I think this article glosses over one of the key factors of the corruption in the textbook industry. Professors who write textbooks receive 15-40% royalties off the cover price. Then when new editions come out to block out the used market, the price on average increases 12%.
Those same professors dictate which books students buy. Students are NOT the consumers of the textbook industry, professors are. At many large American universities a board of professors pick the books for the large Chemistry, Biology, Physics classes. If one of the board members has written or contributed to a book, you know that is the book that will be assigned to 1000+ students a semester. At near $200 a piece and assuming a 30% royalty that professor just made himself $60,000 at ONE university. Now imagine his book being used at 10+ universities.
No matter how great the open textbook world gets, professors who have the option to net $60K are not going to select those books which gain them nothing. Once again, students are not the consumer of the textbook industry.
One aside on new editions. I have a 2nd edition of a book, the 7th edition, and the 12th edition. The only thing that changes is the problems at the end of the chapters. The text on each page is near identical. The problem as a student is that I need the problems in the back to do homework, and in many cases exam questions are drawn straight from those problems.
I'd be interested to know the proportion of professors that write textbooks used in their own courses. I expect it's quite small. Certainly more common in humanities, quite rare in science and engineering.
During my freshman year at Georgia Tech I had two classes with text books written by the instructor. My chemistry teacher was one of the authors of textbook we used. The other was my CS1311 class, but instead of a traditional textbook it had a plastic comb binding and was really inexpensive compared to my other books (I actually still have it sitting on my shelf - $17.50).
Edit: Now that I look more closely at it that CS book was just a supplement to the actual textbook, which was written by the instructor.
I had a professor who assigned his own book when I was an undergrad, but he specifically didn't get royalties on those copies of the book (they were sold to school, we had a textbook rental system), and he explained this fact on the syllabus. I thought that was a pretty big thing of him to do, but he was a great guy, so no surprises maybe.
I had a statistics professor that used a book written by himself in a statistics 101 class.
Also, as a pleasant surprise, the slides he used in class (and where available for students to download) were almost exactly the same content of the book.
The solution for this is to publish textbooks on demand. I know professors who do this, and they get reasonable royalties and a book they're actually pleased with and can change from year to year at no additional cost to their students.
At least in mathematics (excluding the cash cow known as calculus), professors really do care that their students don't have to pay ridiculous costs for texts.
"professors really do care that their students don't have to pay ridiculous costs for texts."
Sure a lot do, like the professor in the article, but that doesn't mean they all do. There are some that don't care and I'm sure others who haven't thought about it or rationalize the situation because it benefits them immensely.
That is to say making generalizations like that boils down the issue to "Professors care" vs "Professors take advantage of students" neither is absolutely true for the system as a whole.
But perhaps the mathematicians are on the far end of the spectrum, since their ideal work environment requires nothing but a writing utensil and a writing surface.
I had a professor who bundled an access code with his "custom-edition" textbook. It forced students to buy new every semester, and he made a healthy cut in the process:
I once got a Chem II lab manual, $50. And let me tell you, this was a real piece of work. The entire thing, covers and all, were printed on normal paper. It was (barely) held together by a plastic spiral ring.
I get in the first class, lab manual in front of me. The teacher comes in and... wait... Is that... That's their name... on my manual. Ugh, I see how it is, whatever. "Don't forget your manuals by the first class - they are MANDATORY".
Then comes our first lab - the first thing she tells us? "Oh, your manual is old, so a lot of those directions aren't right. I'll tell you what's changed when need be (every class)."
If you're going to charge us $50 for a shitty lab manual, can you please make sure it at least keeps itself together and has the right freaking instructions!
>Students are NOT the consumers of the textbook industry, professors are.
Exactly. Besides the conflicts of interest you mentioned, the actual contents of the texts are crafted for the benefit of the customers (the professors of course). Directly from the article:
>To get faculty hooked, Ahrens offers all kinds of extras for the instructor, like test questions, visuals, and homework questions. Not much use for the student's though.
And this leads to a situation where you, the student, are simply paying for the professor's laziness, as you put it:
>The problem as a student is that I need the problems in the back to do homework, and in many cases exam questions are drawn straight from those problems.
This is definitely true in the vast majority of cases. They take advantage of the fact that there are subjects like molecular biology that change significantly from year to year, even at the undergraduate level.
As a guy still in school, a field changing has absolutely zero to do with book editions, and everything to do with squeezing more money out of the government money backed students.
