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In my university town this weekend, students are moving back into their dorms and apartments. Shortly after settling in, they'll head--many with credit-card-toting parents in tow--to the bookstore to purchase the books for their courses.
How much did you pay for the last book you bought? Was it a paperback novel? In the U.S., if you bought it new and paid retail, you're probably looking at about $12-$15. A guide on how to use specific software or to learn to code in CSS? Maybe $30-$40. Mainstream cookbooks? Usually under $50.
But textbooks? It's easy for students to drop the equivalent of a month's rent on a semester's worth of books, especially if they're studying science, engineering, or art history. It's common for students to pay $100-$150 or more for textbooks in certain disciplines.
So what makes textbooks so expensive? That's up for debate. I've been on both sides of the printing press, so to speak--I worked briefly for a small educational publishing company, and I also was a college or grad student for (too) many years. Here are some of the common factors contributing to textbook costs, according to a brochure (PDF) from the National Association of College Stores:
Cost of developing and printing the book: paper, printing, and editorial costs to the publisher constitute 32.5% of a textbook's cost
The publisher's administrative costs account for 10% of each textbook sale.
Publisher's marketing and promotion costs: Besides standard marketing and promotion tactics, this money pays salaries and commissions for a publisher's field representatives as well as supplies professors' free "desk copies" of books adopted or under consideration.
Publisher's income: 7.1% of the cost of the book goes back to the publisher for future project development, author advances, research costs, and stockholder dividends.
Payment to author: The author receives, on average, 11.7% of a textbook's sale. These royalties recompense the writer for his or her writing and research.
Freight expenses account for 1% of the cost of the textbook.
College bookstore personnel, operating expenses, and income account for 11.4%, 5.9%, and 4.9% of textbook costs, respectively.
Of course, this breakdown explains to which institutions each dollar of a textbook goes, but it doesn't explain why each textbook costs so many dollars. It doesn't take much thought to figure out what some of a publisher's expenses might be--beyond writers, graphic artists, editors, accountants, and sales folks, there are reproduction costs related to image rights as well as printing. And many textbooks are printed in Asia and shipped back on large container ships, and from West Coast ports trucked to distributors around the country--this long journey apparently is still less expensive than printing them in the U.S.
But student groups still charge that textbooks cost far more than their actual worth. You can read about one such campaign at MakeTextbooksAffordable.com. The state PIRGs have banded together to produce a series of reports, the most recent in February 2007. That report, "Exposing the Textbook Industry: How Publishers’ Pricing Tactics Drive Up the Cost of College Textbooks" identified three major areas of concern:
1. Publishers are not adequately disclosing price information to the faculty, who do care about the cost to students and want better information.
2. Publishers need to provide unbundled alternatives to bundled textbooks and disclose the availability of these alternatives.
3. Most professors we surveyed often find new editions unnecessary.
You can download the full report as a PDF.
Over the summer, publishing companies and student groups brought the issue to Congress. Chronicle of Higher Education reporter Lauren Smith reports (subscription required) that at the hearing, publishers' representatives accused faculty of choosing the most expensive offerings instead of the less expensive ones.
The result of publishers' pricing and faculty members' apparent misunderstanding of less expensive alternatives? EmptyNestMom pays $131 for a statistics textbook, and Suzanne pays more than $450 for a semester's worth of used textbooks.
Responding to student concerns, bookstores have sought alternative methods of book distribution or have sought to educate faculty on the cost of "bundling" additional products--CDs, DVDs, workbooks, website access, additional books, and more--with a textbook. Such bundles can't be returned to the bookstore unless the entire bundle is still shrink-wrapped. Other schools are even more innovative. Bardiac's institution, for example, rents textbooks to students. Other bookstores are using theft-prevention and -detection methods in order to cut down on the higher prices they must charge on purchased books to make up for their
