Textbooks are a big part of the life of any student; many students have one or two of them with them at all times. But there is a love/hate relationship between a pupil and their textbooks. They help us learn and succeed, but they can cause us an awful lot of grief: they are very heavy and cost a lot.
How much do they cost? So much that the price is actually deterring students from taking certain courses.
“I find that any textbooks for the science programs are extremely unaffordable,” says second-year Arts and Sciences student Jessica Havers. “They make me choose less science courses, for sure. And I’ve had to eat a lot of canned food for a few weeks a couple times because of them.”
Havers’ story is all too familiar for many college students. Camosun College Student Society (CCSS) external executive Andrea Eggenberger says that she knows a lot of students don’t buy textbooks because they’re too expensive. End result? Lower grades.
“We see a lot of students sharing the textbooks with their peers, or going to the library, or simply not using the textbook at all and getting by with a C or a B when they could be getting an A,” she says. “They’ve become a thing which students see as not necessary. It’s unfortunate because you get a lot of knowledge out of textbooks and more depth to the content that your teacher talks about in class.”
So why exactly do these textbooks cost so much? What’s being done to change that? And what resources are available to help students?
What’s in store?
Jill Eriksen, course material buyer at Camosun College’s Lansdowne bookstore, says that the markup situation with textbooks is the same as it is in many retail setups: they get a discount from the publishers and add what she claims is a very small margin when they sell them.
“Publishers will raise the prices month to month,” says Eriksen. “What we’ve tried to do to minimize our prices is to order large in some titles so we can keep the price set.”
There are a number of costs that have to be considered when setting a price. Eriksen explains that the bookstore works to do whatever they can to keep costs low for students while also trying to make money to put back into the college.
“Most of the publishers now, even the Canadian ones like Pearson and McGraw[-Hill], have all their warehouses in the States. We are in the farthest possible spot from most of these publishers, so we pay high shipping costs,” says Eriksen. “We’ve tried to minimize this by going with companies like BC Mail for shipping, piggybacking onto government instead of private companies to be able to get some cuts in shipping.”
The school subsidizes part of its budget with the proceeds from the bookstore; because the school is set up as a teaching institution with no beneficiary, that money is put back into the school and toward the students. Money spent on textbooks outside of the college does not have this effect on the school’s bottom line.
“Anything which is revenue for the bookstore goes back into the college,” explains Eriksen. “You go down into the States and you see a Barnes and Noble across from the college, and there’s nothing going back into the school.”
Though the school does prosper from textbook sales, there is also an understanding that students don’t always have a lot of money. In accordance with this, Eriksen says the store does as many different things as they can to help lower costs. For example, there’s the multimedia access cards sometimes sold with textbooks.
“Some publishers only sell textbooks to you with the access card, but you might see examples in our store where we’ll list the book as a choice of options, either with the access card or the book on its own,” says Erickson. “When the access card’s required, the textbook is almost the add-on in some of these situations.”
Erickson also states that they sell the access cards separately and try to keep an extra-low margin on them, as they are “just a printed piece of cardstock.”
But at what cost?
The price always seems to be the bottom line that students care about. Although the bookstore claims to keep a very low margin for its textbooks, many of them still cost a hefty amount. It can be difficult to visualize exactly what contributes to the bulk of this price, and it’s hard to put a price on knowledge, besides saying that it’s too expensive. In reality, there is a lot of work that goes into the construction of a textbook.
“The vast majority of the cost comes from developing the knowledge that starts as the basis of our content, finding preeminent scholars in each field, and working with them as they develop the content,” says Brian Belardi, director of communications at textbook publisher McGraw-Hill (one of the major Canadian textbook publishers; multiple phone calls and emails to two other major Canadian publishers were not returned by deadline), “then following all the way through into piloting the content in classrooms and providing support.”
Belardi explains that there are other costs as well. On the operations side, the physical books have to be printed, bound, shipped, and stored. As far as digital goes, there is the cost of software development and some of the fees that come with different multimedia resources. Despite this, McGraw-Hill realizes it won’t sell any books if its prices are too high.
