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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).
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