Undergrad topics are not only stable but almost completely isolated from change. A bleeding edge discovery in physics is only relevant to a Ph.D. It doesn't, for instance, upend classical mechanics on an undergrad level. That small change will never (for the most part) ripple its way all the way back to classical mechanics in a way that warrants a new book.
So what changes from edition to edition? The ordering of the chapters, and the questions they contain. It is fundamentally bullshit.
When I took my first year civics course, I mistakenly purchased the previous edition. Upon realizing that the table of contents in my book didn't match the course syllabus, I sent a quick email to the professor explaining my mistake, the fact that money prevents me from getting the correct edition, and whether or not I could get by with the old one. Sure enough, the (awesome) professor explained that the only things that were different were the order of the chapters and their respective titles (she even gave me a mapping of old title to new). As a further point of cool-professor-ness, she acknowledged the bullshit of the new edition, and explained that the book choice was out of her hands.
That was the last time I bought a current edition (sans a few classes which had custom books). Every semester begins with an email to the professor asking if the previous edition could be used, and almost without fail the answer is yes.
And the people who make the books caught on. If students know nothing changes from edition to edition, there's no incentive to purchase the new edition. So, what the current model for text books? Required Online Access codes. New editions come with the book, PLUS the online portion where you can actually submit your answer to the book's questions. Lucky us. Did you pick up a previous version of the book? No problem, just purchase this $70 access code so that you can submit your homework.
> Professors who write textbooks receive 15-40% royalties off the cover price.
I'd like to know where to get that kind of deal! I have only one experience publishing a textbook (currently in progress, with Springer), but we get 6% total, split between the authors (so 2% of the cover price each). That seems to be a fairly common rate at least for niche stuff. I guess if you're writing a "blockbuster" textbook and are a Famous Name you can probably negotiate something better.
In our case we're also putting the book free online. The main issue in getting that through wasn't our own worry about losing royalties, but difficulty convincing the publisher, who I think are in turn worried more about precedent and the way the market is shifting than this one book. If it were up to us, the whole thing would be open-access, and also the cover price for a print copy would be considerably lower than whatever they're likely to price it at. In the end we did a sort of "take it or leave it" ultimatum where we put a draft manuscript online to teach last fall's version of the course, before we'd signed a deal, and told the rep that we would only sign a deal if we could leave an author-formatted manuscript version online, which the publisher (somewhat reluctantly) agreed to. It helped that the rep is part of our research community and we have a good working relationship to explain what our goals are.
In our case the competing incentives are: 1) institutionally it doesn't "count" as a published book unless it's with a recognized publisher, and having it with a recognized publisher also makes it easier to get it into libraries and get other researchers and teachers to take it seriously; but 2) we want people to actually read it, and a €100 Springer book massively cuts down on potential audience, especially non-academic audiences, who we think the subject matter might appeal to if it weren't for the price. Hence the arrangement where Springer publishes it but you can also get the penultimate "author's manuscript" PDF (which will be identical except for formatting) for free online seems ideal for us [1]. We will also not be requiring our students to buy the paper version; the PDF version will be fine for the course.
[1] Well ideal from the perspective that both audiences are served: non-academics, autodidacts, hobbyists, and students who want a free-or-cheap book can get a free book through the PDF channel; academics, administrators, library acquisitions people, and methodologically conservative educators can get a Traditionally Published book through the publisher channel. This is probably not an ideal arrangement from the point of view of royalties, though: if we just self-published for €20 and put some effort into advertising, we would probably sell many more paper copies, and get more money (and also get to keep all the money, not 6% of it). But ultimately writing this book is not our day job or expected to be a significant source of income, so getting it into The System of libraries and official approval was worth the tradeoff of (probably) not making any money from it.
Those same professors dictate which books students buy. Students are NOT the consumers of the textbook industry, professors are. At many large American universities a board of professors pick the books for the large Chemistry, Biology, Physics classes. If one of the board members has written or contributed to a book, you know that is the book that will be assigned to 1000+ students a semester. At near $200 a piece and assuming a 30% royalty that professor just made himself $60,000 at ONE university. Now imagine his book being used at 10+ universities.
No matter how great the open textbook world gets, professors who have the option to net $60K are not going to select those books which gain them nothing. Once again, students are not the consumer of the textbook industry.
One aside on new editions. I have a 2nd edition of a book, the 7th edition, and the 12th edition. The only thing that changes is the problems at the end of the chapters. The text on each page is near identical. The problem as a student is that I need the problems in the back to do homework, and in many cases exam questions are drawn straight from those problems.