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Just over a year ago, college textbook publishers were bombarded with complaints about the exorbitant costs of purchasing college textbooks. A report issued by the Government Accountability Office (GAO) found that textbook prices were increasing at twice the rate of inflation. Student advocacy groups claimed the rate was much higher. Publishers were found to be releasing new editions at increasingly frequent rates, driving cheaper used older editions out of college bookstores. New editions, which were discovered to increase in price by 58 percent from one edition to another, were also found to contain only minimal changes. Major newspapers nationwide released stories in reaction, decrying the publishers’ monopolistic actions, accusing them of forcing lower-income students out of colleges by increasing the already burdensome cost of attendance. Parents got mad. Students got mad. Lawmakers and political figures expressed outrage in congressional hearings. And then…

And then, well, nothing happened. The GAO’s study left just enough justification for the textbook publishers to slip out the back door and continue their crooked ways. There was just enough explanation provided to make students and parents bow down and take it up the tailpipe. These explanations were never well founded nor were empirical, quantitative data ever presented to support these excuses; but the angry mob was eventually quelled and dispersed. The subject of expensive textbooks faded from the national spotlight.

Today, textbooks are still unbelievably expensive. If the books went to class for you, did your homework, passed your tests for you, and provided you with complimentary laundry service, it seems they couldn’t be priced much higher. Students are still rubbing their eyes in disbelief as they leave college bookstores. Parents and students are still wondering how they’re going to make up for unexpectedly high textbook costs. And the publishers are still laughing all the way to the bank.

Therefore, having just been taken to the cleaners on my school books for the umpteenth time, I’m going to revisit and reanalyze those explanations provided by the publishers. My goal: to show that these lame excuses are hardly sufficient to justify price increases and to show a pattern of consciously, strategically forcing prices up. Let’s get started…

1. “Frequent new editions are necessary to win school support.” I have a difficult time believing this one. New editions are reportedly being released, according to the California Student Public Interest Research Group (SPIRG), every 3.8 years on average. However, according to reports and personal experience, schools are not supporting the frequent release of new editions. On the contrary, countless colleges across the country have created booksharing programs to alleviate the financial burden being forced on their students. They encourage students to use websites like Half.com to buy textbooks at half the retail price (most of which end up being international versions that have been sold overseas).

In my own experience, my professors have apologized at the start of every term about the exorbitant book prices. They make every effort to use packets of their own design, which are usually cheaper than textbooks, out of concern for their students’ budgets. In addition, they are the first to comment that, with the lag from research to publishing in a journal to inclusion in a textbook, new editions of textbooks are always at least 7 years behind developments in their fields. They cannot be up to date, and schools know this. I find it hard to swallow that publishers are impressing anybody with textbook content that is almost a decade old.

Finally, I’ve never had a professor tell the class, “I know we just got a new edition a year ago, but I just had to have this new edition because they’ve put this handy new graphic on page 239. That really made the difference for me, and I think it’s worth an extra $58.” No, their apology has always sounded something like this: “We wanted to get last year’s edition for you and save you some money, but the bookstore was unable to get additional copies of that edition from the publisher. So you’ve got to buy the new one. Sorry.”

If it sounds like schools are accepting these new editions reluctantly because they don’t really have a choice, it’s because they are. By limiting access to older editions, professors are cornered into accepting new editions whether they like them or not. Publishers aren’t winning school support; they’re squeezing it out of their customers.

2. “Textbooks must be constantly modernized to keep students’ attention.” The publishers’ rationale here is that this new generation of students has been raised on the flashy graphics and visuality of the internet, and, therefore, textbooks must mirror this design standard to be effective with them. According to publishers, this means putting out a new edition every 3 years. So, if you accept this excuse, students’ visual tastes must be changing every 3 years to justify every new edition. Does anyone else here smell a truckload of bull-oney pulling into the college parking lot?

Now, I’ll be the first to concede that textbooks need to have some measure of visual accessibility. I’ve read some of the driest textbooks around. One book, the size and weight of a large cinder block, was meant to chronicle every detail of gathering, measuring, and analyzing survey data. I think it also included a chapter on the joys of watching paint dry. Worst of all, the book did not contain a single diagram, photograph, or even a single dot of color. Just paragraph after boring paragraph in the smallest font possible. Note: if you are considering using sleeping pills to cure insomnia, try this book first.

But I refuse to believe that publishers need to release a new edition every 3 years to make textbooks visually tolerable. I mean, what can they add every few years that makes it that much better? A new stripe here? A fancy icon there? A snazzy paragraph that manages to fit Britney Spears into the Law of Diminishing Returns? Seriously, is anyone really saying, “Darn, it’s a good thing they put that new smiley face graphic at the corner of each page. I don’t think this new batch of students would’ve gotten this stuff otherwise”?

