44

I am an instructor in a medium-sized state school in the USA. The price for the textbook to the introductory math course that I teach just increased. Again. A new, paperback copy costs 170 USD. I want to put pressure on the publishers to reduce their price, but I am not sure what the best strategy is.

Has anyone had any success in such an endeavour? Any ideas? A strongly worded letter, signed by the faculty?

enthu
  • 7,528
  • 12
  • 47
  • 82
David Steinberg
  • 544
  • 4
  • 10
  • 22
    It seems like it would be a lot easier to change the textbook. Or is there some good reason why it has to be that specific book? – Tobias Kildetoft Sep 27 '14 at 17:55
  • 4
    @tobias That is a good option, but it only works if I am the course coordinator. This changes frequently. If I can get the price of the textbook down, then it won't matter who the course coordinator is. – David Steinberg Sep 27 '14 at 18:06
  • 2
    Well, you need it to at least be an option somewhere or you will have no leverage at all (not to say that you will have much anyway). If the publisher tends to increase the price occasionally, then any lowering will probably only be temporary and will need to be fought for again later. – Tobias Kildetoft Sep 27 '14 at 18:09
  • True. But I am happy to fight about it as long as I am employed by the university. – David Steinberg Sep 27 '14 at 18:10
  • 1
    170 USD for a basic math book seems to me an unusually high price: does this book have any special feature (e.g. many pages, colorful plots)? – Massimo Ortolano Sep 27 '14 at 18:14
  • 4
    @MassimoOrtolano: Check out the price for Thomas's calculus, which seems to be the standard around here. ($US 233!) – Bob Brown Sep 27 '14 at 18:22
  • 1
    @BobBrown: I checked and... gee! But at least Thomas's calculus seems to have a paperback edition for about USD 100. I had always found very high prices (> USD 150 ) more common for very specialistic books, with limited sells, but evidently I had a limited vision of the thing. – Massimo Ortolano Sep 27 '14 at 18:35
  • 2
    I won't mention by name, but if you don't care about having the newest edition, there are online used book stores that offer the texts far cheaper than the campus book stores offer used books. Additionally, you can often find "international" versions of the book through these sites, which are cheaper because they are printed on thinner paper. – AaronLS Sep 27 '14 at 20:36
  • 5
    A lot of people seem to be aware of the used book market on Amazon. It is to be found in small print directly below the retail price for the new book, a link "used from $xx.xx". It is not unusual at all on Amazon for common $100 textbooks to be found in good shape, used, for under $20. I'd say more but this will start to sound like spam. – Paul Sep 28 '14 at 08:35
  • 2
    Yes, the same way the music industry was pressured to do so: massive unauthorized copying. Or in other words, they're better off getting something (by making the price somewhat reasonable) than getting nothing. – R.. GitHub STOP HELPING ICE Sep 29 '14 at 01:20
  • Why don't universities agree a licence with the publisher and provide pdf versions of the required texts to the students? Then people have the option to pay $$ for a paper version. – JamesRyan Sep 30 '14 at 11:20

8 Answers8

45

If you don't have the authority to change the textbook on your own, at least for your own section, then your target should be, not the publisher, but the person or committee that does have that happy power.*

Show them this: http://aimath.org/textbooks/approved-textbooks/ and propose that you teach a section of your course using the appropriate open access textbook. (Edited to add: Pick out the appropriate book and an alternate before you talk to the committee or coordinator and be prepared to defend your choice vs. the approved text.) In the following semester, compare how well your students did in the next course in sequence vs. those who used the standard text.

Your secret weapon: work like hell to be sure your students are well prepared for the next course.

In the comments, Ben Crowell has said: "Here is a catalog I maintain of free books, including many open-source textbooks: http://theassayer.org" I've edited it into my answer so it doesn't get lost. Thank you, Ben.

* Hat tip to Professor Severus Snape for "happy power."

