I use the 4th Seagull in my class, and i chose it precisely because the Seagull edition is the cheapest edition. It is cheaper because it has very few images, which are often the most expensive part of producing a textbook. I don’t need a book with lots of images, because i have thousands of great images that i can post on the class website, or show during class. I also let them buy the 3rd Seagull, which they can usually get used for between 10 and 20 bucks, or the 3rd regular edition.
Also, each year that i assign the book, i contact my textbook rep from Norton and ask for a new desk copy of the book, which i put on reserve in the library. My library now has 3 copies of the book on reserve for my classes, meaning that any of my students can take those books out for two hours at a time to do the reading for the week. If they’re willing to do this, they don’t need to buy the book at all.
Basically, textbooks “need” a new edition every few years because the publishers want people to buy new copies rather than used ones. Textbooks, for many students and for many subjects, constitute and unusual market, in that people buy them for a single purpose, and then often have no further use for them. This means that the market for any given textbook is quickly flooded, after the first year of release, with used copies. Statistics on textbooks sales suggest that sales of new books are cut in half by the used book market after one year, and then in half again in each subsequent year.
Of course, plenty of used books of all types are bought and sold, but textbooks have this sort of turnover in a way that does not generally apply to other books. If i buy a regular work of fiction or non-fiction, i generally want to keep it even after i’ve read it. Many other readers feel the same, which is why we end up with shelves and shelves of books in our houses. Textbooks, though, are often seen by the people who buy them as a necessary evil, and they have no interest in hanging on to them.
I’m not seeking to excuse the behavior of the publishers, and as an academic i feel no obligation to support their bottom line. This summer i’m actually making revisions to my course to see if i can drop the textbook altogether, and replace it with journal articles and also with essays from reputable and scholarly historical websites. But the fact is that, if they didn’t constantly release new editions, the textbook companies would end up losing almost all their sales to the used book market.
What i think will happen in the future is that they might stop producing hard-copy textbooks altogether. Students will, instead, pay for electronic access to a book for the length of the semester, and will thus not be able to sell the used copy on to the next student. Some publishers already do this with some of their books.
Textbooks have skyrocketed in price partly for the same reason tuition has: The market has been distorted by billions of dollars in the form of government student loans. When money is cheap and supply is constrained, prices are sure to rise.
Part of the problem is that supply in textbooks is constrained by publishers constantly cranking out new editions with minor changes simply to invalidate the used market in textbooks. Anyone who has been through university has seen this: Texts that are functionally identical but in which the sample problems are subtly different so that an old textbook cannot be used to follow along with a problem in class. Short-story collections where one or two stories are dropped in favor of others, so that the old text no longer covers all the classroom material.
I took linear algebra 30 years ago. My son just took it this semester. The content of the course is virtually identical, but there have been many, many editions of the textbooks used to teach it during that time. The same goes for calculus, basic circuit theory, and other courses we could compare. He actually used some of my 30 year old textbooks for study where they were better written than the new ones.
Here’s my idea for a simple reform: We identify some core courses that have no political content and in areas that are mature and rarely subject to change. The government then offers a ‘textbook prize’ big enough to get the best educators interested in going for it. Say, two million dollars for the best textbook on introductory calculus, or thermodynamics, or whatever. Find a large panel of experts to evaluate them, or come up with a short list of the best ones that are then given to the schools and the scores of the students on standardized tests evaluated for each one.
Then, release the winning textbook into the public domain, and tie federal funding for state colleges to the requirement that they use that textbook for those classes. If you want to get really creative you can also offer prizes for more advanced texts for ‘honors’ classes or elite universities.
You could instantly save a typical student hundreds of dollars per year.
Sometimes professors (or whoever selects the textbooks) are required to switch to the new edition, because the college bookstore can no longer obtain enough copies of the old edition for the students who will be taking the class because it’s out of print (and/or there’s a danger that the students themselves won’t be able to obtain enough copies).
Sometimes, professors can get away with allowing students to use their choice of editions; but sometimes this doesn’t work well, if the editions are different enough.
And sometimes the professor wants to use supplementary materials that aren’t available with the older edition.
So you fall into the “easy-going” part of the dichotomy I noted. I’m sure there are professors on your campus, however, who absolutely demand one particular edition, no other edition is acceptable, and they’re not going to give “their” desk copy to the library. How do you respond to them?
You’re making my point for me. Publishers need to sell a new edition every couple of years to make lots of money, but they can’t do that without the cooperation of professors who adopt a new edition every couple of years AND require their classes to use the new edition. Apparently there are an awful lot of academics who either do feel an obligation to support publishers’ bottom lines or simply don’t care what students have to spend.
