Link: The Chronicle: Daily news: 06/01/2007 -- 03: Federal Panel Proposes Long-Term Solution to 'Broken' Textbook Market.
Today there's an interesting article in the Chronicle on a new report on how to fix "the textbook problem."
It's from The Advisory Committee on Student Financial Assistance, an independent panel that advises Congress, which
proposes the creation of a "national digital marketplace" that would allow instructors to select and students to buy custom-designed texts -- a chapter from one book, a case study from another -- while protecting fair-use allowances and publishers' copyrights.
Great, but that it not news. I've been there and done that.
I used custom designed on demand published textbooks for five years while teaching at a community college.
And, this approach worked great for students. But I got nothing but opposition from the college.
Why? Just follow the money.
There's been a lot of news lately about the problems with the student loan business. I say it's about time we aired out that other stinky stack of higher education dirty linen: the student-textbook-to-pocketbook game.
Here's My Story
For five years I did exactly what the panel recommends.
I started in Spring 2000, through a program from one of the big textbook publishers that allowed me to chose chapters and readings from dozens of their textbooks, all online via the web. The custom book was then published and ordered just like any other book. But it was my selection, just for my class.
And, since it has a set price per page, I knew exactly what it would cost my students. My goal was to
keep every book I assigned under $20 and as close to $10 as I could. And this was the perfect way to have the content I wanted at a very reasonable price.
The selection I had to choose from was not great, but it was more than adequate, and it was getting better every term. I could choose available articles from any discipline.
Also, it was a real book, not a course packet. It was bound, had a cover, and each version I made had its own ISBN number.
So instead of a 500 page mammoth Introduction to Philosophy or Ethics textbook, costing $50 to $80, of which I would only have them read 15% maybe 20% over a standard 10 week course, I had a slim 60 to 75 page custom reader, all of which we would read, and it cost only $9 dollars. Well, nine dollars before the bookstore markup pushed it to $12.
Aye, there's the rub: The college bookstore HATED me for using a custom published digital based book.
After all, from their point of view I was taking money out of their pockets not just once, not twice, but three times:
- Once: by having a cheap book to start with which lowered their cut because it was percentage based. The overhead is the same for ordering and stocking a ten dollar book as an eighty dollar book, but not the profit.
- Twice: by having fewer buybacks. Since I often taught classes in alternating quarters (Fall-Spring, Winter-Summer quarters), the bookstore would not buy back used copies from my students, since the course wasn't being taught immediately in the next term. So they were bereft of the traditional pennies-on-the-dollar buy back profits (low as they were already.) (Also, because we read the whole book, some students would mark up the whole book, lowering its resale value, whereas marking up the same 60 pages in a 500 page book doesn't look so bad.)
- Thrice: Its resale value was nil. They couldn't resell the copies to any other college bookstore, because, after all, no other course in the country would have exactly those readings. That's one of the prices of customization: no resale value.
Page Too
One of the great benefits of a custom online constructed reader is I could take out an article or add an article or two from class to class, and not have to worry about some arbitrary textbook author, editor, or publisher decision to delete one of the article I depended on.
(In fact, that was one of the main reasons I completely gave up standard textbooks altogether: after creating curriculum for a course based a set of readings in a the third edition of a textbook, only to find that five of those seven readings disappeared in the fourth edition; that was the final straw, er, textbook, for me.)
But to the bookstore, God forbid I change one reading -- why, that means creating a
whole new book, a whole new ISBN, and a whole 'nother round of
bookstore complaints. When first using the service, lots of new texts became available to choose from, so I had the opportunity to perfect my custom reader term by term, but...
Before long, I was pressured to stop using the custom book, subtly by my department chairman, and not so subtly by higher ups.
I was reminded that, technically, as an adjunct (though teaching a full time load), the full time faculty in my discipline could proscribe a required textbook and syllabus for my courses: an adjunct's ability to choose a textbook was a "privilege not a right."
The contract said so. It also said all curricular materials whatsoever had to be purchased through the college bookstore, just in case you were wondering.
I got the message.
I stopped tweaking the custom readers every term, and used the same ones for the next three years. If I needed an extra article or two for a class, I just copied them and handed them out in class myself.
Don't ask, don't tell. Welcome to HigherEd, Inc.
Even so, several times my custom textbooks starting having "publishing delays" -- as the bookstore politely put it -- and after the first year, they rarely if ever showed up before classes started. That wasn't the publisher's fault.
I knew I would always start the term with the same speech about late books and adjusted my syllabus accordingly. One term, the bookstore didn't even bother to order them all: the same one I used in the same class for three years?
And In the End...
After a couple of years of experimentation (including with copyright.com), I arrived at a happy solution of pairing inexpensive mass market paperbacks (e.g. Gaarder's Sophie's World, the Oxford Press Very Short Introduction series) with a custom published reader.
As a result, the text book costs for most of my classes were under $30; for my intro class, as low as $12 used. And that savings meant a lot to some of those students. For some of them, a couple hundred dollars saved on textbooks meant they could pay rent.
Despite the opposition I received, I'm glad I did what I did to help my students. And I know they appreciated it, because many of them told me so. But the college did not.
So, while I predict problems with implementing the Advisory Panel recommendations from the entrenched monetary interests, still it is a great start and a great recommendation for the inevitable way of doing thing. (How ironic one of its congressional authors is from the state where I taught.)
My own personal experience as a pioneer in the classroom taught me it works.
And my recommendation today as an Instructional Technologist to faculty is you can make it work too.
A large scale federated repository of copyright cleared and creative commons copyright texts in digital format that can be on demand custom printed (or even better SCORMed into a LMS) is the way to go.
After all, what are colleges for ? To educate people or to sell books?