Bob Brown
  • 26,946
  • 11
  • 77
  • 110
  • I am in the process of doing something similar, although in a different field. I did not have to get IRB approval because the exams in the follow-on course aren't given to measure the effectiveness of the new material; they're to measure student progress and mine is a "secondary use." Do be prepared for someone to say IRB to you, though. – Bob Brown Sep 27 '14 at 18:33
  • 3
    I strongly suspect that IRB approval is not necessary for textbook selections. Departmental approval, perhaps, but not a central university board. – aeismail Sep 27 '14 at 18:49
  • IRB? Instruction Review Board? – David Steinberg Sep 27 '14 at 18:49
  • 6
    Institutional Review Board: Certifies experiments on human subjects. It absolutely should not be necessary in this case because selection of a new textbook is not an "experiment" in the sense that IRBs have in mind and checking on the progress of students in next courses is a secondary use of their grades. – Bob Brown Sep 27 '14 at 19:00
  • 2
    And another hat tip to Professor Gilderoy Lockhart for requiring a complete set of his expensive books. – Micah Walter Sep 27 '14 at 19:03
  • 3
    @aeismail: Correct; no IRB approval for textbook selection. But I also suggested seeing how students taught from the alternative text do in the follow-on course. Someone who wants to throw up roadblocks might call the two items together "an experiment." It's not, but OP should be prepared to address the objection. The answer, of course, is "secondary use" of the grades in the follow-on course. – Bob Brown Sep 27 '14 at 19:11
  • Use the ebook version. – user5402 Sep 27 '14 at 19:36
  • 2
    ck12.org also puts out free textbooks in math and science. They are K-12, so may not be university level, but they have material for calculus. If you are looking at what's available as an alternative, it's worth a look alongside aimath.org. – mightypile Sep 27 '14 at 20:57
  • If (without the text) you have to work like hell to be sure your students are well prepared for the next course then perhaps the text is worth it. I'll assume you don't have to work like hell with the text. (Cause if you did, that fact should be your secret weapon.) – emory Sep 27 '14 at 23:55
  • @emory: Do not confuse the text with a text. The link above goes to a large collection of open access (i.e. free) math books. – Bob Brown Sep 28 '14 at 01:59
  • @BobBrown I am interpreting your remarks as: an open access free math book + teacher working like hell = the expensive text book. Not liking to work like hell, in that case, I would choose the expensive text book. I infer that the expensive text book has beneficial pedalogical properties that the free ones don't. – emory Sep 28 '14 at 02:14
  • 3
    @emory: At this point it is unknown whether the expensive book has pedagogical properties that the OA book does not. David Steinberg has a desire to reduce the financial burden on his students from the current, expensive textbook. I have suggested an experiment (although we won't call it that) which would test whether an OA book, provided he can find a suitable one, is equivalent to the expensive book. Changing textbooks in an established course involves a certain amount of working like hell no matter how good the replacement is. – Bob Brown Sep 28 '14 at 07:38
  • 2
    Here is a catalog I maintain of free books, including many open-source textbooks: http://theassayer.org/ –  Sep 29 '14 at 01:10
  • +1 for "If you don't have the authority to change the textbook on your own". As they like to say over at Workplace.SE: "If you can't step away from an offer, you are begging, not negotiating." – xLeitix Sep 29 '14 at 08:29
  • 2
    @metacompactness, the official ebook version is often not much less, and can't be resold as used after the course. In some of my classes, the ebook version expired after 6 months, so I couldn't even keep it as a reference. – Kathy Sep 29 '14 at 14:15
  • @Kathy Most books are available online for free (PDFs). I know this isn't legal in some countries, but so should be selling books with extraordinary prices. In many countries, there's a copyright law but nobody applies it. – user5402 Sep 29 '14 at 15:01
  • @metacompactness Which is why I said the official version. :) The free versions are rarely legal in the US (OP's country), and it would be poor form at best for him to recommend those to his students. US corporations do take copyright law very seriously, and (this is my opinion here) prefer to charge high prices and spend the money on litigation. – Kathy Sep 29 '14 at 16:02
  • @Kathy In such case, I usually use a cheaper book since my lecture will cover all the details. I use the cheap textbook to give them HW and if the expensive book have some more interesting exercises, I just write some similar exercises and distribute them to the students. That's just my way (I'm a school teacher). – user5402 Sep 29 '14 at 19:09
16

I suspect—although I don't have actual proof for this—that the number of textbooks being sold has been rapidly declining, forcing upwards pressure on prices as publishers try to maintain their profit margins.

