Textbook Woes
Published on Aug 24, 2007 at 5:03 pm.
4 Comments.
Filed under college teaching.
About a year ago, I had a rant about textbooks. Now, it is time for another one. But, first let me go on about general irritations on campus this week.
This week has been spent in meetings all week. I turned in grades for the summer term on Friday, one week ago. And, every day this week, there have been meetings. Lots of them. Meetings about mostly things that are of no consequence. The one thing that is significantly different is that we are now expected to keep attendance and grade books online. OK. I get that. The software that does that doesn’t seem to do what most people want it to do. It is another case of people who don’t teach writing software for faculty. But, the worst thing is that it seems every administrator at the college wants to have their own meeting to tell us this! Oh, and we have a new statewide policy restricting students to only six dropped classes in their entire undergraduate career. Personally, I think that might be a good thing, since it is far too easy to drop classes around here. Oh, and they workers redoing the classrooms (starting during the final exam last week) decided to take a break most of this week, so they won’t be done with the classrooms next week when classes resume for the fall semester. Great planning, that is!
Now, let me rant a bit about textbooks, since that is part of my increased workload this past week. A year ago, I posted about how textbook prices are getting out of control. The books are priced out of reach of many students. Earlier this month, I posted about student loans. With the price of education going up so fast, students are getting deeper and deeper into debt. Textbook prices are part of the problem. There is a move to try to keep faculty from changing textbooks too frequently. While that might sound good, it is not the solution. After all, what if the professor changes, and the new professor teaching the class wants a textbook that matches his teaching style better? The students would be far better off with a textbook that matches the professor rather than the professor trying to fit the textbook. That is particularly true if it is a bad textbook. But, I really understand the reasoning. If you keep a textbook for several years, then there will be used books available for students. Sadly, the used book prices today are nowhere near as good of a bargain as they were when I was taking classes. Still, it helps the students, and for that reason, I try to keep the same book for as long as possible. Also, students often drop a class and take it later, or fail a class and take it later. Either way, they have the old edition of the book, and it is better for them if the textbook has not changed. So, unless the book is really bad, I will keep it.
Having said that, I find that I am having to change up two classes this semester because of new editions of the textbook. Therefore, with all the meetings during the week, I never got time to put up copies of my syllabus with the new book information for students so that they could order the new books online. Both books have substantial differences, so it isn’t just a matter of changing the header on the syllabus. And, both situations caught me by surprise.
We are required to submit textbook orders for the fall semester back the first of April. At that time, I knew that a new edition of the astronomy textbook was going to be coming out, but I didn’t want to adopt it sight unseen, and the new edition wasn’t out yet. So, I adopted the old edition for one more year. Then, the new edition comes out over the summer. My summer class uses the old edition, but I anticipate perhaps adopting the new edition next year, or perhaps in the spring. But, I am not sure which edition of the lab workbook we adopted. So, I call the bookstore, and I find that they can only get copies of about 20 of the old edition of the textbook for our 100+ students. Great. So, frantically, we have to change orders to the new edition. I contact the publisher, who had never gotten around to sending me any new editions or ancillary materials. We need copies for each of us teaching the class. Oh, and the software that comes with the book is different, so there is a new workbook, and the old ones aren’t even supported. Great. More to worry about. The books finally arrive, but there is no time to look at them before all these stupid meetings start this week.
Then, comes the other surprise. The physics text is also changing. The bookstore informs us that they’ve now sold out of the 7th edition and when they ordered more, the publisher sent 8th editions. Would it be OK to sell the new editions since they can’t get more of the 7th editions? Huh? I find this hard to believe. Surely they made a mistake. The 7th edition is only TWO years old. They can’t possibly have a new edition. I check. Sure enough, there is now and 8th edition. And, somehow, no 7th editions of either the physics or the astronomy texts are available anywhere. Yeah. Of course. When the bookstore (which wants our textbook orders nearly 5 months before the semester begins) only orders them a couple weeks before the semester starts then they will be sold out of the old ones. So, now what? About 1/4 of the students have now bought the 7th edition, and the rest the 8th edition. With astronomy, any student who had the other half of the class in the spring was told that we’d be using the same textbook in the fall. But, now that textbook is not even an option, so they have the wrong book. Now, those students, I’ll work with so that they don’t need to buy the new edition, but it really is a pain. And, what is particularly annoying is that in neither case did the textbook reps tell us anything at all about the change. In fact, I’ve not even seen the new reps. We used to have some really WONDERFUL book reps for these two publishers, but the new ones are not putting forth any effort or providing any service. I’ve got half a mind to just go along with the textbook from the new publisher than our wonderful book rep went to work for. I know that she’d have made sure that we weren’t caught by surprise like this!
