The Price Is Right?
Logically, e-textbooks should be much cheaper than the print options available to students--but they're not. CT looks at the rationale behind their pricing, and the market factors at play.
- By Dian Schaffhauser
- 04/01/12
"The cost of textbooks ranks at the top of the list of undergraduate 'gripes.'" --The Cornell Daily Sun
"Doing the required reading will hurt more than ever this year. Textbook prices…have been rising at an alarming rate." --The Harvard Crimson
Such sentiments surface in student newspapers and on social networking sites regularly. And, apparently, they're nothing new. The Cornell University (NY) quote, for instance, was published in 1934; the Harvard University (MA) quote came out 20 years ago.
There's something about textbook prices that generates outrage in ways that other college expenses, such as housing and technology fees, don't. Maybe it's the shock felt by new students when faced with a $900 bill after getting their textbooks for free in K-12. Maybe it's the awful realization that $40,000 in tuition and board doesn't even cover learning materials.
Many educators--as well as the feds and plenty of state governments--believe that the solution to high textbook costs lies with a shift to digital content. After all, if you eliminate the printing, the trucking, the warehousing, and all the other hassles related to physical inventory, you're left with only the writing, production, development, and marketing. Surely that will bring down the prices students have to pay for curriculum?
But if that were true, why hasn't the digital-content pilot at Florida's Daytona State College shown far greater savings? According to a report by the pilot's researchers, "during three of the project's four semesters, students enrolled in some of the e-text pilot sections paid only $1 less for rental of their e-texts than students who bought a printed book, due to publisher pricing decisions." Worse, these students couldn't sell their e-texts back to the campus bookstore like the owners of print books could, "which increased their disappointment."
Given these conflicting claims and beliefs, CT set out to discover the true cost of e-textbooks, what's driving the pricing, and how these costs compare to those of traditional print products.
Crunching the Numbers
At first glance, e-texts do offer a significant discount over traditional print textbooks. An unscientific review of pricing on CourseSmart, an e-textbook clearinghouse, indicates that e-texts on average sell for 50 to 60 percent of the cost of equivalent new print textbooks. But discounts are dependent on the individual title and the area of study. Architecture e-texts, for example, are often as much as 70 percent of the cost of the new print textbook, while many law e-texts cost 40 percent of the print edition.