Textbooks

[ciao_yall]

I don't know about all the other above assertions, but second-hand textbook sales are not a new thing.

I remember back in the day, going to the bookstore and buying mostly used texts just to stay under budget.

I was the difference between having to whumpf one saber-toothed tiger on the head, or two, and then skinning it and bartering the meat and skin for books....

Tough system, but we made it work...

M.

No, but if the "textbook" includes a lot of online material that is only available using a product code, for a limited time, then there is no second-hand market. Same thing for digital editions (kindle, etc.), unless they are file-shared.

I ordered a textbook that had a vast amount of complementary material in the digital version, then realized that distributing those materials to students who didn't order a new copy was going to be a full-time job. I'm rethinking.

In an ideal world, such textbook side-kicks can be really valuable. High-quality, full color reproductions are really expensive to print, and often tiny, which drives up the price of humanities survey texts to an unreasonable degree; digital reproduction is a reasonable alternative, since we're reproducing anyway. But they have value only if students can access them.

I'm mulling.

That's why I always let students use the previous edition or the international edition. The content was 99% the same and often could be had for under $20.

I was never too impressed with all the online content.

[marshwiggle]

This topic is fascinating. I've wondered for years what, if any, viable business model exists for publishers in the 21st century, given the constraints:

• Churning out new versions just in order to make used copies obsolete is undesirable.
• The subscription model for online assignments and other things is also at least partly to undermine the used market, and so undesirable.
• All kinds of free content exists online.
• For anyone to make the effort to write a textbook, there needs to be a way for the work to be monetized.

So is there any way to not simply try to spike the used market but offer some real value in an ongoing fashion that creates revenue?

[ciao_yall]

This topic is fascinating. I've wondered for years what, if any, viable business model exists for publishers in the 21st century, given the constraints:

• Churning out new versions just in order to make used copies obsolete is undesirable.
• The subscription model for online assignments and other things is also at least partly to undermine the used market, and so undesirable.

• All kinds of free content exists online.

[/b]

• For anyone to make the effort to write a textbook, there needs to be a way for the work to be monetized.

So is there any way to not simply try to spike the used market but offer some real value in an ongoing fashion that creates revenue?

I disagree about free content online.

Yes, there is information, but it's not contextualized or organized. The value of a good textbook is that the information is presented consistently, as a cohesive whole, and within an overall framework so the students can learn.

[mbelvadi]

Is there a link to be able to find open access textbooks? To be honest  this is the first time I have heard about this. Thanks

I'm sorry your request was met with lots of skepticism and only one actually useful pointer. Here is another: https://open.umn.edu/opentextbooks/
Another term to look for in this regard is "OER" - open educational resources.
This is a huge movement, and many non-profit foundations and individual universities are providing grants to faculty to develop really excellent quality textbooks, mostly for large into-level courses like Psych 101. Our own Psych 101 course uses an open textbook.
To those who think the cost of textbooks is a tiny part of overall college costs, you are obviously at an expensive place. Textbooks can be up to a fourth of our students' total semester costs (not counting room and board). And I have a friend working on a community college degree who often faces textbook costs that exceed her actual tuition fees some semesters. This is a real problem, so big that some states like Florida have actually passed laws forcing their public universities to help students reduce textbook costs: http://www.fldoe.org/schools/higher-ed/fl-college-system/academic-student-affairs/textbook-affordability.stml

[Cheerful]

This is a huge movement....

Thanks for the links.  Can you share more about this movement?

Are you trying to eliminate all costs for all books required in college courses -- undergrad to grad?  Or is your focus solely the big textbooks for which publishers change editions too frequently and charge "too much?"  Does the OER movement argue that textbook authors shouldn't receive any royalties?

Is this the start of something bigger aligned with today's focus on "free" tuition, etc.?  Will professors face pressure to avoid requiring books (any book type, not necessarily textbooks) that cost money for their classes and be pressured to use mostly free materials?

[mbelvadi]

This is a huge movement....

Thanks for the links.  Can you share more about this movement?

