The first-sale doctrine protects owners’ rights to rent out books (and most other physical media) as they please.
I’m taking one class this coming semester. An Anatomy & Physiology class. Haven’t attended college in about 15 years now, and textbooks were kind of a racket back then. But they’ve really gotten out of hand.
Now, the professor has not officially listed what textbook(s) she will be requiring, but a little digging around online revealed that last semester for the same class, she required a textbook (Anatomy & Physiology, an Integrative Approach, McKinley, 2nd edition) that costs, at retail, $260. It was published in 2015.
Now just out of curiosity, I found a sample chapter of the second edition, and a sample chapter from the first edition, published in 2012, and compared them. It is the SAME BOOK. I do not exaggerate. A couple of pages have been inserted here and there (like 3 or 4 extra pages, out of a 1200 page text), the pages might have some different artwork, rearranged a bit, the visual style is different, but it’s the SAME BOOK. The first edition can be purchased from Amazon used for $3.99.
There is absolutely no need for this - other than profit seeking and price gouging on the behalf of the publishers and college bookstores.
On the other hand, I’ve never heard of a college teacher who would actually check to see what version of the book you had. And I had plenty who would tell you the page number for the previous edition.
What really sucks is when the books include workbooks, so everything in them gets filled out. I had a few teachers that would accept you writing on a separate sheet of paper, though. And I didn’t know a single one that would object to a photocopy. But that took extra time and cost money per page.
The worst are those who would give you a one-time use code for the online material that was necessary for the class.
I certainly agree that college students get royally screwed over on books, and that something needs to be done about it, but I don’t think that antitrust laws are the solution. To the extent that a monopoly exists, it’s basically an unavoidable one. Using my own class as an example, I assign homework problems out of the textbook. I could create my own, but that’s a lot of work, both to create them, to write them up in a usable form, and to distribute them to the students. And if not all the students have the same edition of the same book, I can’t just tell them “Problems 2, 7, and 23 on page 492”.
Now, what would be really nice would be if the publishers didn’t release new editions except when there were substantive changes, and if, when they did so, they put the new problems in at the end so the existing problem numbers didn’t change. If that were the case, then my students could find used textbooks easily, and everyone could still just copy down the problem numbers off of the board. It’d be a solution, but it wouldn’t actually break the monopoly, because different editions of the same book will be from the same publisher.
Most professors do, in my experience, try to soften the blow for their students. At the beginning of this semester, I had a few students who were using an older edition for reference, and just copying down the problems from classmates’ books, and I made it clear that I was fine with that. One of my undergraduate professors told us “There are two good books on this subject, and one of them costs $25, so we’re using that one”. And another professor used a self-published book that he priced at cost.
That said, though, there are also a few professors out there who exploit the system, and who really do do things like requiring their own book and charging $400 for it. They’re thankfully the minority, but they do exist.
The first part of your quote is wrong, in a very real sense.
Yes, it’s true that students are the ones who have to buy the books, but in terms of identifying your market and producing a book, it’s perfectly appropriate to think of professors as the market, because they are the ones with the expertise to evaluate whether or not your book will do the job. What are professors hired for, if not expertise? We don’t let students choose which books they buy for a course, because the level of expertise required to make that choice is precisely what they don’t have when they arrive in college.
And your call for standardization is, at least in the humanities and social sciences, completely ridiculous. While most professors who teach the US History survey course might touch on a bunch of key areas, and important themes and topics, the scope of US History is too large, with too many fascinating and important possible topics, to be confined to a single standardized text.
And those of us who teach college don’t just grab the first book we see, or the one that makes our lives easiest. We take seriously the task of evaluating the books, and also of making choices with our students’ financial limitations in mind. As someone who teaches at a university (California State University system), i constantly have textbook reps sending me samples and trying to get me to buy their stuff. Most of the reps are very nice, but i’m also very careful about what i choose for my classes. My job is to teach the students, not look out for the bottom line of massive publishing houses.
I’ve been offered “custom” edition textbooks on quite a few occasions, and they are always marketed as a great way to provide a book that is customized to the particular needs of teacher and student. But i have always resisted, largely due to the fact that such editions are hard to resell. The freshman-level classes i teach, and some of the upper division classes, are required for many students, even those who are not majoring in my subject. I have no interest is asking them to pay a lot of money for something that most of them are only going to use for one semester and then sell. And i’m not going to saddle them with a unique edition that will be difficult to sell on the used-book market.
As someone who teaches US history, i have literally dozens of excellent texts to choose from. I’m currently teaching with a text that is considered by many to be one of the best in the field for introductory courses, and has the added advantage of being offered in a cheaper, paperback edition. The cheaper edition has exactly the same text as the full edition, but fewer pictures and maps (that’s often the stuff that costs a lot to put into books). I don’t really need too many pictures and maps in the book, because i provide plenty of those in my class presentations, and on the class website. I also think the students can focus better on the content of the book if they’re not distracted on every page by pictures and maps and charts.
The book i use is currently in its fourth edition, and this is the one i order for the campus bookstore. But the text of the third edition is very similar, and i tell students that they are welcome to buy used copies of the third edition, as long as they realize that the page numbers might not always match up when we’re discussing the book in class.
The full, hardcover edition of the textbook i use is about $108. The cheaper version that i assign is about $55, and they can usually get a used copy of the third or fourth edition for about $25-40, depending on condition. I also place two copies of the book on reserve in the library, so that students who are willing to read the book in the library on a short (2-hour) loan each week do not have to buy it at all. Some of them also rent the book, either as a physical book, or as an electronic book for reading on tablet and computers.
I also assign a whole bunch of primary source documents to my classes, but i select and collect those myself, and make them available for free download as PDF documents on the class website.
