How to cut cost of college texts

With students paying up to $1,000 yearly, advisory panel urges use of digital market.

from the June 4, 2007 edition

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More than 100 bills have been proposed in 34 states in the past three years to address textbook affordability. Proposals include cutting sales taxes on textbooks, creating incentives to promote book rental programs, increasing grant aid to cover books for low-income students, and requiring publishers and professors to be more transparent about textbook options and costs. Laws have passed in such states as Connecticut, California, and Virginia.

Professors' choices "depend on the quality of what's out there in a particular field.... If they have options that they see as equally good, they're very good about being cost-conscious," says Nicole Byrd, government relations associate for the American Association of University Professors (AAUP) in Washington.

Colleges and publishers have started to use technology to offer cheaper options to students. Electronic books cost about half as much as their printed counterparts, for instance. And OER (open education resources) websites offer free course material.

Many of the fixes currently being tried can be helpful in the short term, but the problem of rising prices will persist unless there's a fundamental shift to "a demand-driven ... student-centric market," the report warns.

To that end, the advisory committee, which makes recommendations to the US Department of Education, proposes the creation of a "national digital marketplace" of instruction materials. Accessible online, it would be an infrastructure where professors could choose both fee-based and free components from various publishers to best suit their classes, students could order printed materials or access digital information through Web portals customized by their colleges, and content providers could more efficiently market their materials.

Persuading stakeholders to make the investment to set up such a system would be a challenge, but initial reactions indicate open-mindedness.

"If a system helps with marketing and improves transparency, that could be helpful," says Mr. Hildebrand, the publishing spokesman. But he questions, "Who will build and pay for such a system?" and "How do you organize that massive database?"

Moving toward electronic access makes sense, says Ms. Byrd of the AAUP, but such a plan requires sensitivity to "guarding intellectual property."

The proposed marketplace strikes student advocates as good for the bottom line. "A faculty member could go in and compare. We think that will create downward price pressure," says Saffron Zomer, program director for MASSPIRG.

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