Textbooks got cheaper, and people seem unhappy
When everything's a crisis, solutions lack nuance
This week I read that the cost of college students' textbooks has gone down dramatically, from $610 a decade ago to $332 now, and I took to social media for perspective. Reactions from teachers tended to pin the change on sometimes-problematic new policies in higher ed, including restrictions on what materials can be assigned. (Readers may recall the topic coming to prominence last year with the controversy around the “textbook free” campus in Texas.)
Concerns along these lines strike me as reasonable. While students’ textbook expenses are a genuine issue, policies that prevent an English professor from assigning an inexpensive Penguin paperback with a helpful apparatus would seem to be misguided. The push for free materials (known as Open Educational Resources) and the rise of inclusive access policies (complicated, but read more here) have evidently succeeded at reducing costs. But I’m hearing that these solutions have sometimes been inattentive to the needs and practices of specific fields, specific kinds of books, and specific ways of reading.
And that, I think, is an underlying issue in so much of the way books get talked and thought about. The tendency to frame developments in the world of books as crises prompts sweeping, top-down responses. You see something similar in the one-size-fits-all push for Open Access, including an initiative in the UK that will require all university-based authors to publish their books OA. Open Access arose largely in response to the expense of scientific journal articles. Applying it to work by (for example) historians jettisons pragmatic, grounded perspectives and invites all sorts of unintended consequences—a trajectory similar to what appears to be happening with course-book policies.
Or I could be wrong! As someone reasonably close to the textbook issue (I’m both a publisher and soon-to-be college parent) I’m disappointed that there hasn’t been more sustained reporting on these matters. I probably don’t read as much specialized coverage as I should, but still—if I’m surprised and frankly a little confused by the state of play, I assume people further removed from the topic may feel the same.
It’s another argument in favor of beat reporting about the world of books. I’d love to see more, on an ongoing basis, that incorporates the voices of publishing workers, authors, teachers, booksellers, and others in the ecosystem. As it is, readers are too often left, I think, with intermittent coverage responding to press releases about crises and their purported solutions. The result can be distorted understandings and heavy-handed policy.
Would be interested in additional perspectives in comments, especially from teachers and students.
Happy to chat about this offline, Derek. I’m an OER advocate. I also know too much about the relationship between institutions and bookstores, which are often owned by B&N or Follett.
I teach English/humanities classes. I use a mix of print and digital sources, and I find that I re-evaluate every year. For example, for the past few years I’ve used an OER for my American lit survey course, but probably going back to Norton next time.
No matter what I’m assigning, though, I’ve found it important to include more explicit discussions about formats. Some of this is very practical, like showing/reminding students how to print online readings. I talk more explicitly about my own reading (ex: I most often read journal articles online, but sometimes print them; I use a mix of ebooks and print, digital archives and physical archives, etc, for research.) And I ask students to think about how to adapt reading practices (like annotating) across a variety of formats. I’ve found Jenae Cohn’s *Skim, Dive, Surface* to be so helpful for this.