Cheaper Online Textbooks?
Posted by John Baez
College textbooks are really expensive these days. In California, a law was passed to tackle this problem. But it seems to lack teeth.
One way to tackle this problem is to develop free online textbooks. I think a wiki-based approach could be good. People are trying it. Will it ever catch on?
It might also make sense for the NSF, or other funding agencies, to pay for scholars to write free online textbooks — or improve existing ones.
Now this has finally happened.
First, a bit about the California law, AB 2477. It went into effect on January 1st, 2005. Here’s an old story from Capital Campus News:
The bill arose from a study released by CALPIRG in January, that surveyed 156 faculty and 521 students at public colleges throughout California and Oregon.
The findings showed that University of California students would spend an average of $898 per year on textbooks, based on what they had paid in Fall 2003. In contrast, a 1997 University of California survey found students spent on average $642 on textbooks that year.
It might seem that AB 2477 is a victory for students in search of financial relief. However, the law does not actually require publishers, school faculty, or universities to make price reductions. Nor will it hold them accountable for failing to follow through.
“This bill puts state recommended guidelines in place,” Blackledge said. “Publishers could choose to ignore the guidelines, but if they do, they will likely have to deal with irritated legislators in future years.”
Assemblywoman Liu initially intended to require publishers to offer “unbundled” options, those books not packaged with expensive supplements like CD-ROMs, which often go unused by students.
Liu also wanted to prohibit publishers from coming out with new editions so often. But legislative counsel told the Liu team that these requirements would violate publishers’ First Amendment rights.
According to Lynn Lorber, a consultant in the Assembly Higher Education Committee, lawmakers opted for urging and encouraging, rather than making demands that flirted with legal trouble.
Although the law doesn’t include any oversight to watch over the process, lawmakers expect publishers and universities alike to follow through with the requests.
“Assemblywoman Liu and staff will be watching the textbook publishing industry very closely over the next year,” Lorber said.
In the event that the law is not as effective as planned, Lorber says Liu would introduce additional legislation to resolve difficulties in implementing textbook price reductions.
In the meantime, some publishers have already offered alternatives.
Pearson Education, one of the major college textbook producers, recently launched SafariX. This on-line digital textbook subscription service allows students to save as much as 50 percent on selected books by subscribing to a “web-book” version instead of buying the print version.
And Thomson Higher Education has announced they will cut prices by using fewer photos, less color, and unbound editions in loose-leaf binders.
As for eliminating those “bundled” textbooks, the decision will continue to be left to individual professors.
I haven’t felt any significant effect myself. Indeed, in recent years math students at UCR are paying even more. Why? Thanks to the lack of state funding, we can no longer afford for homework to be graded by hand in lower-level courses. So, students need to buy access to ‘Webassign’, where they do homework online and it’s graded automatically. Webassign only supports the big famous textbooks. And it only knows how to grade a small fraction of the homework problems in these texts. Certainly nothing that involves graphing or proofs! So now the choice of homework problems is significantly less, and the students have to pay for it to be graded.
Apparently what California needs are free online textbooks and a free software that allows for automatic grading. Either that, or a legislature that cares about the education system.
But enough about the sad state of California. Here’s some good news from the Chronicle of Higher Education:
October 20, 2009
An E-Textbook Program Aims to Benefit Students and ProfessorsBy Ben Terris
The University of Wisconsin at Oshkosh’s College of Business is creating a new type of e-textbook that will give professors more control of their content while also saving students hundreds of dollars in the process.
The program, a result of a nearly $300,000 grant from U.S. Department of Education’s Fund for the Improvement of Postsecondary Education, will commission professors to create texts personalized for specific classes and put them in a digital format that will bring textbook prices down from their average cost of $100 to a much more moderate $15.
While the idea of money-saving digital textbooks is not new, M. Ryan Haley, an associate professor of economics at the university, sees this program as an opportunity to alter just how these textbooks are created and utilized. Using a “core concepts” paradigm, Mr. Haley will write 80 percent of the first e-textbook in the program — a statistics book — leaving room for each professor to customize the book with his or her own appendices.
“Professors always have their own style of teaching, even if the general material is the same,” Mr. Haley said in an interview with The Chronicle of Higher Education. “So it doesn’t make sense for everyone to have the same exact texts. Some professors would be unsatisfied with the materials; some would be teaching the books in a goofy order, it would backfire.”
[…]
Mr. Haley said he hoped to have the first book ready for use by the fall of 2010.
Will these new textbooks be generally available, or only at this college? It makes a huge difference.
Does anyone know about other initiatives along these lines?
Re: Cheaper Online Textbooks?
It seems to me that the students of UC and CSU together constitute a huge market for textbooks. And they buy textbooks only because the universities require them! If these two State institutions (and possibly the community colleges) got together and told publishers that they will not require any textbooks that cost more than a certain amount or will not require new editions that come out faster than a certain frequency, then this would constitute significant pressure on publishers. (It's my understanding that California's content guidelines for primary and secondary education have a huge impact on those publishers.)
To have teeth, this would have to take away from individual professors' and departments' ability to require the texts that they want to use (although it is only the introductory courses that really matter here). So it would need support from the Legislature and student organisations. (The latter are already upset at the university for raising tuition, and they are not accepting the university's attempt to shift the blame to the Legislature. So maybe there is already some sympathy here.) The ability to require expensive books is what economists call a ‘moral hazard’: you get to make students spend a lot of money, but it's not coming out of your budget!