Column: Secondhand sales won't save students from textbook prices
Brenton Kenkel
2/14/07 Kentucky Kernel
As textbook prices continue to rise, students seem to be concerned only with blaming someone.We say the bookstores are at fault for buying books back at unconscionably low prices, but the publishers are to blame for selling them at exorbitant costs in the first place. We blame professors for assigning costly textbooks and UK for not posting ISBN numbers online.Strangely enough, we never blame ourselves for driving up textbook prices. Maybe we should. In a Feb. 2 Inside Higher Ed story, University of Texas business instructor Michael Brandl makes an intuitive argument for why used-book sales have helped drive prices so high.There are a certain number of "fixed costs" to writing a textbook - such as paying the writers, editors and designers - that are the same regardless of how many books are sold. Used sales drive down the number of books sold, meaning that each book printed must bear a higher proportion of the total fixed costs, according to Brandl. Used books may seem cost-effective, but they're part of the reason texts are so expensive in the first place.I don't mean to suggest that we should buy only new books in a collective effort to bring prices back down - it's unlikely the market would respond to the change before we graduate.But it's clear that we need something more than a simplistic solution to alleviate the pain of high book prices. Buying books online and mandating that professors assign old editions of books are not viable long-term methods of reducing textbook prices.Systemic change is necessary for textbook prices to drop - namely, the textbook industry must adopt an open-source method of writing and distribution, similar to the open-source movement in the software world.Open-source textbook publishing can take many forms - written collaboratively (like Wikipedia) or individually, for instance - but the essential feature is the absence of strong copyright protection. Books released under an open-source license can be downloaded for free online (or printed for the standard photocopy price), and instructors who use the book can redistribute it with their own modifications.K-12 education administrators in California have already started a project to use open-source textbooks to cut costs and improve educational quality there. The California Open Source Textbook Project seeks to cut the cost of making textbooks and stem the shortage of books in that state's public schools, according to its Web site (www.opensourcetext.org).Such a project needs to take place on a national level for higher education. The main problem will be getting the funding necessary to set up resources and reimburse contributors for their time. That's easier in the case of K-12 education, in which taxpayers themselves, instead of powerless college students, have to foot the textbook bill.That's why universities - collectively, not just individual institutions - need to take the initiative to promote open-source textbooks. Putting money toward these projects may increase costs in the short term, but in time they will pay off, as students will have to put less money toward unfairly priced books.The federal government would also have an interest in motivating systemic change in the textbook market. As the price of textbooks skyrockets, attending college becomes unaffordable for even more students, meaning that fewer highly educated workers are entering the economy. Keeping the cost of college low is a public good worthy of federal support - and funding open-source books will be a more effective use of money than simply subsidizing the publishing industry.It will certainly do more to bring down book prices than the current tendency toward finger-pointing does.Brenton Kenkel is a philosophy and political science junior.
E-mail bkenkel@kykernel.com
http://www2.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=5564288595417370013
No comments:
Post a Comment