Updated Post - The Problem/Potential Solutions of Academic Textbooks

          The question that I try to answer here is “what can writing studies do to combat academic publishing oligopolies?” and “what can we do as teachers to combat academic publishing oligopolies?” I see these questions as worth answering because, basically, academic publishers damage public good in a direct exchange for higher and higher profit margins. When I first decided to get involved in this battle, I didn’t realize it, but there are two separate and distinct fronts on which the battle is being fought: the first front is academic textbook publishing, and the second is scholarly article and book publishing. Though similar, both fronts on this battle have their own separate problems and potential solutions. This paper will focus on what instructors can do to combat detrimental publishing practices in relation to academic textbooks.

            Regardless of whether open-access textbooks are viable, clearly, something needs to be done about the current US college textbook system. 40 years ago, this was not the case. Then, bookstores “had characteristics of a cost center (like a library or advising unit)” (Acker as cited in Okamoto, 2013, p.268). Unfortunately, during the 1980s, campus bookstores were taken over by chains like Barnes and Noble and became focused upon contributing to profits for the college or university rather than being focused upon serving students and helping them to secure affordable classroom materials (Okamoto, 2013, p.268).

            Now, students have to pay much more money for their textbooks than they should, which is evidenced by the cost of textbooks increasing “more than four times the rate of inflation” over the past few decades (Okamoto, 2013, p. 268). Between just 2002 and 2013 in the US, textbook prices rose 6% every year whereas inflation was only causing consumer prices overall to raise by 2% every year during that period (Carbaugh, 2016, p.192). Of course, according to the law of supply and demand, the price of a product increasing usually makes demand fall, but since students do not get to choose which textbooks to purchase (their instructors and administrators make this decision for them), there is much less elasticity in textbook demand (Carbaugh, 2016, p.192). Students are just forced to pay higher and higher prices without having much of a say in it. This dynamic has been maintained by there being far fewer textbook publishers over the years too: there are less options for teachers to choose from, less competition from different textbook publishers (Carbaugh, 2016, p.192). Basically, textbook publishers have exploited their position to charge students higher costs than they probably should.

            There are, of course, cheaper options for students than, for example, paying the full $229 for a textbook like Biology. Students can rent books and buy used books too, but textbook publishers actively fight to limit student access to these options. One way in which publishers have fought is by moving their textbooks online with access codes that can be used once and terminate access after one semester. Both Pearson and McGraw-Hill have used this tactic (Carbaugh, 2016, p.193). Going back to the textbook Biology, online access to that text is only about $120, which is much cheaper than the full $229, but the text can be rented for $36, and it can be bought used for $102, then later resold for $95, only costing the student $6 total (Carbaugh, 2016, p.193). The motivation often given for providing students with online textbooks is giving them access to online-only material like speech recordings and videos that they would be unable to access with the print format (Forman, 2005, p.1402). Another strategy that textbook publishers use it to churn out new editions of textbooks usually about every four years. Even though people can make the argument that, even in areas like US history, interpretations can change pretty dramatically over the course of 25 years (Forman, 2005, p.1400), the basic information is still the same, and there is little question that new editions release more quickly than necessary in mostly static academic areas like calculus (Carbaugh, 2016, p.193). Publishers, overall, make it more difficult for students to access these more affordable options with a variety of tactics.

            Of course, supporters of academic textbook publishing are quick to point out that high textbook costs are more complicated than publishers being greedy. Author royalties can account for 15% of the price that publishers charge to campus bookstores, and the cost of the thousands of free copies given away to instructors as advertising also raises prices (Forman, 2005, p.1398). Furthermore, some argue that the shift in higher education towards part-time and adjunct faculty members has put more of a burden on textbooks to make teaching easier for instructors, which has caused their prices to inflate (Carbaugh, 2016, p.195; Forman, 2005, p.1403).

            Regardless of the cause, problems have materialized for students because of these increasing textbook prices. A study of over 14,000 students in Florida has revealed that a 7.2% of students have claimed to have failed a course because they were unable to afford the texts for the class (Okamoto, 2013, p. 269). For budget-minded community college students, textbooks can make up 75% of their total educational costs and are usually not covered by financial aid (Okamoto, 2013, p.268). I don’t think I need to elaborate, here, on the fact that education in the United States is already more expensive and difficult to access for college students than it should be. Textbooks shouldn’t be making this situation worse.

