October 14, 2007

Knowledge for rent
Competing bills aim to reduce their cost while students and educators seek out alternatives.
By MARLA JO FISHER
The Orange County Register

College students have been hammered in recent years by soaring costs for everything from tuition to rent to gasoline to the coffee-house java that fuels all-night study sessions.

One of the most frequent complaints has always been about textbook prices, now averaging $900 per year, according to a 2004 study by the California Public Interest Research Group. That's more than many community college students spend on a year's tuition.

This weekend, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger has two competing bills on his desk, both seeking to make textbooks more affordable, that he must sign or veto by today, or they'll expire.

"Books are generally really expensive and getting higher," Mohamed Eldessouky, the student body president of UC Irvine, said Wednesday, adding he hopes the governor will sign one of the bills, SB832. "My buddy just bought an economics book yesterday for $163."

SB832 would, among other things, require publishers to tell faculty in advance about the entire range of books available in their subject matter and how much they cost.

That bill is opposed by the Association of American Publishers, saying it creates onerous and unnecessary new disclosure rules for textbook publishers, while not fixing other links in the textbook supply chain.

"We have 240 introductory algebra books available every day in the bookstores," said Bruce Hildebrand, executive director for higher education at the Association of American Publishers. "Which ones are you talking about? Some cost $20 and some cost $120."

Hildebrand said the country's 4,500 textbook publishers should not be told how to publicize their books, and that the burden of textbook price reform should not fall entirely on publishers.

Meanwhile, college officials around the country are moving forward with other ways to save students money, including rental programs, e-books, custom printed books and free course materials that are increasingly available online.

Some of the changes are driven by the need for college bookstores to stay competitive. A generation ago, students had little choice but to shop at their school's bookstore to fill their book lists, hoping only that cheaper used copies would be available.

Today, students look for books on Web sites that sell used and marked-down materials. Some buy books from other countries, where they're cheaper.

Publishers are coming out with digital book programs, from which students can download information at half the cost of buying a new book.

And some schools like Cal State Fullerton are experimenting with rental programs. This year, CSUF is only offering 29 books for rent – but 5,000 students have taken advantage of the program.

Books rent for about one-third of the cost of a new book. Titan Shops manager Chuck Kissel said he invites faculty to sign up, and asks them to guarantee that the books they assign through the rental program will be used for at least two years, to make the program financially viable.

"We are making a little less (profit) but we are finding more students are shopping with us," Kissel said, adding that he expects to continue to grow the rental business. It helps students financially not only because they pay less, but because they don't have to shell out hundreds of dollars in advance, with the hope that they can later get some of it back by reselling the book.

For example, the bookstore rented 516 copies of the "Nature of Mathematics" this term for $44.95 per semester, less than half the $130 it cost to buy the book new or the $97.50 cost of the used edition.

UC Irvine doesn't have a rental program, but students are trying to develop a more robust used-book buy-back program to help students save money.

UCI students who wanted this fall to buy all the textbooks for a single basic Biology 100 class would have spent $216.50 at the UCI bookstore.

Some students split the cost of books and agree to share them, but that can have its downside.

"It's a good way to save money, but it's inconvenient," Eldessouky said. "Especially at finals, when you need the book to study."

Eldessouky said his pet peeve is a standard publishing practice of creating new editions of books every few years, even if there's little or no new material, which makes used books obsolete and impossible to sell back.

Books that are used repeatedly, in the same edition, are cheaper because students can find used copies, either in the college bookstore or online. They can then save even more money by selling the books back at the end of the term.

The typical way textbooks end up in the classroom is as follows: Publishers create the products and then the faculty receives a selection list from the publishers, from which they can choose the books they want students to read. Then the chair of the college department approves the selections, and the list goes to the bookstore, which orders the materials for students to buy.

Some faculty who want to help students have complained that they can't choose the lowest-priced books because publishers don't put prices in their catalogs.

Others seek out the cheapest ways their students can access the same information.