Well, it seems like, in this day and age, the school could just purchase e-copies of one edition, and just make it available to students. There never would be a danger of it being out of print, or unavailable at the college bookstore.
I’m not entirely sure what you mean. Depending on what you’re talking about, the answer is either
They can’t, because copyright, or
Sure they could, but why do you specify e-books or “this day and age”? This is something they’ve always been able to do with printed copies of textbooks, if they wanted to.
I’m not going to second-guess them, because as others have noted, there could well be circumstances where the only really practical solution is to have everyone using exactly the same edition.
When i switched to Foner (from a different text) three years ago, the first thing i did was find out which version of the book was the cheapest for the students. It was the 4th Seagull edition, so i chose that.I then grabbed earlier editions to see if i could reasonably allow the students to purchase those without unduly disrupting the class, and without making life difficult for students who chose the older edition.
I discovered, in my examination, that allowing the students to buy the 3rd Seagull would work, because while a few sections of text had some changes, most of the changes were minor enough that all students would still get essentially the same material. I did not allow them to go further back than that, because earlier editions had more important differences.
All of this was possible because, for me as a historian, the key stuff that i want to students to understand is the big, important themes, and the key skills i want them to develop are close reading, analysis, critical thinking, and persuasive argumentation and writing. A few minor differences between textbook editions doesn’t really change that. But in other subjects, it might be much more important that everyone have exactly the same book.
To be honest, even in my own class, it would make it easier if everyone had the same book. When i tell my students that they can, if they want to save money, purchase a used copy of the 3rd edition, i also tell them that i will be using the 4th edition, and that if i make reference to a page number when we’re talking about a particular issue, it might not match up with the 3rd edition. And still i occasionally get students complaining that they are having trouble finding the page i’m talking about.
This problem would be even worse if i allowed them buy every any edition they wanted. My syllabus would end up looking something like this:
Week 7, Lesson 1: The Post-WWI Red Scare and the Debate over Immigration
Foner, Seagull 4th edition, pp. 678-694
Foner, Seagull 3rd edition, pp. 661-676
Foner, Seagull 2nd edition, pp. 675-691
Foner, Seagull 1st edition, pp. 670-686
Foner, Complete 4th edition, pp. 724-739
Foner, Complete 3rd edition, pp. 720-735
Foner, Complete 2nd edition, pp. 730-745
Foner, Complete 1st edition, pp. 726-741
Sorry, but that’s not going to happen. There comes a time when the priority has to be making the classroom experience smoother and more consistent for all students in the class, and for the instructor, rather than allowing a free-for-all in the area of course materials.
It’s worth noting, by the way, that even though Foner’s book is very good, i don’t much like teaching with textbooks at all. I’d prefer to teach with a few scholarly monographs and some good journal articles. The problem is that, in my freshman classes at least, the vast majority of my students are non-majors who are taking US history because it is a state requirement. Many of them resent the requirement, and many of them also really are not prepared for the intellectual rigor of a proper university-level course. When i have tried to assign more difficult readings from journals or scholarly monographs, i’ve found that a significant number of my students can barely make sense of the arguments in those readings. In my upper division course, where i have more history majors, i do not use a textbook. In fact, in my California history class, all of the readings are scholarly articles and primary sources, and the course readings cost the students exactly zero dollars unless they decide to print something out.
Regarding cost in my freshman class, while the journal articles are free to the students through our campus library, three or four scholarly history books would probably end up costing more than the textbook i currently assign. I know this because i’ve looked at prices, and also because it’s how i was taught as an undergraduate. I remember having to buy four or five different books for each of my history classes, and in many cases these added up to more than the cost of a textbook. One benefit of scholarly monographs, though, is that they are books that people are more likely to want to keep; i still have all the books i purchased as an undergraduate history major.
They don’t feel an obligation; they often feel that they have little choice. The fact is that, whatever you think of the economic model, some of these textbooks are excellent, and do a really good job of conveying important ideas to the students. The first thing on the minds of most faculty when choosing a book is: “Which book will provide the best learning outcomes in my course?”
It’s true that this means that faculty generally end up supporting the economic model of the textbook publishers, but the problem is that our first obligation is to teach the course as well as we possibly can, and for that we should choose the best materials. Also, while individual faculty members, and even small groups of them, can push back against the system by refusing to cooperate, there is no national (or international; this is not just a US problem) concerted effort to change the system.
And i’m not exactly sure what changing the system would actually look like. As a hypothetical, let’s assume that we could get every faculty member to agree, in an instant, not to buy any new editions of the textbooks they are currently using. Say that we got all faculty, nationwide, to write a letter to the publishers saying that the only way we would continue to assign their books is if they keep producing the current issue, and not bring out new editions. So, for my book, i would insist that Norton keep producing the Seagull 4th edition in perpetuity, and not bring out a 5th edition.