            I believe that academic textbooks can become more affordable in the United States, and there have been many efforts already to achieve this goal. There have been legislative efforts to make texts more affordable including a bill in Washington that limited course materials to less than $30 per class and a bill in California that funded the development of open source electronic textbooks (Okamoto, 2013, p. 270). It is important to note, however, that these bills tend not to work unless there is strong enforcement with the state. In 2008, the US also passed the Higher Education Opportunity Act, which made it required that bookstores stock textbooks unbundled with supplementary materials like CDs and workbooks (Carbaugh, 2016, p.193). Some universities and community colleges have taken measures into their own hands as well, but this doesn’t extend much beyond creating repositories of open-access textbooks and materials and encouraging instructors to use them (Okamoto, 2013, p. 271). Such efforts are usually directed by university libraries. The University of Minnesota is an example; there, the library has advocated strongly for course material affordability through “publishing open content, borrowing textbooks from other libraries, advocating for the use of library-licensed materials, and selecting these resources for [their] collection” (Eighmy-Brown, McCready, & Riha, 2017, p. 94). There also are open-access textbook publishers, creators, and curators like Flat World Knowledge, Wikibooks, and the OpenStax repository (Ovadia, 2011, p.53); unfortunately, none of these efforts have had a large impact on the traditional model for academic textbook publishing.
            Overall, I think that the most promising places to look will be where schools have somehow succeeded in making their textbooks affordable. A route that we might possibly take is a crowdfunding, collaboratively written operation. Could we have a textbook written in a similar manner as how Naming What We Know or Wikipedia was written?

 [the following is a loose end that I will develop as I keep writing the paper]

When I was in Pittsburgh, I had a heated conversation with a Pearson author about open-access textbooks (Sid Dobrin, chair of University of Florida’s English department), and he was not only very frank in his motivation for writing texts for Pearson (money), but he also said that he thought it was impossible for students to successfully use open-access textbooks. I had a similar conversation with Rick Johnson-Sheehan where he cited the quality of open-access textbooks and pointed out that his own textbook was superior because it was on the cutting edge of writing research. But does this mean that it is impossible to have an open-access (or at least much more affordable) textbook which is also of very high quality? From my own experience working with Pearson and visiting one of their headquarters in Hoboken, New Jersey, I know how unnecessarily opulent textbook publisher lifestyles can seem, and most scholars in writing studies are aware that publisher parties at conferences like CCCC probably contribute to these inflated prices as well. Can these parties and benefits from interacting with academic textbook publishers be seen basically as hush money? If we have a favorable view of Pearson because they gave us free martinis and sushi, are we less likely to speak out about practices that are clearly detrimental to our students?

References

Carbaugh, B. (2016). College Textbook Publishing: Three Microeconomic Applications. The American Economist, 61(2), 191–203. https://doi.org/10.1177/0569434516652035

Eighmy-Brown, M., McCready, K., & Riha, E. (2017). Textbook access and affordability through academic library services: A department develops strategies to meet the needs of students. Journal of Access Services, 14(3), 93–113. https://doi.org/10.1080/15367967.2017.1289817

Forman, S. (2005). Textbook Publishing: An Ecological View. Journal of American History, 91(4), 1398. https://doi.org/10.2307/3660180

Morris-Babb, M., & Henderson, S. (2012). An Experiment in Open-Access Textbook Publishing: Changing the World One Textbook at a Time <sup/>. Journal of Scholarly Publishing, 43(2), 148–155. https://doi.org/10.3138/jsp.43.2.148

Okamoto, K. (2013). Making Higher Education More Affordable, One Course Reading at a Time: Academic Libraries as Key Advocates for Open Access Textbooks and Educational Resources. Public Services Quarterly, 9(4), 267–283. https://doi.org/10.1080/15228959.2013.842397

Ovadia, S. (2011). Open-Access Electronic Textbooks: An Overview. Behavioral & Social Sciences Librarian, 30(1), 52–56. https://doi.org/10.1080/01639269.2011.546767