That said, I fully understand why teachers are reluctant to ask students to spend hundreds of dollars on a textbook. (Books that I spent $50 on as an undergraduate less than two decades ago now regularly sell for $150-$200!) I think this has also led to more and more instructors providing alternatives:

  • Having departments order limited quantities of texts, and depositing them as "restricted reference" materials in the university library.
  • Producing their own reference materials, either by making lecture notes and slides available online, or producing "prepared" materials closer in style to a textbook.
  • Reducing the reliance on individual textbooks, so that students can choose whichever appropriate reference they wish.

I know from personal experience that all three approaches are useful (and I've used them in different classes, depending on the nature and structure of the course).

aeismail
  • 173,481
  • 34
  • 418
  • 736
  • 7
    +1 for teaching without a textbook. I did my BSc in math at a top University in Europe and I didn't have to buy a single math book. There were recommendations and a library of course, but it was perfectly possible to do the undergrad courses with just the lecture notes and occasionally meeting for homework sessions in the library's homework room. – Sumyrda - remember Monica Sep 28 '14 at 13:10
  • 2
    Not an economist, but I don't understand your first sentence. Surely if the demand for something falls then the price should go down? – Flounderer Sep 28 '14 at 22:54
  • 13
    Surely if the demand for something falls then the price should go down? No, the normal logic of supply and demand doesn't apply here, because the person who picks the books is different from the person who pays. The extremely rapid rate of increase in textbook prices is simply a question of the publishers probing the limits of how exploitative they can be. –  Sep 29 '14 at 01:12
  • @Flounderer I am not an economist either but I know that this is not necesarily true. It depends on several factors. Two important ones are cost pr unit - Due to economy of scale this will tend to go up as volume goes down, and consumer response - while demand can be expected to go down with rising price this needs not be a linear relationship. – Taemyr Sep 29 '14 at 13:16
  • @Flounderer For textbooks in particular, the reverse is true due to what BenCrowell said in his comment. The price, not the demand, is the determining factor - when the price goes up, students just start sharing or buying used instead of buying new. – Izkata Sep 29 '14 at 17:05
  • That's very interesting! It sounds like the sort of thing whey would write about in Freakonomics. – Flounderer Sep 29 '14 at 20:51
  • @Flounderer If you are interested, in economics this is referred to generally as "price elasticity". Some goods are highly inelastic, such that a large increase (or decrease!) in price might have little or no effect on demand. So a publisher might reasonably find that a price of $50 or $250 elicits similar total demand in the short-run, so they make more money by increasing price (to a point, anyway). For more happy-fun-time reading: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Price_elasticity_of_demand (many years ago I wanted to be an economist - now it's just an occasional interest/hobby) – BrianH Sep 30 '14 at 04:30
  • @BenCrowell The normal logic of supply and demand applies everywhere. When the book publisher raises the price of the book, there will be fewer buyers regardless of who picks the book. Granted the elasticity of demand is probably pretty low so the quantity won't go down much because of the increase. That being said it will absolutely go down. It isn't the fewer quantities that drive publishers to increase their prices, it is simply because they can. Her'es a thought experiment, do you honestly believe the asking price would go down if they sold more units? – Dean MacGregor Sep 08 '15 at 19:03
  • 2
    @Flounderer you are inverting the cause and effect. A buyer will certainly buy fewer of something when the price increases but a supplier's cost doesn't decrease when fewer buyers buy the thing. What could be happening with books is that fewer people buy new books because of other factors (perhaps the internet makes buying used books significantly easier and cheaper). A publisher might lose some economies of scale benefit and therefore raise their price. In response to that price increase, buyers will buy even fewer of the good. – Dean MacGregor Sep 08 '15 at 19:15
6

At my institution, we asked a publisher to make us a "custom edition" of one of their expensive texts. The content wasn't really any different (I think we had them omit a chapter or two that wasn't in our curriculum) but they printed it in black and white, and it was somewhat cheaper than the four-color standard edition and still perfectly adequate.

We did encounter some difficulty in communicating to the bookstore what exactly they were supposed to order and stock.

I think the publishers like doing this because (a) it makes them feel more responsive to the needs of their customers and (b) it further fragments the used market. So I couldn't really say it turns the tables; maybe just wobbles them a little.