In my upper division course, i don’t use a textbook at all, but make use of multiple sources, from book chapters to scholarly journal articles to primary source documents. I provide all of them on the class website, and the only cost to students is the printing cost if they want to print them out rather than read them online.
My university has made an effort, over the past couple of years, to encourage faculty to reduce the cost of class materials to students. They even hold special workshops for faculty to show ways that this can be done. I’ve never bothered with these workshops, because i know my classes are already among the cheapest that any of my students are likely to take during their whole degree.
Have you ever tried to write an academic university level book?
Thousands of hours drawing on decades of knowledge.
With a print run of 1000 if you are lucky.
And then wait in hope that somebody might buy one.
And a publisher taking a big risk even putting the book on the market.
Academic text books are an obscure type of publication. Ironically they are also very important because of the knowledge they contain. But buyers are few which is why the price is high.
Thousands of hours of work? So they can add 3 and a half pages of text to a 1200 page textbook, and charge $260 for it? World’s smallest record player for those poor guys.
For the record, I bought the $4 first edition, with the plan of buying access to the digital (second) edition if it seems necessary, for around $100. All of this assumes that the teacher hasn’t planned a different $300 textbook to announce at the last second. I figured $4 was a worthwhile wager.
You seem to be conflating textbooks and scholarly monographs.
It is true that scholarly monographs often have very small print runs, sometimes in the hundreds or very low thousands, and their biggest market is usually a few hundred university libraries, plus another few hundred academics and maybe a thousand more graduate students.
But textbooks are a somewhat different animal. They still take a lot of work, but in many cases they sell in the tens or even hundreds of thousands. The text that i use, which i mentioned in my previous post, is used by history professors all over the country, from community colleges to four-year universities, and possibly also in high schools. Over the three years that i’ve been using the book, i have, through my students, probably been indirectly responsible for at least 300-500 copies of the book being purchased or rented.
But the textbook is also in a peculiar situation, because the market for it is so narrow (in terms of the type of people who buy it). Textbook publishers face a somewhat unique situation, in that they publish books that are generally used for specialized purposes, for a limited period of time. Those books are also often purchased by people who have no further use for them afterwards, generating a disproportionately large number of available used copies. This, combined with the fact that new customers often don’t care if their copy of the textbook already has writing or highlighting in it, leads to a used book market that where demand is not very discriminating, in terms of the actual quality and condition of the product, and where demand for used copies can rapidly exceed the market for new copies of the book.
Anyone who reads knows that used books have always been around, and have always eaten (at least a little bit) into the market for new books, but it seems to me that the scale of the problem is significantly larger for textbooks. And i think this explains why textbook publishers constantly come out with new editions that seem to contain so little in the way of useful new material. In some ways, what they are doing is understandable, because a textbook takes a lot of time and effort and money to produce, and if you lose all your sales to the used textbook market after a couple of semesters, they might quickly become unprofitable. I’m not excusing the situation; just trying to account for it.
I think, in the longer run, as more and more people read on electronic devices, that many textbooks might move to being exclusively electronic, with updates simply incorporated into the electronic version, rather than requiring a printing of a completely new book. It could also be that they become rental-only, whereby you have access to an electronic copy of the book only for the semester that you need it, and then your account expires unless you’re willing to pay up for another four or six months. Some of my students already choose this type of purchase for their books. This would (assuming you can protect the electronic versions from being copied and distributed) effectively eliminate the used book market altogether.
I had to buy a Dynamics textbook one year and I swear the only difference between that one and the prior edition was the color of the font used for the problem set titles.
I know someone who is in nursing school right now. The way the university gets her and her classmates to purchase books is very slimy. The total cost of her books is about $1000, and she can find exact used versions online for about $350 total. If she could buy those books she’d be fine because they’re the same editions.
However, the university sells the books with an added sheet of paper packaged in that is sort of like a scantron but is marketed as a “study guide”. This study guide is a prerequisite for the course and is required to pass. So essentially you are forced to buy new books just to get the piece of paper they added under the extra layer of cellophane. The book store would certainly lose a lot of money if they didn’t come up with this neat little trick a few years ago.
Sure, but the publishers will come out with the Second, Third, and Fourth editions of the book during a student’s tenure at the school, even though the subject matter hasn’t changed for centuries.
Case in point: my college calculus textbook. When I started, we were on the Third Edition of our particular textbook, if I’m not mistaken. By the time I made it to the second semester of calculus, the Fourth Edition had been published. By the time I graduated, the Fifth Edition was in print.
Some profs were very adamant that you have THE version that he specified, and others didn’t really give a shit, so long as you had something relatively current (i.e. the 3rd edition or newer).
It’s a huge scam- basically by changing the edition and switching around the homework problems, the textbook publishers can essentially crowbar the profs/departments and the students into buying new books every so often, at what seem to be absurd prices, because the demand for calculus textbooks is extremely high in college towns and probably near zero elsewhere. What makes it worse is that in the pre-internet days, there weren’t good ways to hook up buyers and sellers of used books- you kind of had to work a deal with someone you knew who needed that book, or you took whatever pennies the bookstores would throw your direction.
Of course, this only applies to textbooks. For things like say… novels and the like, you always were better off going to a regular bookstore in town for your copy of “Pride and Prejudice” or whatever.
The catch with trying to sue textbook publishers would be proving collusion and some sort of cartel-like activity, which probably isn’t actually there. I think you’d have more luck sueing locally on the resale side- there’s no reason whatsoever that ALL college bookstores in a college town should buy used books for the exact same prices, or even within the exact same band, especially in light of the absurd markup they’ll put on the the following semester.