I am not exactly an old salt in the world of college teaching, but a scant half-decade has been more than enough to convince me that the textbook industry is in mortal combat with Three Card Monte dealers for the coveted title of the America's Biggest Scam. One often develops misconceptions about things when viewing them from afar but finds them quite different with first hand experience. Such is not the case here. It really is as much of a ripoff as you think it is.
My adviser co-authors a highly regarded textbook on political parties and she likes to tell me how when the project began a new edition was demanded every four years. By the late 1990s the updates became biannual. Now, as you might imagine, annual updates are on the agenda. What can one meaningfully update about a political parties textbook annually?
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Lots, as long as the term "meaningfully" can be disregarded. Otherwise not so much. Believe it or not, questions like "What is the role of political parties in our system?" and "Why is the American system dominated by two parties?" do not have new answers. So what does an annual or biannual update look like? Well, you change the anecdotes used as examples. Do a ctrl-f search to replace "Kerry" with "Obama." Add new pictures. Shoehorn in some dumbass sidebar about Jon Stewart (you know, really connect with the young'ns!) And of course, if nothing else, design a new cover.
You already knew this, of course, but the robustness of the second-hand textbook market (thanks, internet!) has increased pressure from publishers to obsolete each book as quickly as possible. But wait! There's more.
I have a valuable resource even though I am a nobody in this profession. We low men on the totem pole are the ones who teach the 350-student Intro to American Government courses, often required of all undergraduates. Intro textbooks are 80% of the textbook market in any field, and political science is no different. And at $95 a pop for new hardcovers the competition is intense. So are the textbook reps (salespeople, in essence).
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Publishers offer kickbacks – uh, "royalties" – to departments in exchange for adopting Intro texts, sometimes as much as $10 per copy. This never really affects the students, given that every one of the dozens of Intro books are exactly the same; how many ways can an interest group be explained? How many variations of the theme "Politics matters!" can they concoct? Fortunately my department(s) have not required me to adopt specific books. Which simply leaves the door open for the authors to lobby me.
Yes, the royalties on hardcover textbooks can be significant. $5/copy is not unheard of. That means that my 280 student Intro class is worth close to $1500 to an author. And in my graduate program, two of the five American politics professors wrote Intro textbooks. Thankfully their suggestions about adopting their books were gentle and non-binding. Nonetheless academia is full of people who are comfortable putting pressure on their graduate students and colleagues to adopt texts. More importantly, from my perspective it is nice to have one small piece of power, one decision I can make that constitutes a favor to people who are much higher up the ladder than me. "Hey, I adopted your book for my Intro class" is just about the only thing we who are the bottom of the barrel can say that translates to "This is a favor. Please return it at some point in the future.
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Don't even get me started on "online portals." The less I say about that the better.
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I understand that publishers need to make a buck and from my perspective I should be excited about potentially getting on this gravy train at some point in the future. I don't know why I can't shift my mindset from "Hey, this is a fucking crock" to "Woo hoo! Kickbacks!" If it ever happens I'll let you know.
Daniel says:
Neustadt: Fifty years and going strong.
ladiesbane says:
Most of my profs championed cheap Penguin editions of source texts rather than predigested textbooks (and they still hold their own on the bookshelf.) Behold the power of liberal arts. The Bard abides.
But for you science-y types, I'm sure the college PR flak can't sell an education at 2010 prices with five year old textbooks in use. It's like that AT&T ad with the mom frantically educating her family in rollover minutes. THE DATA ARE STILL VALID, PEOPLE!
Matthew Laird says:
The update that you describe is actually more significant than a lot of textbook revisions. There are a some mathematics textbooks that I know which only change the order of the questions (or possibly replace a few with other questions from their vault) so that students will be unable to do the assignments with old versions, even though the material is exactly the same.
In addition, five dollars in the pocket of an author per book sold may be a low estimate as well. The range is significant – an author's royalty on a textbook can fluctuate from about 5% of net receipts to 15% of the list price of the book. And of course, 15% of a $100 book is 15 bucks. Most textbook authors couldn't get that kind of a royalty rate, but for some proven guys who have shown that their books will be adopted, it is not unheard of.
So yes, pretty much a scam. But what else is capitalism for?
Shane says:
I must not be teaching the right classes. The only thing I ever get are free desk copies and generally a slew of review copies for classes I am not even teaching, which, from an environmental standpoint, tick me off.
Ed says:
But from a "selling shit on Half.com for extra cash" perspective it's pretty awesome.
Megan says:
This is why I primarily assign articles available on e-reserves or Oncourse. Whenever a book is required I post an announcement on my Oncourse page before class starts, telling students to buy USED and ONLINE if at all possible (though, I guess I'm actually reducing demand and thus promoting the hyper-production of "new" editions…oops!)
JohnR says:
My favorite Organic Chem. text is still an edition of Fieser and Fieser from the 30s somewhere. Protocols on how to make guncotton and Phosgene really tend to make the lessons stand out. You don't always gain from revisions…
Desargues says:
Fortunately, the primary literature for my courses is available at no cost on Google Books. As to secondary lit, I try to use articles already published as pdfs. I ain't takin' part in no tree genocide to teach kids about Newton and Leibniz.
Tale that, Springer Verlag, you fucks.
Ed's Sister says:
When I was a freshman at the U of I, my chemistry professor got remarried and the required text for his class was a new edition of his book – the only change being a dedication to his new wife. The book was something like $120.