Nate Eldredge
  • 133,015
  • 44
  • 379
  • 480
  • 3
    In my experience, this has not worked well when the course of interest has a low enrollment. Custom textbooks for small courses in some cases can be more expensive, if you can even get the publisher to make them. – Jeffrey Weimer Sep 27 '14 at 22:10
  • @JeffreyWeimer: True. The OP mentioned an introductory math course; those typically have large enrollments. The book I am talking about was also for an introductory math course, which is taken by perhaps 200 students per year, so the numbers don't have to be enormous. – Nate Eldredge Sep 27 '14 at 22:13
  • 3
    I should have mentioned: the $170 textbook is a custom edition. – David Steinberg Sep 27 '14 at 23:09
  • tbh manufacture costs should have little to no relevance on price otherwise why not simply provide it as a pdf? This is all about them setting an arbitary price for the IP. – JamesRyan Sep 30 '14 at 11:16
6

Many publishers will publish the same book at a much cheaper price for sale in markets in the developing world. These copies will be exactly the same (even down to the typesetting and graphic design) except that the paper, printing and binding will be of inferior quality, and the cover will be a generic design.

I've bought the South Asian editions of third year physics textbooks for $20 from various sellers on AbeBooks, whereas these textbooks would retail for over $150 in my university bookshop. I've only done this on AbeBooks, but this might be possible on other websites as well.

Perhaps you could search online to see whether cheaper editions of your text are available, and if so, recommend that students purchase their copies there.

ChrisS
  • 161
  • 7
  • 1
    I have been able to purchase many if not most of my Computer Science text books on ebay as international editions. The material contained within the textbooks was identical to the books being offered in the school bookstore. Paying $20 for Modern Operating Systems instead of $180 is much easier to swallow. – Sarah Sep 30 '14 at 12:56
6

I have never had to buy a book for a course¹. All the lectures were absolutely self contained, and I only used the books when I needed a clarification or a different explanation on a particular thing, in which case I borrowed it for a few days from the library. I did buy a few books, but only these that I though would be useful as a reference beyond the particular course.

The best way to reduce the impact on the student's pockets is not to require purchasing the book at all. The library should have a bunch of copies of different books, so the students can compare and choose what suits them best.

¹ Actually, once I did. It was not compulsory per se, but the professor was referring to his book every day. He was a bad lecturer.

Davidmh
  • 21,215
  • 5
  • 60
  • 105
4

If there isn't too much of a difference, or if the differences aren't relevant, use the previous edition. This is always cheaper, and will be available second-hand.

RedSonja
  • 592
  • 8
  • 13
3

Two comments here ...

I know a professor who once wrote a popular textbook. When he wrote the next one, which was expected to be equally successful, he asked several publishers who could promise him the lowest sticker price. It might even have been a smart business move, because the next textbook was another bestseller by textbook standards. The author had bargaining power and used it for the benefit of his students.

On the other hand, I know that some textbooks have relatively low print runs and complicated layout/typesetting. Computers can only do so much, a good textbook needs manual attention. These overheads have to be divided over the print run in order to make any profits, and they might dwarf the costs of paper, print, and binding.

o.m.
  • 31
  • 1

  • I know that some textbooks have relatively low print runs and complicated layout/typesetting.

    Typesetting is a lot of work. But with LaTeX people can do it pretty well. I guess most mathematicans know LaTeX and the rest can be asked on http://tex.stackexchange.com/

     – Martin Thoma Oct 01 '14 at 08:48
  • Also, students can be paied to do the typesetting. (I did this once). – Martin Thoma Oct 01 '14 at 08:51
3

One "easy" way to pressure textbook publishers to reduce price for a textbook about a given topic you know a lot about is by writing a textbook yourself and giving it away for free. So you become the publisher.

I did so for a German lecture about Geometry and Topology. I am a student and the professor did not provide a textbook. So I create one from my lecture notes (he prepared the lectures very well; but it still was a lot of work).

Here is the result:

Students now have something that fits exactly what is taught in lecture (plus some very small extras I've added) together with training material. They can print it for less than 10 Euro. If they build groups / if the institute would decided to print 200 (which should not be a problem) I guess the price could go down to 5-7 Euro.

Another advantage of this OpenSource / science / education approach is that it gets easy to create derivates. In my case, another student asked me if it would be possible to create index cards for definitions. It turned out that it was quite easy to do so (index cards for this project). I could imagine that students or other teachers could come up with other variations of the text.

Martin Thoma
  • 1,268
  • 2
  • 12
  • 27