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Joci Wonderly and her mother worked the aisles of the IPFW bookstore on a recent afternoon, book list in hand, carefully searching shrink-wrapped packages of books for ISBN numbers. “I’m being very strategic,” the sophomore English major said, neatly jotting numbers in a small spiral notebook. “I have a list of everything I need, and I’ll compare prices to get the best deal.”
It’s those shrink-wrapped packages that give her the most grief, however. Textbooks “bundled” with study guides, online access cards and other materials make it tough to find the International Standard Book Numbers she needs to confirm she has the right book. And if she takes the chance of buying the entire package, there’s the possibility that she won’t even need to use some of the materials.
The books Wonderly will need for her English courses are the easiest.
“I’ll find those at a used-bookstore. I don’t care if they are already highlighted and worn,” she said.
But those are about the only bargains she’s likely to find. According to U.S. PIRG, the federation of state Public Interest Research Groups, students like Wonderly will spend about $900 a year on textbooks, or about 20 percent of the total annual tuition and fees at a four-year public institution. Textbook costs are increasing at four times the rate of inflation.
The troublesome burden of student loan debt is primarily the product of skyrocketing tuition costs. But college textbook costs are increasing at a rate even higher than tuition and adding to the debt burden, yet they don’t attract the attention of the college-cost critics. That’s starting to change, however, and it can change even more quickly if students, parents, policymakers and profs join forces to demand change.
Anyone who doubts there’s money in college textbooks need only look to any Ivy Tech campus. In June, Indiana’s community college system received the first of three $2 million bonus signing checks for penning a deal with Follett Higher Education Group to manage Ivy Tech’s 27 bookstores.
Lanni Connelly, who owns the Bookmark on North Anthony Boulevard near both the Ivy Tech and Indiana University-Purdue University Fort Wayne campuses, said the contract means that students will inevitably pay more.
“That’s $6 million they have to make up right off the top,” she said. “It’s good news for me – that means their students will be looking for their books here.”
Indeed, Connelly’s business has flourished thanks to the textbook trade. She tore out the back wall and expanded into new space specifically for textbooks, and she also trades online through Amazon.com and half.com, a division of eBay.com.
“It’s like Christmas two times a year,” Connelly said. “Our busy seasons are January and August.”
The bookseller said she enjoyed seeing the reaction of students who have priced books elsewhere and found them for less at her store.
Students in some disciplines – the sciences and health care, in particular – have always shelled out a great deal of money for textbooks. But bookstore charges of hundreds of dollars are now just as common among math and history majors. The bundling phenomenon Wonderly faced at the IPFW bookstore is one reason.
An insidious practice on some campuses requires students to buy customized textbooks, with the university collecting a royalty from the publisher. The Wall Street Journal cites the University of Alabama, where freshmen writing students are required to buy a $59.35 spiral-bound composition book distinguished only by the school’s name on the cover and a 32-page guide on Alabama’s writing program inside. The same guide is available for free on the university’s Web site. A nearly identical textbook – minus the Alabama monogram and writing guide – sells for $54. Used copies are available for $30, but the school’s version is imprinted with “This book may not be bought or sold used,” eliminating the resale value for any student who hopes to recoup some of the cost at semester’s end.
The textbook burden hasn’t gone unnoticed by lawmakers. Companion bills introduced in the Indiana House and Senate by the Republican representatives from West Lafayette would have made college textbooks exempt from sales taxes, but neither bill made it beyond committee assignment. The state sales tax increase the legislature did approve, however, pushed the average annual cost of $900 worth of books from $954 to $963.
Congress also has weighed in on the matter. The College Opportunity and Affordability Act of 2008, the long-overdue reauthorization of the federal higher ed bill, was approved last month with provisions requiring publishers to make unbundled alternatives available. It would also require colleges to include information about required materials in course schedules so that students can budget for expenses.
Robert Talbert, an associate professor of mathematics and computing science at Indiana’s Franklin College, is one of several hundred U.S. college faculty members who have signed on to PIRG’s online pledge to help control textbook costs. He’s passionate about the issue.
“Many of my students are either first-generation college students, students from middle- to lower-income families, or both. They are struggling to afford college as it is – often having to work off campus, which then affects their class performance – and it really pains me to see textbook companies charge more and more for a less and less useful product,” he said in an e-mail.
Talbert said he’s bothered not just by the cost, but by the quality of the books, which he said are often “poorly written, chaotically organized and full of so many irrelevant graphical elements and sidebars” that the information students need is difficult to find. If he can avoid it, Talbert doesn’t require a textbook or directs his students to an inexpensive one.
“In my abstract algebra course last fall, I used no textbook but rather homemade course notes and a handful of helpful Web sites,” he wrote.
A generation of students who mastered keyboarding along with walking was bound to turn to the Internet for a solution. BookRenter.com and Chegg.com are among the sites that offer books for rent. Sites like mybooksforcheap.com search bookseller sites across the Internet to find used books.
Open source is the great hope for corralling textbook costs. Connexions, based at Rice University in Houston, makes online content available for free. The service has just released a statistics textbook commonly used in community college courses in California. It’s the first textbook and related materials made available online for wide distribution at no cost, according to the university.
Franklin’s Talbert said he sees great potential there.
“Imagine having a calculus textbook, the contributors to which are some of the best calculus professors in practice today, and which includes not only text material but also links to Web sites, embedded video, interactive applets for visual/kinesthetic learners, and user-contributed problem sets – for free,” he wrote.
“There’s a stigma against such things now, just as there is a continuing stigma against Wikipedia in academia (because academicians have a hard time accepting the legitimacy of something that is not peer-reviewed), but I think once students start learning and getting engaged with material through these things, that stigma will go away quickly,” he wrote.
A professor of accounting at the University of Texas proposes what might be the most intriguing idea for reducing textbook costs. In an op-ed published last week in the New York Times, Michael Granof suggests that colleges negotiate with a publisher based on the number of students enrolled in the class where a particular textbook is required. A licensing fee, in effect, would ensure the publisher a revenue stream but could be passed along to students just as lab fees and computer software costs are now shared.
“A textbook’s value, like that of a software program, is not in its physical form, but rather in its intellectual content,” Granof wrote. “Therefore, just as software companies typically ‘site license’ to colleges, so should textbook publishers.”