Leaving aside for a moment the question of whether the actual content might need to be updated occasionally, we also have to deal with the economic reality. Of all the students who use the textbook that i require, almost none of them have any interest in keeping the book after the course is over, so they flood the used book market. This means that, for textbooks, the secondary market quickly fills the demand for the book, and the publisher can’t sell new copies anymore.
On the one hand, i’m not crying any tears for the publishers. On the other, though, what would be the consequence of this in the long run? Like it or not, textbooks cost a lot of money to produce, and if a publisher knows that they will only get one or two years of initial sales out of a book, they might stop producing them altogether. What then?
I’m not pretending there are any easy answers to this. One possibility might be to try some sort of radical nationwide adoption program like the one proposed above like Sam Stone, but can you imagine the reaction that proposal would get, from all corners of the political spectrum, not to mention from the lobbyists for the publishing industry? Another might be just for individual professors and universities to do everything they can to adopt free and open-source materials. My own university currently has a program to encourage faculty to do just that: it’s called the Cougars Affordable Learning Materials (CALM) program. As i said above, this summer i’m in the process of working out whether i can drop my textbook altogether and substitute a bunch of freely-available journal articles and other historical essays. If i can do that, the total cost of materials for a student taking my course will drop from about $70 (Foner + printing out a bunch of primary source documents) to about $20 (just printing out a bunch of primary source documents).
Something i resent a little bit about these discussions is what i think is excessive focus on the cost of books, and excessive blame placed on professors, none of whom have created the model that is making education more and more expensive.
I teach at a second-tier state university in San Diego County. It’s part of the California State University system. It’s relatively young, having been created less than 30 years ago when it became clear that San Diego State could not handle the county’s growing population. It’s not a prestigious institution, but it provides a good education to about 13,000 students, and the student population is growing. We have a lot of first-gen college students.
The basic cost of one year’s attendance at my campus for in-state students is as follows:
I include parking because we’re a commuter campus that is poorly served by public transport. The vast majority of our students drive to campus. I have also posted the cheapest parking price, for three lots that involve a longer hike from campus. The yearly price for parking in the regular lots is $643.
You’ll forgive me if i suggest that my $50 resellable textbook probably isn’t the most significant financial hurdle that my students face in getting their education, and that maybe there’s a disproportionate amount of blame being placed on the shoulders of faculty when it comes to educational inflation.
Over the last ten years, a time during which student tuition and other fees have basically doubled, faculty salaries in the California State University system have remained essentially stagnant, while our campus alone has increased its employment of administrators on six-figure salaries by about 40 percent.
Yeah, that’s why I think it would only work with books that have no controversial content in them at all. I don’t think anyone would get bent out of shape over a standardized text on introductory calculus or basic physics. It would never work for history, or for genetics, or climatology or those sorts of courses. Too much opportunity for partisans or other people with agendas to get their panties in a bunch.
The good thing is that those basic freshman classes are the low hanging fruit because just about every STEM student has to take them, they are quite expensive, and the material is relatively basic and non-controversial.
Of course the publishers would whine, but so what? So long as their material isn’t being stolen, they can compete with open source material just like every other business has to in the digital age. Pearson is not owed guaranteed profits.
I guess the freak out over the common core math curriculum hasn’t reached you. And when I was a kid there was a big fight about how to teach first graders reading - I got an old battleaxe who did it the old way, bless her heart.
Remember, we’re talking academic politics here.
Firstly, i’m not quite as sanguine as you about the idea that some subjects are non-controversial and easy to standardize.
Secondly, and perhaps more importantly, i think that the ideological objections from all points of the political spectrum would be less about the particular content than about the idea of a federally-sanctioned core curriculum. Many people who constantly complain about the federal government’s involvement in education would see this as just another example of government over-reach, and it probably wouldn’t matter to them whether or not the subject matter itself were controversial.
Many academics would also argue that your plan undermines their academic freedom. In one of the core history courses that i teach, there are about 8-12 sections offered per semester, taught by anywhere from 3 to 6 different faculty members.While many of us teach very similar issues, and attempt to develop similar skills of analysis and argumentation, we don’t all use the same books. To be honest, i don’t think it would be the end of the world if we were all required to get together and use the same materials, especially in a freshman survey course, but there are plenty of professors who would balk at such a requirement.
I agree with you about publishers like Pearson, but isn’t it libertarian-leaning conservatives like you who are constantly saying that the government should not compete with the private sector except in areas where the private sector cannot fill the need? Given the plethora of different textbooks offered for every course, it’s a bit hard to argue that the publishers aren’t competing with one another, or that they don’t offer a product that does the job.