Shedding light on the dark textbook industry

High textbook prices have long topped the list of the proverbially poor college student's woes.

With publishers raising their prices an average of eight to 10 percent each year, various outfits have sought to offer a lower cost option. One of these outfits is the OSU Beaver Store, which adopted a program on its website for the comparison of textbook prices this fall.

The program allows students to select textbooks online and compare the prices offered at the store with other providers such as Amazon, Barnes & Noble and Half.com. Students can then purchase their textbooks online new, used, as rentals or in digital format. The store also has a "Sell Books OSU" cell phone app that allows students to use smartphone cameras to check the price the store pays to buy its used books.

Catherine Skipper, senior in economics at Oregon State University who has always bought her textbooks at the Beaver Store, is buying her textbooks online for the first time this term. She usually uses course reserves, but this term only one of her textbooks for the five courses she is taking is available on reserve, so she is buying the rest. Throughout her four years at OSU, Skipper estimates she has spent close to $2,500 on textbooks.

That number seems small when compared to the estimated $7,500 total cost of Michael Fyffe's textbooks during his five years as a construction engineering management major at OSU. On a Wednesday morning you can find Fyffe outside Milam auditorium, handing out fliers that urge students to "join the movement to end textbook tyranny." The paper handouts advertise a new website, Boundless.com, that boasts free digital copies of textbooks.

Fyffe was the first person at OSU to visit their website, so the company offered him one dollar for every new person from OSU to join, though he said he would do it for free because he believes so passionately in the cause. Fyffe speaks about the atrocities of textbook pricing with the same conviction some activists speak about abortion or government oppression.

"I love the concept because I hate the fact that giant corporations are gauging students who can least afford to pay it. I am so broke I have to go to the library and get the books on reserve. And if I really, really have to have it I'll scan it," Fyffe said. "You're not supposed to do it more than 10 pages, that's copyright infringement, but when you're broke and you gotta go to class to get a degree to make money you don't have a choice."

He explained that Boundless does not infringe on publishing rules because it is not word for word, but rather conceptual. The company collects public information and correlates it with the information given in the textbook, filling in gaps with text provided by hired Ph.D.'s.

Searching online is only one of the options college students have when considering textbooks. Some choose to buy used textbooks, borrow from friends, rent from the library, or simply go without, choices that can lead to illegal copyright infringement or have a detrimental effect on student grades.

Which begs the question, why are textbook prices so wallet-wrenchingly high?

The simple answer is capitalism, explains OSU Beaver Store Academic Materials Manager James Howard. Publicly held companies, with stockholders who expect a return on their investment, seek to make money.

One need hardly read past the title: "RipOff 101: How the Publishing Industry's Practices Needlessly Drive Up Textbook Costs." In this 2005 second edition national survey of textbook prices, State Public Interest Research Groups, or PIRGs, highlight frequent new editions and bundling— shrink wrapping additional instructional materials such as CD-ROMS or workbooks to the textbook— as publisher-induced factors that drive up the cost.

OSU librarians John Pollitz and Anne Christie identified these as problems as well, in their 2006 article, "The High Cost of Textbooks: A Convergence of Academic Libraries, Campus Bookstores, Publishers?" Both sources mention the prices of American textbooks are often much greater than the same book sold in international markets.

The Association for Psychological Science past president Henry L. Roediger, III in his 2005 article "Why Are Textbooks So Expensive?" addresses the questions of inflation, more brightly colored diagrams, the exit of traditional "genteel" textbook companies who have been bought up by larger conglomerates seeking larger profits, and reduced competition among companies through the merging of formerly independent companies under the same corporate umbrella.

Yet Roediger argues that the root cause is the sale of used books. Describing them as "true parasites" and comparing their practice to movie pirating, Roediger says used book stores cheat the textbook company as well as authors by re-selling books the writing of which they themselves did not contribute to. This, he argues, pressures textbook companies to create more editions that can be sold new.