“We know that it doesn’t matter how good an education solution is; if no one can afford it, it is not very useful,” says Belardi. “We also are very keenly aware of the stats about student debt and the difficult financial position that attending college can put students and their families in, so we’re very eager to make our products as affordable as possible.”
This establishes a difficult task of finding a balance between keeping costs low and providing good quality books, a common conundrum in the publishing industry. Belardi says that McGraw-Hill is always keeping its mind on its mission to help students perform well in school, and that sometimes comes at a cost.
“Even more than affordability, we have to focus on results,” says Belardi. “Our philosophy is that we want to make things as affordable as possible, but our number-one job is to help students improve their results, to help them get a better grade, do better on a test, graduate on time, and to get the career that they want. We want to help them earn a return on their college investment.”
Use it or lose it
One subject that gets students as upset as textbook prices is how little money they get when selling their old textbooks back. Accordingly, the numbers of students selling their textbooks back are falling; add to that the advent of e-books, and the used-textbook scene isn’t what it used to be.
“Used textbooks are bought from both students and wholesalers,” says Camosun’s Eriksen. “We have the student buy-back four times a year at exam week, and we give 50 percent of the book’s used value and then sell them at 25 percent off the new price. Once we obtain as much as we can from those people we look to buy the new books from the publishers.”
She goes on to explain that the past couple years have seen a drop in people selling back their textbooks. She attributes this to a number of reasons, the most prominent being that people don’t feel they are getting enough money in return for the textbooks which they originally paid top dollar for. This creates a paradox where many textbooks sit under students’ beds unused, generating no value for the student, the store, or other students who end up having to buy new textbooks because there aren’t enough used ones for everyone.
“We’d like to see more people come to buy-back,” Eriksen explains. “We do, in fact, make better profit off the used than we do the new, which has a very small margin. Ultimately, we sell more used because they’re cheaper.”
E for effort
New frontiers are always being sought out to help achieve this balance of cost versus quality. In recent years e-books have become the latest way for students to save a few bucks on textbooks. This may be part of the answer to the problem of costly texts, as e-books lack many of the costs of the physical versions while retaining the same quality of knowledge.
“We’re trying to operate in the space that figures out where those two curves of affordability and effectiveness intersect,” says Belardi. “In the higher-education market last year we crossed the 50-percent threshold as far as cash revenue, with more coming from digital than print.”
Although e-books are said by some to be the learning tool of the future, it’s hard for some students to give up their paper books. Many students still feel the need to be able to flip pages and write notes within the book. However, the positive environmental effects of not using all that paper coupled with the financial savings makes e-texts a tempting idea.
“We do have a biology textbook that costs $190 US in college bookstores. We offer a digital version of that book for $85 US,” says Belardi. “Now, that’s a subscription and not a purchase, but you are looking at a significant decrease in price from print to digital.”
This is the downside of e-books for students and the school, although not for the textbook companies: the subscriptions for e-books only last for a set time before running out, effectively eliminating the used market.
Read ’em like an open book
Let’s not forget one important aspect of textbook companies: they are businesses trying to make money. This fact isn’t lost on Camosun College.
“Throughout time we’ve always felt as students that we’re being gouged a bit by the textbook companies,” says John Boraas, Camosun College vice president education. “The publishing industry is struggling; we’ve certainly seen a lot of publishing houses close. I would say it’s a pretty competitive field and certainly they are for profit; they are businesses that are looking to make money.”
The costs of school alone, without including textbooks, can be very shocking. Fortunately, the school understands this and has set up, and continues to work on, projects to help students decrease costs. A huge part of this across Canada is the open resource textbook initiative.
“We’re a major participant in the provincial open resource textbook project,” Boraas says. “BC is a real leader in the country on open textbooks, and our school and some of our faculty have been involved in creating an open biology book.”
This represents the beginning of a revolutionary new phase in the student/textbook relationship. Open textbook resources mean that large amounts of content will be available for free online (some already is). Teachers can choose to adopt these books as their course text, effectively saving the student body oodles of money.