Are you trying to eliminate all costs for all books required in college courses -- undergrad to grad?  Or is your focus solely the big textbooks for which publishers change editions too frequently and charge "too much?"  Does the OER movement argue that textbook authors shouldn't receive any royalties?

Is this the start of something bigger aligned with today's focus on "free" tuition, etc.?  Will professors face pressure to avoid requiring books (any book type, not necessarily textbooks) that cost money for their classes and be pressured to use mostly free materials?

The answers to all of these are "it depends on the kind of institution/state/country/etc."  It's a bit like the open access journals and open source software movements in that there isn't any centralized authority making these decrees or writing The Official Mission Statement of the OER Movement.  Generally, the OER proponents are trying, like OA journal articles, to flip the cost equation from the reader to the producer by, for instance, paying the authors up front to produce the book instead of them getting royalties on sales.  Here's just one of very many examples, an internal grant at Ryerson U in Canada, up to $10,000 for the faculty to develop an open textbook: https://library.ryerson.ca/publishing/grants/2019-2020-oer-grants/   Google: "oer textbook grant" to find lots more examples of institutions offering sizeable grants to develop, or smaller ones just to customize/adopt, open textbooks.

One could argue that many professors are already facing a kind of pressure from the student to avoid requiring expensive textbooks, in that many students are simply refusing to buy them, and are doing poorly in the class as a result, possibly also dragging down the quality of discussions and other in-class activities as a result.  The OER discussion is also having a side effect of getting more faculty to accept or even encourage use of older editions of commercial titles, kind of as a compromise against such pressure.

So far the focus has been mostly on the "low hanging fruit" of the broad "101" survey courses and especially the textbooks by very expensive publishers like Pearson and Wiley aimed at those classes with enrollments over a hundred per semester.

[Big Giant Head]

I will present my CC as just one example of one way the textbook issue might be handled.

We are a pretty large department in a field where much of the content doesn't change very often. We decided, as a group, that we were tired of the publishers and wanted to try to create our own OER texts for the two big first-year classes. We formed a six-person team, each of whom was compensated with course release time, and spent a year writing the two books. About 25% of the material is content we found online under a Creative Commons license. About 75% we just wrote from scratch. Each of us too responsibility for 3 or 4 chapters and for reviewing the chapters we didn't write.  Incidentally, our two books are now available, in their entirety, under a Creative Commons license that allows anyone to use them and even alter them at will. We thought this was appropriate service to the profession.

The bookstore was happy to be the point of contact for these texts, because 100% are bought from them rather than Amazon or Chegg. They actually end up making more money than they do when faculty use proprietary textbooks. The deal is that students pay a $40 fee and then can just show their registration to a bookstore clerk and be handed a paper copy of the text, which is printed in our own campus copy center. If they don't want a paper copy, that's fine--we load a PDF and a Word version into every Canvas course shell.

We can change the content any time we want. We have total control over it. We've saved our students literally hundreds of thousands of dollars in the 18 months these books have been in use.

For us, this has been a win-win, and the students seem to appreciate it, too. The drawbacks are that, when a student finds a typo, I can't blame Pearson or Cengage. Also, we were limited to 400 pages total, the quality of the binding isn't optimum, and we couldn't really include very many images. The texts are boring, at least in their visual look.

What astonishes me is that it really wasn't THAT hard to do this. It does require a department culture of cooperation and genuine collegiality, and an administration that is willing to pay people to do this work.

In any case, it IS an option for some academic disciplines. 

[Aster]

At Big Urban College (which is basically a community college) our department has a somewhat opposite take on OER.

For us, the majority of our courses are taught by part-time adjuncts. Adjuncts who are often new to teaching and/or new to the courses that they are teaching.

So when we look at textbooks, we don't just look at textbooks from a student or our own perspective. We look at the perspective of our adjunct faculty.

