Friends, Publishers, ASG, lend me your texts!

If you hang out with students, you notice that they consistently beef about certain things.

Like textbook prices. A student can spend two or three hundred dollars or more per semester just on books. And prices keep rising.

Students at both campuses of SOCCCD have started textbook lending programs, which should help. But, for many reasons, not all textbooks will be available for lending and I suspect that these programs are not equipped to serve all or even most students. They are little more than gestures.

Meanwhile, as usual, our board of trustees is clueless, though they do seem to recognize the problem. On the positive side, some trustees have consistently pressured student government, which receives serious district money, to focus more on providing genuine benefits for students—scholarships, cheaper textbooks, etc. Good for them.

Student government (at least on many campuses) is a part of the textbook cost problem. At Saddleback and Irvine Valley Colleges, student government gets a cut of textbook sales at the college bookstore. It’s a huge source of revenue for ASG. That cut is added to the bookseller's cut.

So textbooks are expensive in part because student government jacks up prices in order to fund student activities: campus concerts, dances, co-curricular activities (speech tournaments, Model UN, etc.), scholarships, and the flying of pretty blue balloons above bucolic lawns in the bright Southern California sky.

The situation is, well, ironic. And trustees who lean toward libertarianism (Don Wagner and Tom Fuentes [in some of his moods]) have made that irony plain.

(It’s amazing to see these people actually doing their job for a change. Do you suppose that the dominating board majority—the "fiscally conservative" Fuentes, Wagner, Williams, and Lang—recognizes that, on such occasions, they punctuate an endless dark saga of cluelessness, counter-productivity, and contempt with bright points of honest trusteeship? Are they proud or ashamed? Do they even perceive the absurdity?)

Still, much cluelessness prevails on the board. For instance, with monumental obliviousness, trustee John "the dolt" Williams, who has served on the board since 1992, has suggested that instructors get together to write textbooks and provide them to students for free.

I guess they can do that over lunch.

Actually, I’ve written and provided free text materials for my students for years.

But that avenue is more available to some of us than to others, owing to the differing natures of academic areas. Further, for most people, writing textbooks is difficult and time-consuming—so the work must be funded. Further, as a "humanist" (aka left-wing, devil-worshipping, homosexual atheist), I'm accustomed to writing, but this cannot be said of most instructors, many of whom desperately avoid writing (thank God). Then there's this: the notion that a department should settle on a standard text (for a particular course) obviously undercuts instructor autonomy, a freedom that continues to be greatly valued by the professorate (or, um, the instructorate), and for good reason.

For this and various other reasons, to anyone who actually understands colleges and academics, Williams' suggestion is unworkable and absurd. (In seventeen years, Orlando Boy has learned nothing, except how to work the system to his advantage. He is: the world's most uninteresting man.)


Regarding textbooks, instructors can behave badly too. Some (a very few, I think) approach textbook selection as a way to line their pockets. (We've all heard of scandalous instances: instructors who sell a package of materials apparently designed to maximize profit.) More significantly, many instructors, it seems, choose textbooks with little thought to student cost issues. With some exceptions (e.g., IVC's English Dept.), instructors do not organize to achieve some sort of uniformity or economy in textbooks selection. (Again, sometimes, such avenues aren’t available.)

Meanwhile, textbook publishers have generally approached students merely as a market to exploit for all it's worth. Still, in recent years, they have felt the pressure created by student dissatisfaction with high textbook costs, some of it coming from legislators. Some publishers have made available “online” versions of texts—students “own” them for the semester. But that avenue remains expensive, and it has been attended with abuses--e.g., the often-meretricious "bundling" of materials.

And now, we read, publishers too are moving into lending. From this morning’s Inside Higher Ed:

Rent, Read and Return

Students frequently rent DVDs to watch in their dorm rooms, but soon they may start checking out something much heavier and pricier: textbooks.

Saying they offer an alternative to the textbook industry's bloated prices, a growing number of companies are renting new and used titles at reduced prices. Among them are Chegg, BookRenter and the Follett Higher Education Group, which will test drive a rental service at campus bookstores this fall. They join a number of colleges that have already started their own on-campus programs.

With all of them, the concept is essentially to pay to check out textbooks as if they're out of a library – only there are more copies and titles, and they can be used for longer periods of time. Through Chegg, for instance, a student searches for a book and rents it for up to a certain number of days, such as up to a quarter or a semester. Users are promised discounts of 65 to 85 percent off the list price, but if they don't return a book on time, they are charged full price. The same punishment applies to doodling in the margins, since the books are meant for reuse….
…
At least one publisher has noticed Chegg. In an arrangement that will go live in August, McGraw-Hill Companies will provide the site with new books and share an undisclosed portion of the revenue…. Until now, Chegg has been purchasing books on its own and through affiliate programs….
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Studies have shown that textbook prices are rising faster than the rate of inflation, but not as much as tuition and other higher education costs. Last year's Higher Education Opportunity Act mandated that institutions report annually how much they spend on essentially reducing the costs of textbooks and other instructional fees. It also required textbook publishers to expand the information they provide about pricing and changes from past editions. Most significantly for companies like Follett and Chegg, a bill outlining the U.S. Education Department's budget, crafted in February, mandated that $10 million be reserved for a "new college textbook rental initiative" to "provide competitive grants to colleges to expand opportunities for students to rent college course materials."
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Charles Schmidt, a spokesman for the National Association of College Stores, said that 2 percent of the group's stores offer some kind of rental service and more are likely to come. He, too, warned that the savings touted by companies may not be as great as they seem. If a student rents a book at a discounted price, the savings would be minimal, he said, considering he or she could have sold a bought-new copy back to the bookstore to make up the difference. Plus, he said, there is some value in keeping a book well past the semester's end: "A book such as [organic] chemistry is the type of book that a student is probably going to want to keep in their education, and possibly in their professional life or graduate student life."….

Things change. When I was a student, I kept all my textbooks, for I saw them as representing what I had learned. I often referred to them in subsequent years. I still consult some of them.

I guess that practice has fallen out of favor. Too bad.

Change isn't automatically good, you know.