TeleRead: Bring the E-Books Home

Myths and Facts about School Textbook Prices

By Robert Nagle

Myth: When a company wants to undermine consumer-based research about the high price of textbooks, the most effective way to do so is to portray the findings as a bunch of myths.

Fact: The research they are trying to debunk comes from surveys of readers and consumers. Although the data may have methodological shortcomings, they nonetheless represent the voice of the people who feel the brunt of textbook prices.

Admittedly, it looks like the Make Textbooks Affordable coalition had a point they intended to prove. That said, some of the results are staggering to ponder if true:

• Price Awareness:

  For professors who meet with sales representatives to research textbooks: 77% told us that sales representatives rarely or never volunteer the price. And even when professors directly asked for the price during a sales meeting, only 38% reported that the sales representative would always disclose the price.

• On bundled course material:
  

  Only 50% of the professors who told us that they assigned a bundled book last semester said that they used the additional materials often. One-third said that they either could not assign the book they chose without the bundle or did not know if that option was available. This finding stands in contrast to the claims of many in the publishing industry that most of their books are available unbundled.

• Unnecessary New Editions: Over 700 physics and math professors have written to Thompson Learning asking them to stop issuing new editions of textbooks.. From the Make Textbooks Affordable summary sheet:
  

  Of the professors we surveyed, 71% said that new editions of textbooks in their field are justified only ‘sometimes’ or ‘rarely’, confirming earlier PIRG research. Since new editions are on average 12% more expensive than the previous edition, students are spending a lot of money for little educational gain.

In the response from the publishing houses, a rather amazing figure is thrown out:

Developing a new textbook and accompanying learning tools can cost more than $1 million. The largest portion of this cost is the time and work of authors, experts, editors, researchers, reviewers and designers. Other factors also contribute to the final retail price of textbooks, including:

- inflation, which is running at an annual rate of 4.8 percent for 2006 (according to the U.S. Department of Laborís Bureau of Labor Statistics), accounts for more than 77 percent of the increase in textbook prices
- book store mark-ups, which are determined by the bookstore and affected by a number of factors, such as staff and operations costs, which vary from store to store;
- paper, which is driven by the cost of raw materials;
- layout, typesetting and printing, which are driven by labor costs;
- freight and transportation, which are driven by fuel costs;
- federal, state and local taxes

There is an unnamed comment on a higher education blog by a textbook editor that rings true to me. (NO Permalink; see “Book Editor” May 25 comment). Lots of insights:

• Amazon vs. BN.com

  The price listed on Amazon.com for a new copy of any college textbook is almost NEVER correct. Amazon is geared almost entirely to *trade* book sales, and almost always screws up the markup on ’short discount’ books (i.e., textbooks and university-press monographs). If you’re attempting to find a more accurate *new* book price for a text you’re considering, go to bn.com. Because they run some of the nation’s college bookstores, they generally know what a ‘net’ price is, and mark up textbooks at a rate within the range listed above.

• Kickbacks for Profs
  

  It is a well-known yet little-discussed fact in college publishing that “committee decisions”—in which a select number of faculty members in a large department convene to choose a text for all sections of a course—frequently end in the faculty committees demanding considerable incentives, kickbacks, freebies, and commitments to underwrite specific campus events. This wheeling and dealing has become standard practice among faculty who supervise text selection for large survey courses, and very few of them show any compunction about it.

  (The most egregious, and ridiculous, example I have heard of is a quid-pro-quo acquisition by a publisher of a golf-cart for an English department at a state university in the southwest in exchange for a very large textbook adoption.)

• Selling vs. Reselling
  

  Each copy of a text is sold by the publisher exactly once. A well-managed college bookstore will sell that same copy at least 3 or 4 additional times as a used book, at a much higher profit margin (for the bookstore) than the new book.

• Ebooks vs. Print Runs
  

  As the sales curve for new copies of a book asymptotically approaches zero, the per-book cost to the publisher to print and bind the new copies rises considerably. Small print runs=high unit costs=very low profit.

  —Every major college publisher offers low-cost options in most subject areas, and ebook versions are widely available across the curriculum.

  —Despite the availability of these options, and the aggressive publicity campaigns to promote them, very few professors choose to assign an ebook, almost no students buy them, and most low-cost print editions significantly undersell their full-featured, full-price cousins.