At that time in 1994 there weren't online textbook dealers, so when the campus bookstore ran out of used copies of the book you were screwed. At least now, students can find old copies online and not indulge these profs.
grendelkhan says:
If you think that's bad, consider the situation for primary and secondary education. There's even less changing content (arithmetic is pretty static), the audience is far larger, and the committees making the decisions more heavily courted by the textbook publishers.
Seriously–for what the states pay in one year for textbook royalties, they could produce their own book, in-house, which would pay for itself in money not paid to textbook companies within a single year. Heck, have the states band together and pool their resources.
Textbooks for elementary education in any topic should be a solved problem. It's ridiculous that they're simply not.
It would be downright unconscionable if they didn't… but given the behavior in other fields, it's still surprising that they do the right thing.
For classic texts, there are a decent number of pretty good electronic editions; while importing actual critical editions (as opposed to the bare source text) is an ongoing process, this is pretty cool.
jazzbumpa says:
Everywhere you look, you see examples of wealth flowing from the have-nots (students in the case, who will on average receive their B.A. or B.S. degree with a $25K student loan debt over their head) to the havs. I don't know if the textbook publishing business is enormously profitable or not, But I'll bet my next Soc. Sec. check the top execs are multimillionaires.
jim says:
Try Pearson Custom Publishing if you're not aware of them yet. Make your own cut and paste textbook out of already existing works. Most of the textbook typesetting and printing work has gone overseas, so were getting back books for students with egregious typos.
I blame development editors and the designers of modern textbooks. Towers full of expensive middle-men between the student and the authors. They've become much more concerned about the way a book looks than how to produce it well and care of the content. It must be frustrating.
Sarah says:
I took Business Law last year, and I managed to snag a book for less than $40 with shipping (would have cost $165 new, and average used prices were running at over $80). It was painful to read that book; I felt like I should be sitting there with a red pen to highlight all the spelling errors, grammatical errors, and at least one outright factual error. They're not only rigging the system so that students have to keep buying new textbooks at huge markups, they're saving on production with people who apparently didn't do very well in high school sophomore English class. When I wrote my evaluation of the class, I put in a complaint about that book. I mentioned the retail price and said for that kind of money, surely we can get books which are written and edited by people with a better command of Her Majesty's English than that.
ec says:
It's not just in college. The textbook industry in K-12 is out of control as well – the main difference is local districts pay for the books instead of the students. Unless of course one of my students loses their book – then they have to pay $50.
Emily says:
Well, as an English instructor (not prof, I don't have the degree for that yet), I find that the only thing I really need to keep up with is the MLA guidelines, which don't change that often. We adopted a new textbook at my college this year (for which I am glad: the old one sucked shit), but we had been using the same one for a while, from what I've heard from others in the adjunct office.
Fortunately for me, when I was an undergrad/grad student, I only had to buy trade paperbacks for most of my classes once I got into my core studies. My textbook bill maxed out at $250 at the beginning and ended up being around $100 by the end because I never took any serious math or sciences courses. What can I say, lit doesn't require big fat textbooks except in theory courses. Even then, only one survey text is required, the rest can be uploaded to BB or WebCT via pdf.
steve says:
I wonder how soon, or if it's already happening (in the sciences especially) that wikipedia is going to be good enough that it's better than any textbook. I've been out of school for too long to know what folks on campus are doing, but I work in a job where people much smarter than me are doing some pretty cool science and i'm always on wikipedia looking things up. The level of detail (at least in Biochemistry related issues) is really good. I'm actually kind of surprised to read here how necessary having an old fashioned, physical textbook seems to still be.
Ecks says:
I read a blurb once from the perspective of an author, and his argument basically went like this:
So you spend a year of your life writing this book, it gets picked up, it sells some copies, you get some ROI, life is good. But students only need the books once, so when the course is done they kick them into the resale market. The bookstore makes a killing off this, but you, the author, who put a year of your life into it make not a single dime. If you have a blockbuster best seller you're golden anyway, but if not, your year of work isn't seeing as many returns as you'd hope, because demand rapidly drops off as more books move into used circulation. So that means you have to jack up the prices on the book to make enough money the first time, driving even more students to the used book market, and you start doing all these crazy gimmicks, like updating it all the time, enclosing shrink wrapped CD's, blah blah blah. So it's a self-reinforcing cycle.
That was his story and I guess I see some of it. Either way, the whole think becomes a viciously competitive venture that starts dipping more than a few toes into the waters of scam.
jon says:
Textbooks should be like law books and have a pocket in the back for the yearly update or "pocket part". Once the yearly revisions get too unwieldy, make a new edition.
Of course there's no possible way a for-profit publisher could game that system….
displacedCapitalist says:
@steve, Wikipedia already is superior to most text books in many areas. A frequent "concern" about wiki is that the info might be inaccurate or poorly cited; but I've seen so many textbooks with inaccurate information, typos, and poor citation that Wiki is becoming the clear winner. (Yeah, I'm so much of a nerd that I actually look up some of the citations in bibliographies.)
Peggy says:
I've been teaching my high school English classes without a textbook except as a supplemental material, and even then I only use it when it's got a story in it that I already wanted to use. I do end up spending about the same amount that I'd spend on books on photocopies, though, especially since the kids like to lose the packets. But as a high school we're considering going paperless in the next few years–the state of Indiana now allows high schools to use "textbook" funds for student laptops, and I'm pretty jazzed about getting to use The Internet to teach Shakespeare…