And for those professors, adopting a professional mainstream textbook is highly beneficial for them. Those mainstream books are top quality and professors have full access to a rich collection of  professional instructional resources (e.g. powerpoints, test banks, media files, dedicated CMS, 24/7 technical support). Without those support resources, our view is that new professors and professors new to these courses would be at an enormous disadvantage. Even for our experienced or more senior professors, many of us heavily take advantage of professional textbook support services just on general principle. Half of our department for example requires that students purchase supplemental e-learning packs containing super-souped up multimedia study aid and study assessments. The extra services are extra work for the professors to integrate and manage, but they do it because they are heavily motivated in student success. None of us, either working alone or working collaboratively, could ever create anything remotely as effective as the supplemental resources provided by Pearson or McGraw Hill. And we certainly would not be able to maintain/update anything we created. It would mostly go stale after its first roll-out.

[mbelvadi]

I have a friend taking classes at an American community college and was helping her look at the course choices for next semester, and noticed in the course search system that they now have a search-limiting checkbox, "OER only". I asked her and sure enough, students there can now choose to limit their entire degree program to only courses with free textbooks. Obviously that is going to put some constraints on their course and program timeline options.  But I thought it was very relevant to this discussion thread that this expense is considered so burdensome that students would literally limit their course schedule search to ONLY free-textbook courses and that her school recognizes that need formally in the search options.

[downer]

I have a friend taking classes at an American community college and was helping her look at the course choices for next semester, and noticed in the course search system that they now have a search-limiting checkbox, "OER only". I asked her and sure enough, students there can now choose to limit their entire degree program to only courses with free textbooks. Obviously that is going to put some constraints on their course and program timeline options.  But I thought it was very relevant to this discussion thread that this expense is considered so burdensome that students would literally limit their course schedule search to ONLY free-textbook courses and that her school recognizes that need formally in the search options.

Sounds like an attractive way for professors to limit their class sizes. Just assign a $50 textbook.

[Aster]

There was a private college in our state that forced every single professor to remove their use of textbooks and replace everything with e-learning equivalents (e-texts, OER) that were directly compatible with an iPad.

All physical textbooks were removed from professors' discretion to use.

Any e-learning resources not compatible with an iPad were removed from professors' discretion to use.

Must be fun to work at that place.

[marshwiggle]

There was a private college in our state that forced every single professor to remove their use of textbooks and replace everything with e-learning equivalents (e-texts, OER) that were directly compatible with an iPad.

All physical textbooks were removed from professors' discretion to use.

Any e-learning resources not compatible with an iPad were removed from professors' discretion to use.

Must be fun to work at that place.

The iPad restriction is even more ridiculous than the physical textbooks one.

And given the cost of an education, textbooks are not going to come anywhere near the other costs, even if every course has a required textbook. (This isn't to be unsympathetic, but if a person can manage the bigger costs, choosing courses and/or programs on the textbook costs is penny-wise and pound-foolish.)

[ciao_yall]

There was a private college in our state that forced every single professor to remove their use of textbooks and replace everything with e-learning equivalents (e-texts, OER) that were directly compatible with an iPad.

All physical textbooks were removed from professors' discretion to use.

Any e-learning resources not compatible with an iPad were removed from professors' discretion to use.

Must be fun to work at that place.

Provost must be an investor in AAPL.

[dr_codex]

There was a private college in our state that forced every single professor to remove their use of textbooks and replace everything with e-learning equivalents (e-texts, OER) that were directly compatible with an iPad.

All physical textbooks were removed from professors' discretion to use.

Any e-learning resources not compatible with an iPad were removed from professors' discretion to use.

Must be fun to work at that place.

Provost must be an investor in AAPL.

Possible.

Just as likely, the institution went all-in on devices, had all Freshpeeps buy an iPad, and (partially) justified the sales with e-texts.

[bibliothecula]

Also check out Open Education Resources Commons: https://www.oercommons.org/.

Having worked in textbook publishing, I am now of the opinion that the vast majority of it is unethical and is all about making money for authors and publishers and is in no way beneficial for students. If you can at all avoid having to assign a textbook, and use freely available readings, websites, and other materials instead, I urge everyone to always do the latter.