinions probably best apply to lower division service courses and less to upper division courses for majors or graduate students. This has to do with the background of the instructor (see following comments), the uniqueness and depth of the content, and what type of literature best suits the purpose of a course. For example, advanced courses are more likely to require exposure to multiple authors who have specific expertise and primary rather than secondary source material.
Authors
Expertise
I would argue that writing a quality lower level, survey textbook in many ways requires more preparation than a specialized upper division textbook. I have found that the survey course requires that I address topics I know should be included that I am not prepared to address. I may be able to write on topics generically because I should know more about most topics than students because of previous teaching experiences, but quality instruction and more so writing instructional content requires a depth of knowledge beyond what ends up conveyed in what is actually written. When you write in an actual area of expertise, the range of topics is much more restricted and you are likely an active researcher/scholar in that area. When I try to explain this to people, I use the example of copyright specifically when it comes to fair use and what classroom teachers can do to present content themselves or that their students have created online. I started reading about this topic and encountered something called the TEACH act (Technology, Education, and Copyright Harmonization). I learned that the purpose of this legislation was to place online and in person instruction on an equal footing when it came to fair use for instruction. Sounds important for K12 teachers to me. To qualify for this equal footing, there were certain expectations – protected access for students in actual classes. By my understanding of what this means, unrestricted access as would be allowed when using popular tools such as web environments (Google Sites) should not be used to share content allowed for classroom instruction because access is not limited, whether intended or not, to students with access. I started asking lawyers with educational responsibility (my university attorney) and experts talking about educational fair use at conferences and they all were baffled by the question and even the existence of the TEACH Act. I have not found reference to this act in other technology textbooks in the discussion of fair use.
This is just an example, but I offer it to make the point that there is some unique work required when creating the background for writing about topics beyond what I would describe as the typical expertise of most authors writing in a broad academic area. There may be far more work required than you realize if you have not written a textbook yourself. Part of what authors are paid for is to do this work. Again, I have a specific kind of product in mind and I assume that support for the statements made and the actions recommended have a basis not in personal opinion but a careful review of expert opinions and research.
Summary
Understanding what is a fair price for work and the cost of a product depends on a realistic understanding of what it takes to generate that product. These comments were intended to communicate some of the factors consumers may not recognize.