English Professor Suzanne Crawford of Cerritos College said she has low-income students who don't want to spend $1.50 to buy a cheap edition of "Hamlet" for her class.

For them, Crawford recommends the Gutenberg Project, an online collection of tens of thousands of free books and other materials that are in the public domain and can be accessed at no cost.

She also has begun ordering custom books, where a publishing house will compile selected readings into a book specifically for a class. This can save money vs. requiring students to buy several books per semester.

"Right now, I am teaching an English 100 class with the theme of relationships," Crawford said. "I ordered 20 different articles and had a custom textbook created that only cost the students about $20. That way, they use 100 percent of the stuff, instead of reading 10 percent and then the rest is waste."

Other college officials go even farther. Several community colleges have formed a coalition to encourage the use of "open courseware," or free classes and materials that are available on the Internet, as part of an international movement. Some were created at universities like UCI, Notre Dame and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

"Not only are these materials saving students money, we are also discovering the material is better than conventional textbooks," said Hal Plotkin, board president at the Foothill-De Anza Community College District in Silicon Valley, which has spearheaded the coalition.

Plotkin's district has set aside resources to help faculty locate and develop course materials that can be used online for free.

"We've found there's a real desire on the part of most faculty to use these materials, but they have difficulty finding them and are not sure which ones they can legally use," Plotkin said.

He expects colleges to someday shut down their bookstores entirely and "get out of the dead tree business."

Meanwhile, the Association of American Publishers has created a Web site called www.textbookfacts.org in which they explain their key points in the wake of criticism for high textbook prices.

"College students spend more on electronics, cell phones, dorm room decorations, clothes and accessories, and their cars than they do on textbooks," one of the key facts reads.

That may be true, UCI student president Eldessouky acknowledged.

"But some of those things are necessities, and, in any event, unlike textbooks, they can still be used a year later," he said.

Textbook price reform

The two bills sent to the governor this year on textbook price reform. He had the power to sign or veto by today, after which they would expire:

SB832, the College Textbook Affordability Act would require textbook publishers to provide more information to faculty before they choose any books for the coming semester, including a complete list of products available in the subject matter being taught, the cost of the product, the estimated length of time the publisher expects to keep the product on the market, a list of differences or changes between the current edition and most recent previous edition of textbooks.

SB832 has been supported by consumer coalitions and college associations, including the California Association of College Stores. It is opposed by the Association of American Publishers and Pearson Inc.

AB1548, the College Textbook Transparency Act, also on the governor's desk for his consideration, this bill would require college bookstores to post their pricing policies and would require colleges to encourage their faculty to order books earlier. Faculty would be banned from demanding anything from publishers in return for selecting their books.

By 2010, publishers would be required to publish in their books the differences between previous editions and the copyright date of the previous edition. Also, if faculty members ask, publishers would be required to tell them the price of a book they want to order, a list of relevant products available for sale, the copyright date of the previous edition and a summary of changes from the old edition. This bill is supported by the textbook publishing industry.

Compiled by Marla Jo Fisher/The Register

Alternatives to traditional textbooks

The Open Courseware Consortium:
Offers free online course materials from major universities in a dozen countries including, in the U.S., UC Irvine, Notre Dame and Tufts universities, and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
www.ocwconsortium.org

Project Gutenberg's catalog of free books online:
There are more than 20,000 books available for free download at the Project Gutenberg online book catalog at www.gutenberg.org. A sampling of books: "Ulysses" by James Joyce; Roget's Thesaurus; "Diseases of the Horse's Foot" by Harry C. Reeks; "An Elementary Study of Chemistry" by William Edwards Henderson and William McPherson; "Moby Dick," Herman Melville.

Freeload Press
This site has free textbooks: www.freeloadpress.com/bookList.aspx
Some textbooks: "Guide to Business Valuation" by Les Livingstone, Ph.D.; "Math Glossary: Essential Words Series," by New Leaf Publications