Now, this gets back to what I was talking about last year. Part of the problem with textbook prices is that the publishers have the students over a barrel. They have to have a particular book for a class. And, that book is only available from on publisher. And, that book is normally only available at a handful of bookstores on or near campus. So, supply and demand are all out of whack. The publisher can charge pretty much what they want. The bookstores can boost the price by pretty much what they want, too. And, most of the students just have to pay. Now, some of the students are getting smart and are getting books online at a fraction of the cost of buying them at the bookstore. Still, the price of the books is quite excessive.
And, of course, any time there is a new edition, then the price can go up. I can understand frequent new editions for the astronomy. We know FAR more about comets, formation of planets, extrasolar planets, formation of galaxies, etc. than was known in the last edition of the textbook (published three years ago). The field is moving quickly. But, introductory physics has NOT changed in the last two years. There is absolutely no reason at all for a new edition of the book. I am particularly irritated since I was one of the ones who selected this edition of the book two years ago, but then I rotated off of teaching the course that used it. I only got to teach that course again this past summer, so I only got to use the book one time! And, now there is a new edition! I am on the verge of doing what some other faculty have done, and that is to simply make up my own homework problems rather than using the ones in the book. Then, I can tell the students that they can use any appropriate textbook at that level that they want to use. Most physics books at that level are pretty much alike. I’d give them a list of acceptable ones, and they can get whatever book that they want to use to study with.
The publishers complain that they are losing money to the used book market, but they are driving the used book market by their own very aggressive pricing tactics. I am really not sure what to do about this. I know that I’ve done away with the lab manual for physics and I just post labs on my web page for the students to download and print. I am seriously thinking of doing something similar for astronomy. I wish that I had time to write my own textbooks. Then, I could do away with the publishers’ schemes to get money out of the students.
-Astroprof
Astrogeek on August 25, 2007 at 1:25 am: 1
I’ve always wondered why Universities couldn’t go with a more flexible option than printed textbooks. It seems that it should be doable to produce the required materials in an ebook format that could be updated as necessary and be less expensive or the student and for the University.
Of course, there’s several downside arguments against that idea, one of the biggest being convincing the publishers to go along.
Jackie on August 25, 2007 at 1:42 am: 2
I decided to rent my textbooks this semester from the site bookrenter.com and it saved me a lot of money. Hopefully the site can help you/your students too.
Astroprof on August 25, 2007 at 8:45 am: 3
Well, Astrogeek, I was sitting in a focus group held by the publisher of our astronomy textbook. I have the option of adopting the textbook in electronic form. That would cost a bit over 1/2 what they charge for the print version. But, the electronic version expires after one year (it disables itself), so if a student fails the class and retakes it the following year, or if they have a semester gap between first and second semester, then they would have to buy the textbook, twice .
As for producing your own materials, it is a HUGE amount of work, as I’ve found out just doing the lab materials. Faculty don’t get credit for that work. It almost never counts towards promotion and tenure. And, many institutions have a policy like mine where faculty are prohibited from collecting royalties from textbooks or lab manuals that their own students buy. Still, I decided to write my own materials for the labs and post them on my college web site. I think that this is far better for the students, since their only cost will be printing the labs out.
Astroprof on August 25, 2007 at 8:57 am: 4
Jackie, I looked at that site. They still charge an awful lot to just rent the books. I teach two semester classes, and renting for two semesters costs even more than buying a new book at our bookstore. And the problem with renting a book (or selling back a used one) is that for some courses that are prerequisites to others, you need that material in later classes. Now, if they charged much less for renting, then that would be different. The prices that came up for the textbooks that we are using didn’t seem to be all that hot of a deal, but that might be different for other classes or disciplines. I encourage my students to check out a wide variety of online sources to get their textbook cheaper than you can find it in the college bookstore.