Textbooks are sexy... (Part 1)

Last week I attended at the Canadian Roundtable on Academic Materials (CRAM) conference in Toronto. The DSU was invited to participate in this forum along with a dozen other student associations and university bookstores.

The Problem

Textbook prices have been increasing considerably over the past few decades. While the cost of most goods and services have increased with inflation over that time period, the average increase in the price of textbooks over the past 13 years has been 2.8 times the rate of inflation (or CPI). The rationale behind these price increases is hidden to the consumer.

A second issue is that the increases in book prices have not directly corresponded to an increase in quality of materials received by students. Textbooks continue to be packaged with supplemental materials such as CD-ROMs and problem packs that most students (in my experience) never or rarely end up using. Often times a large portion of the written material in a textbook is never used or referenced by a professor and is unnecessary waste to a majority of students.

The Publishers

After an afternoon of discussion amongst student leaders and bookstore managers attending the conference, we spent the evening talking with representatives from the major publishing companies in Canada. While a few companies sent their marketing and campus relations representatives, Neilson Publishing sent the president of their Higher Education Division.

I wish I could say that the discussion was productive and fruitful and that student concerns were well received and taken into the decision making process, but unfortunately that is not the case. Rather than taking student’s comments and criticisms as if we were, you know, representing a large portion of their customer base, they took almost every suggestion and comment as if we didn’t put millions of dollars into their coffers annually.

Now, having spent a period of time (albeit a very short one) in the DSU I realize how hard it can be to facilitate engagement with stake holders and to get a proper grasp of exactly what it is students are looking for from us. So, if it were me being given the chance to sit in a room with the people who pay my salary, you can bet your bookends I wouldn’t try and shoot them down every time they offered what (from our perspective anyways) seemed like valuable input into generating solutions to the problems my organization might be facing.

So, for the benefit of those of you who wish you’d been in the room, here’s what went down (I’ll warn you in advance I may be paraphrasing at times, but I kid you not, this is the genuine tone of the conversation):

CRAM: What explanation is there for the drastic increase in prices of textbooks over the past decade? Specifically, why have textbook prices increased at a rate almost triple than that of inflation?

Publishers: The reality is we’re not just selling textbooks anymore. What we’re hearing from professors is that they are overworked, understaffed (fewer TAs) and underpaid, and they simply aren’t able to cope with their workload and research. For this reason, we provide them with supplemental teaching materials to help develop their lessons, mark assignments. We also include free technology supplements for students with most textbooks, which has been proven (when taken advantage of) to enhance academic performance.

CRAM: We already pay tuition to our schools to develop their lessons, pay TAs and provide income to professors. What right do publishers have to include this material in the price paid by students for textbooks? Surely the universities aren’t paying you for these services?

Publishers: These services are provided free of charge to professors, as an incentive for these professors to require their students to purchase our texts. It sounds like its not so much a problem you have with us, but moreso a problem you’ve got with your own faculty. You should really talk to them.

CRAM: It’s a problem we have with the publishers because it’s a service you’re knowingly providing when you know that students don’t want (and don’t deserve to pay for these services).

Publishers: We need to provide the service in order to stay competitive.

CRAM: Representatives from the five major publishers in Canada are in the room right now. Why not agree to cease providing these services for the benefit of students.

Publishers: That would be collusion, which is illegal.

CRAM: The major problem with the textbook market is that it is out of equilibrium. The market isn’t described by the basic principles of a free marketplace because faculty are the decision makers and students are left with the binaric decision of whether or not to purchase the book, with no perfect substitute available at a lower price (or higher quality). Textbook publishers are obviously very active in marketing their product to instructors (the decision makers), but what market research has been done to ensure the products satisfy the needs of students (the purchasers). Comparatively, what portion of your marketing budget (which translates to about 15% of the cost) is spent on market research analysis on students, to ensure that the product offered is favorable equally to faculty as it is to students?

Publishers: We don’t have those kinds of numbers off hand, but I can tell you it is relatively minimal compared to what we spend on marketing textbooks to faculty.

CRAM: What are your annual profits like?

Publishers: Again, we don’t have those kinds of numbers off hand. In fact, I find it incredibly insulting that we’re being asked these questions on the spot in some form of ambush interrogation. We weren’t even given an agenda for this meeting, so how can we be expected to participate fully in the discussion?

Editor’s note: To be fair the publishers were absolutely right; we had forgotten to give them an agenda. In fact, we didn’t even have an agenda for this meeting, the time had been slotted for an informal discussion between bookstores, students and publishers, and our questions were as nil rehearsed as the answers we got. Oops, our bad.

I could go on and on about the futile discourse that continued for another hour or so, but I think the above conversation sums up the overall outcome of the consultation. One thing is apparent though, while the textbook companies are extremely resistant to the suggestions they’ve heard from students, they are wary of the potential of this group of stakeholders.

Stay tuned in the next couple of days for some further updates on the work that CRAM did this week, including a summary of how the new copyright act will affect students and universities, on campus initiatives for reducing the cost of academic materials and the future of CRAM.