“Textbooks are a necessary asset to every course, but they really don’t have to cost the atrocious amount that they do,” says the CCSS’ Eggenberger. “Teachers at Camosun College do try to utilize the free open textbook resource, but we would like to see it utilized a lot more.”
Ours is not the only school looking to cut costs for its students in innovative new ways. Camosun could take some pointers from other schools around the province, according to Eggenberger.
“Kwantlen Polytechnic University has an excellent open source program right now,” she says. “They access this excellent open source textbook resource where teachers go in and can edit their texts. So you’ll have an intro to macroeconomics or an intro to business law, and it’s totally edited by teachers and it’s a completely free resource. They can even print these books for a decent cost without having to pay through the nose”
The provincial government is working to bring more open resource textbooks to BC’s schools.
“Our government is putting students first through its open textbook initiative,” says Advanced Education Minister Andrew Wilkinson. “By this fall, approximately 8,000 students in British Columbia are expected to have saved up to $1 million with open textbooks. Currently, more than 90 open textbooks are available. These range from popular first- and second-year areas such as math, chemistry, and business, to skills and technical subjects, as well as adult upgrading. An additional 30 open textbooks are expected later in the fall.”
This is good news, although one wonders how the government can justify its continuing cuts to the funding of schools while also taking away one of the schools’ sources of revenue. But even though there will be money lost over this on Camosun’s end, Boraas says that they are just happy to help the students.
“As government funding declines and becomes a smaller part of our overall budget, there are things we need to do to bring revenue into the college, and certainly the bookstore is one of those things that gives us some portion of our operating budget,” explains Boraas. “Anything that diminishes resources is a concern, but we are absolutely committed to moving to as much online open textbook resources as we can, and we’ll deal with the reality of the funding as we go.”
Reservations for two
Camosun’s library also provides another useful resource: reserve texts. Most of these textbooks can be checked out for up to two hours, but there are some available for 72-hour loans.
“We’ve always provided reserves,” says Camosun director of learning services Sybil Harrison. “I would say we’ve probably increased the number that we provide access to over time. I think we’ve increased the number for a couple reasons, most importantly the demand. More students are asking, so that’s why we provide them.”
These textbooks can be very helpful, especially in cases where a teacher is only going to use a text a couple of times throughout the course. The library does its best to keep an up-to-date collection of relevant textbook editions and receives them a variety of ways.
“Often an instructor will have a copy themselves that they have received from the publisher, so the instructor will give us a copy of the textbook,” Harrison explains. “The second way we get them is that each year we get a list of all of the textbooks, and we check to see what we have in our collection, and we move anything needed out of the regular collection and put it in the reserves. Another thing we do, usually based on the request of an instructor, is we’ll consider purchasing it for the collection.”
Unfortunately, there is no specifically designated budget for reserve textbooks, so the library has to use any excess funds from their main budget if they want to purchase them. Many factors come into play when choosing what textbooks they buy.
“If there’s a need for a book we buy it; we don’t just wait for someone to give it to us. It’s sort of a balance you need to seek,” Harrison says. “It’s a really high turnover and the books are moving in and out and many students, for a variety of reasons, really depend on the reserve collection.”
The library does its best to keep up with the times, but the lack of a separate fund for reserves isn’t the only thing keeping them from starting a reserve e-book collection.
“The big challenge with an e-book reserve is licensing,” she says. “Publishers have made it very difficult for libraries to do that. They would prefer people to be buying the book, so it’s a licensing challenge; it’s not so much about a lack of desire for us to do something like that.”
Harrison has no doubt that the library will continue to provide an affordable option for students for a long time to come.
“We’re not replacing textbooks, but we know there are so many different circumstances,” says Harrison, “and what’s most important to us is to ensure that students get access to the materials they need.”
The bookstore’s Eriksen says that it’s an interesting time, with digital “flying through the roof” while there are still students who want their textbooks to be printed and in their hands.
“Open resource is growing, and that’s great,” she says. “I really support free education where possible. I’m a strong believer that the textbooks and course materials are very important for success in a course. Hopefully, everything that a student takes home is useful and has value in that it’s going to make them do well. The point of the materials is that they’re going to prove to be useful for you in your learning.”