Let’s get real here. Textbooks will never be used as leisure reading for college students. Reading assignments will rarely be viewed by students as an aesthetically pleasing experience: “Just having those multicolored stripes at the top of each page really made me want to go on to chapter 3 and then 4 and then… well, I just couldn’t help myself.” No, for the vast majority of students, reading assignments will always be viewed as a grueling exercise in comprehending mass amounts of information with the hope of being able to retrieve them in lecture. Honestly, we could make due with one less graphic if it would save us an extra $50.

I’ll give publishers this much: every new edition does indeed catch students’ attention- but not because of the striking graphics. The overblown price and empty feeling in our wallets are what catch our attention. The fact that our leisure money for the next month is blown because of your new edition catches our attention. Instead of feeling prompted to read that whiz-bang marvel of modern textbook publishing, however, we feel prompted to use the thing as a projectile to put out our professor’s office window. And we would- if they hadn’t cost us so much.

3. “New editions include newer teaching techniques and more modern information or interpretations.” Call me skeptical, but how much do teaching techniques or information on a given college subject change in 3 years? And aren’t professors better equipped to bring things up to date for their students or to determine teaching techniques, for that matter, than publishers, who I’ve already pointed out are seven years behind current events?

Publishers have insisted, for example, that new editions help to ensure that textbooks are current and politically correct, including viewpoints from underrepresented groups that were previously left out. That’s important, of course. But do revisions need to be made to history books every three years? Do they need to be made to economics books, a field in which major advances happen every decade at the most? Do they need to be made in algebra, where the subject matter has not changed since ancient Persia? Authors are not even mentioned in literature anthologies until their works are, like, 30 years old. So what’s another 3 years?
Again, publishers are inventing a false utility for their product to justify raising their prices. It is simply not true that new teaching techniques and information demand new editions every 3 years. Period.

There is a human being at the front of every classroom for a reason: to overlay current events on course subject matter, to help students make interpretations, and to use their unique teaching techniques to run their classes. You would be hard-pressed to find a college instructor who leaves the teaching up to their textbook.

4. “Bundling of textbooks with CD-ROMs, study guides, website access, and test questions helps professors teach better.” At the most basic level, a book is just a book- a structure of paper, glue, string, cardboard, and ink. If all you’ve got is a few photographs and diagrams and a lot of text, how much can it cost? Only so much. Now let’s say you throw in a ridiculous collection of multimedia tools and other booklets to complement a textbook which is already probably too large to get through in a single term, as if your tri-annual revisions to the actual textbook weren’t enough to school any student who should fall under its influence. CD-ROMs come with significant development costs. Study guides easily jack up the price farther. To get a website functional to complement the book also incurs web design and development expenses, as well as ongoing costs for maintenance of the site. What happens? The price you can charge for each book suddenly makes an Olympic leap because, I mean, look at all these toys at your disposal.

But the fact of the matter is, professors don’t need, and, in many cases, don’t use, all of these toys. Unfortunately for students, the whole package, the learning extravaganza gold package created by the publisher, is the only package they advertise. Cheaper, stripped down versions with just the text that you can slide into a three-ring binder are available in many cases. But, of course, with a fraction of the commission they could make off the deluxe version, these discount versions are conveniently neglected by sales reps. Professors don’t even know about them for this reason.

Don’t be fooled by the bells and whistles. They only exist as an excuse to jack up prices and to give the impression of changes made to a new edition. Any student who has had to pay for one of these deluxe editions has probably noticed that their professor didn’t have the time to really use the added features. Like a computer loaded with way too many features and programs, students’ money is wasted on these so-called tools. The fact is, time is a very finite resource for both professors and students. They just don’t have the time to read from the textbook, run through a simulation on the CD-ROM, check into the website on a regular basis, do practice problems from the textbook, and then do more practice problems in the study guide.

And we haven’t even addressed the question of whether these study aids really help students learn better. My experience- take it for what it is- is that practice brings learning, whether it is on a good, old-fashioned sheet of paper or in a slick CD-ROM presentation. Throwing in the inconvenience of installing and navigating a CD-ROM only makes the student less likely to use the CD-ROM. Personally, I’d rather just open my book, pull out my calculator, and get to work.

But don’t count on publishers to realize this anytime soon. Sadly, with every consecutive edition, California SPIRG found that inclusion of these non-required materials rose by 21 percent. They will keep packing them in and pushing prices up until we wise up and push back.

Does this make you angry? It makes me angry. The college textbook rip-off continues. And the worst thing we can do is forget and let the publishers keep doing it. Students, parents, lawmakers, and publishers need to be reminded that this is unfair. So, if you’re angry about this, leave your comments below and send this article to your friends.

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