It is that time of the semester: I have to order my textbooks for fall. And, yet again, my textbook for Contemporary Moral Problems is going into a new edition. Which is hardly “new” at all — some years, the publisher merely restores the same articles that were removed for the current edition and calls that “revised”! Publishers produce new editions of textbooks in my field at a rate of every 2-3 years, to combat losses incurred by the used book market. Protesting that textbooks are priced for one use, textbook publishers blame the resale market for rising prices, which have far outpaced inflation. Professors, trying to protect students from skyrocketing textbook prices (and also, it must be admitted, in order to forestall the tedious work of fixing all the page references of our lecture notes) are free to assign older editions, but after a year or two, it become impossible to guarantee all students will be able to obtain copies. Eventually, we relent and move to the new edition.
Different universities are handling the cost problem in different ways. Some have textbook rental programs, for paper textbooks. Others, like North Carolina State, bought a license to host a physics textbook online for students, who can read it online for free, or pay $45 for a print version. My own university has taken the small step of giving any department that gets its textbook orders in quickly a $50 award (this helps keep costs down in the short term by helping bookstore get used copies).
U.S. PIRG has made textbooks a major issue. They point out that textbook prices have risen at four times the rate of inflation in the past two decades, textbooks cost 30-50% of tuition for students, and that publishers bundle CD roms, workbooks, etc., and other useless material with textbooks to drive up prices.
Are etextbooks the solution?
After introducing the larger, more textbook friendly Kindle DX, Amazon partnered with several universities= in pilot programs to introduce Kindles to the classroom. Each university tried out the Kindle DX in different ways (some giving Kindles to half the students in a class, with the others as a control group, for example; others giving Kindles to an entire segment of the university, as in an Honors College). The idea, from the universities’ point of view, is to (a) cut costs, (b) provide new pedagogical options (for example, possibilities that open up when a professor can refer to material studied a month prior, or not to be studied for a month yet, and students have that material on hand), and, in some cases, (c) reduce environmental impact. From the publishers’ point of view, the idea is to keep making money (Other universities have experimented with the Sony reader.)
How is it going? Several universities backed out before the trial even began, some citing the problems with accessibility for blind students (Arizona just settled its lawsuit with the National Federation of the Blind, which argued that use of the Kindle violated federal law). One professor, who, like me, teaches seminar style with close reading of passages, reports that it doesn’t work well at all. As a Kindle 2 owner myself, I could have predicted that. Highlighting, note taking, and finding particular passages is very cumbersome on the Kindle. Kindle for PC is no panacea, since there are formatting issues and pages load one at a time. And what about Kindle for Macs? Nonexistent as yet. Location numbers — Kindle’s version of page numbers — are also annoying, non-intuitive, and cumbersome to utilize on any device.
Some textbook companies are offering free downloads of e textbooks, in the hopes of getting consumers to buy more print products. For example, the inauspiciously named Flat World Knowledge,
has spent about $150,000 on each of the 11 online textbooks it offers, [CEO] Mr. Frank says. Anyone can read the books free online, but students can buy a black-and-white print version for about $30, or a color copy for about $60. About 65 percent of the students in courses that require the “open textbooks,” as they are called, have bought some product from the company, he reports. (One popular item is a printed study guide.) “We think we’ll get to 70 or 75 percent,” he says.
As reported widely in the past week,
DynamicBooks aims to deliver textbooks Wikipedia-style, allowing college instructors to edit, modify, add video and pictures to, and rewrite chapters or paragraphs of textbooks as they see fit — all without consulting the original authors. “Basically they will go online, log on to the authoring tool, have the content right there and make whatever changes they want,” Macmillan president Brian Napack told the newspaper. “And we don’t even look at it.”
This just gets better and better. Imagine the possibilities in fiction: I always thought Sauron should have gotten his ring back, that Eve and Roarke should perish in a hail of bullets, and that the plot of Of Mice and Men was a tad too gloomy for my PETA tastes. If only I could get in there and “tweak” a little!
Another etextbook company, Course Smart’s, Terms of Service makes potential pirates out of all of its customers. It informs users that downloads of course material may be used on only one device, and will expire. Printing is limited to ten pages at a time. And students must choose between using their textbook online or offline — they can;t both download and have online access. The cost of textbooks from Course Smart is hardly negligible — it’s $42.75 to rent for 180 days the textbook I use. A paper version of the same book costs $80, but students can recoup some of that by reselling to the bookstore. In good conscience, I cannot recommend the e-option to my students.
The Open Educational Resources Center for California offers a clearinghouse of free online course materials, aiming to “provide support for community college educators to find, create, remix, use, and share openly licensed learning content.” I hope similar sites are developed for four year institutions.
As a Kindle owner and enthusiastic reader of e-books in my spare time, it strikes me that many of the problems leisure readers have with e-books are replicated in the realm of textbooks: cost, format, quality, device issues, ease of access, copyright, etc. I know these are complex issues, and when you combine them, as I must, with pedagogical considerations (many students do not want to read on a computer, or lack reliable computer or internet access) it gets even more complicated. Needless to say, the Kindle DX’s price point — $489 — was a huge sticker shock to students at the universities who piloted the Amazon program.
