Click here to receive your FREE subscription to Campus Technology
Join the Debate!
Textbooks: A Value Proposition
11/13/2007
Perhaps this is a useful remedy in the short term, and when thinking only within the realm of print textbooks, but a robust used book market actually exacerbates the annuity problem. Since the publisher’s revenue from new book sales must subsidize an even greater number of used book sales, a more efficient used book market will drive the cost of new texts higher. And as new book prices escalate, the price of used books will follow the same upward spiral.Textbooks should be comprehensive. The monolithic textbook and the rationale underlying its production may be anachronisms. The 22-chapter textbook I co-authored in 1989 was developed from an editorial/production model that first assumed weekly readings for a 17-week semester. Next, we convened faculty focus groups, and we wrote five additional chapters to cover interests we had left out but that were valued by some significant share of the market. Book sales were driven by a variation on the 80/20 rule, all adopters will use most of the book but each individual adopter wants some degrees of freedom to craft the emphases in their course. The sunk cost of creating this universal resource is a guarantee of unused materials; in our example, exclusion of five chapters for the semester schools and 12 for the schools on quarters. Though the traditional textbook places all needed information in one place, the mosaic of unmarked chapters among those with yellow highlights documents the need for custom texts directly matched to different course syllabi. Publishers are making such custom texts available and pricing them more attractively, but the two-pound, seven-hundred-page compendium still dominates the market.
International textbooks are the answer. Buying from the UK or Asia, students once could find texts at around 40 percent of the cost of the text in the US market. Sometimes framed in the context of the ethical drug pricing debate (“Why should US consumers subsidize foreign consumers and pay higher prices for essentially the same product?”), international text arbitrage represents another distortion of the student’s value proposition based on production and distribution processes of a physical product. While some international texts use lower cost (and quality) paper and less expensive or no color processing, floating heavy texts back and forth across the ocean adds expense, but no value, to attainment of the student’s learning goals.
Text rental programs are the way to go. Some schools, notably a set of early adopters in Wisconsin, have created effective textbook rental programs and report that students using the program save up to 50 percent of the cost of the print-based textbook. More recent explorations highlight some of the provider drawbacks that accompany the positive effect of rental programs on student savings. The State Board of Illinois estimated start up costs of $11 million dollars for a school the size of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and found issues with the length of time the book had to be used (up to 4 years) and the need for standardized choices to maximize the affordability and sustainability of the program (see link).
Recommended Reading
- North Idaho College To Provide Accessible Lecture Recordings for Disabled Students
North Idaho College will be implementing a new classroom capture system as part of an effort to provide accessible education to students with disabilities. The college will be using SpeakerBox from ClearSky Systems for the lecture capture program beginning in January 2009.
- College of Southern Nevada Implementing Angel To Run Online Courses
The College of Southern Nevada (CSN), a community college in Las Vegas with 41,000 students, has adopted the Angel Learning Management Suite (LMS) to support its online course offerings. In Spring 2008 CSN began evaluating alternatives to WebCT, which it currently runs, and made the decision to adopt Angel in the fall. In January 2009, CSN's 865 sections of online enrollment will be delivered using the Angel LMS.
- Mitsubishi Ships SXGA+ Projector with DICOM Simulation
Mitsubishi has begun shipping a new LCD-based SXGA+ projector aimed at higher education, specifically medical schools. The new MH2850U, according to Mitsubishi, is "specially engineered for projecting DICOM simulation images for use in medical education and training."
- First Look: Komodo IDE 5.0
Last month, ActiveState released Komodo IDE 5.0, the company's latest integrated development environment (IDE). Komodo supports multiple programming and markup languages, including HTML, JavaScript, PHP, Perl, Java, Python, C++ and more. It does not support some .NET languages at present, such as ASP/ASP.NET, C# and VB.NET.
- IBM Offers Cloud Computing Help
IBM last week announced consulting services specifically designed to help organizations assess their options in using cloud computing technology. "Cloud computing" is a much argued term, but it typically refers to solutions delivered over the Internet, rather than via customer premises-installed software.
- Hollins U Chooses Omnilert for Emergency Notification Ahead of VA Deadline
Hollins University, among other higher ed institutions in Virginia, has implemented Omnilert's e2Campus emergency notification system (ENS) just ahead of a state-mandated deadline requiring them at every public institution of higher education by Jan. 1. Hollins itself isn't a public campus, but wished to implement an ENS before the end of the year, the school said in a company statement.
