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.
