NYT
April 25, 2008
Editorial

That Book Costs How Much?

College students and their families are rightly outraged about the
bankrupting costs of textbooks that have nearly tripled since the
1980s, mainly because of marginally useful CD-ROMs and other
supplements. A bill pending in Congress would require publishers to
sell “unbundled” versions of the books — minus the pricey add-ons.
Even more important, it would require publishers to reveal book prices
in marketing material so that professors could choose less-expensive
titles.

The bill is a good first step. But colleges and universities will need
to embrace new methods of textbook development and distribution if
they want to rein in runaway costs. That means using digital
textbooks, which can often be presented online free of charge or in
hard copies for as little as one-fifth the cost of traditional books.
The digital books can also be easily customized and updated.

Right now, textbook publishers are calling the tune. They add as many
bells and whistles as they can and pump out new editions as quickly as
possible — as a way of making perfectly good textbooks obsolete. Not
every book can be cheap. A specialized text that only a few people
know how to write and that reaches a small audience will be costly by
definition. But there is no reason for an introductory textbook to
carry a price tag of, say, $140 in an area like economics where the
information changes little from year to year.

Schools are beginning to balk at outrageous pricing. Rice University
offers textbooks for some classes free online and charges a nominal
fee for the printed version. A new company called Flat World
Knowledge, based in Nyack, N.Y., plans to offer online textbooks free
and hopes to make its profit by selling supplemental materials like
study guides and hard copies printed on demand.

A study being carried out by the geographer Ronald Dorn at Arizona
State University suggests that students who use free online textbooks
perform as well academically as students who buy expensive copies from
traditional publishers. Colleges and universities should take
advantage of these new developments.

Cash-strapped students and their families need all the relief they can
get.