Many people are “waiting it out” on the format wars, the e-reader wars, the Apple v. Amazon v. Everybody Else wars. But my textbook orders are due in two weeks.
Right now, I plan to support open textbooks distributed under an open license, to utilize free online articles (many of which are as good as, or even identical to, what you can find in textbooks), and rely on my university library’s e-reserve (which makes copyrighted material available for download by individual students who have the course password) for the rest. I may make a course packet available for students who feel they really need pre-packaged bound paper versions.
But I refuse to order another paper textbook for this particular class.
Good luck with this. I toy with the idea of becoming a rebel with my Western Civ, Renaissance to French Revolution. Only so far, the open source texts I’ve seen don’t fit my approach very well.
I find that it’s vital to get students feeling that they possess a readable copy of the text. For many, the e-version doesn’t cut it at all. While a Course Smart text may be pretty searchable, the fact that it’s e-only is a real barrier, I agree (and why I still have student buy the physical copy).
Of course, I’m still holding out on buying a Kindle or anything like even though I would love to go zipping through the romance and mystery shelves online. There’s something that sticks in my craw about paying good money for a virtual book that I can’t resell or lend out readily!
Great post, Jessica. I’ve actually forwarded it on to both the marketing & production depts here at my academic pub house. Feedback from professors as we all try to navigate the world of e-textbooks is crucial.
Wow, I never thought about this area of ereading. Seems like you’d need a device you can really mark extensively on.
The wikipedia style ebook. OMG. The mind boggles. Suddenly, Jane isn’t a ghost after all!
I was reading a blog post by an art history prof who said she’d completely dropped using textbooks in her survey classes (!? I know, shocker, right?). Instead, she just assigns articles from wikipedia, Heilbrunn Timeline, and other reliable academic sites. I don’t think that’s a half-bad idea, personally–at least it encourages the students to explore more about a subject if they want, and it’s free.
It’s just so hard to completely drop the textbooks.
@Janice: your sense that students need a readable copy of the text is borne out by research.
@Lori: Great! thank you!
@Carolyn Crane: Yeah, I always marked up my texts (I rarely sold them back — things were different in those days). I hear the Sony touch is easier to mark up, and maybe the Ipad will be the best yet.
@heidenkind: I am glad to hear I am not the only one. There are some classes where I must have a textbook, or assigned copies of paper books. But in this class we cover issues about which smart people publish essays for free on the internet. I vet the textbooks anyway, omitting stuff that is sub par. Why can’t I vet what’s on the internet?
Wonderful post. Thanks for pointing out so any of the ways publishers are yet providing what users need from their products. When I was in grad school I was very grateful that professors did their best to reduce the expense of books. As a student teacher and tutor, I met a lot of students who were barely getting by on jobs that paid very little. Purchasing a $500 device would have been an impossibility.
I’ve also cut back on the use of textbooks and readers in my classes. The final straw was a reader that was about 60% good that went up to $85 dollars. It was ridiculous, especially since all of the authors had published articles on the same subjects and the articles were available through JSTOR or our library’s ejournal collection (or ILL). There are a few books that are pretty difficult to replace with articles, or which take a huge amount of work to find the equivalents, but by and large, I limit the course purchasing to 3-4 paperbacks max and then build a nice fat electronic reserve collection.
I’ve tried to use my Sony 505 to read pdfs, but it’s not easy, even for all-word -no-table-or-formula articles. Instead, I’ve started to use programs that allow you to mark up pdfs on the computer and then export the notes, etc. as a text file. There are a couple of really good ones for OSX, and I’m trying out another one that works on Windows.
FWIW, we’re a few months from a fairly significant shoe dropping with the iPads, which have been heavily pushed on some universities and departments – for example, I know of one department at a midwestern school that is getting free iPads for every one of their 200+ students, largely because of the resulting etext sales. Which, frankly, seems like a bad sign for a lot of the open text/publishing options out there unless they put on a serious push to reformat to take advantage of the iPad as a device that’s more than just a text reader like Kindle (sorry). They can’t continue to depend on html/pdf/web browsers as a delivery platform when there will be competing apps that build in functionality like highlighting, note taking, or deep-linked media. The DRM and iTunes lock-in that goes with those apps will just come to be accepted if there isn’t an open alternative very quickly.
Personally, I’m all for switching to freely available content in classes, and am glad to hear it when anybody heads that direction. It’s been years since I’ve seen the need for a dedicated textbook, but obviously subject matter makes a difference.
Good for you, Jessica. The textbook racket has always made me a little bit ill, and it sounds like it’s only gotten worse. I mean, how much does basic chemistry or physics change from year to year? And yet somehow the textbooks become “obsolete” ?
This is why I, as a broke college student, was so happy that my college provided textbooks we could borrow from the library for 2hrs. Plus, I always read the old editions, since when asked, professors always shared what differed between the new and the old editions.