Textbook prices need oversight

Michael A. Covington

[Appeared in The Red and Black, www.redandblack.com,
February 15, 2005.]

Michael A. Covington is associate director of the Artificial
Intelligence Center and the author of half a dozen books,
including the textbooks for CSCI 6540 and 8570.





The students say they're being taken advantage of.  Textbooks cost too
much.

The publishers say good books are expensive, and we should just deal
with it.

The truth is somewhere in between.

This university manages to teach two semesters of Latin out of a
single $16 book.  Even allowing for a dictionary and a few
supplemental booklets, that's under $50 for 2 courses.

At the other end of the scale, some books _do_ cost a lot, and we
can't avoid it.  Art students need hundreds of color pictures,
regardless of the cost.  Law books and advanced research handbooks
are expensive because they cost a lot to produce, and only sell a
few thousand copies.

So should we restrict the price of textbooks?  Not exactly.  But I
think we should do something about a few problem situations:

(1) The unknown price.

Nobody can control prices if they don't know about them.  Commonly,
even the professor doesn't know how much a book costs.

I'd like to see book prices listed in _The Key_ or some other central
database.  They also ought to be on the syllabus of every course.

(2) The unused book.

To be fair, I have to point out that sometimes students claim a book
wasn't used, when they actually should have been reading it. But other
books really do go unused.

Sometimes the professor just changes his plans; sometimes the
department requires a book that the individual professor doesn't like.
Either way, money gets wasted.

And how about reviving the ancient practice of assigning readings
in the library, so students won't have to buy everything they read?

(3) The money-wasting giant.

Do Americans always need a 900-page textbook that weighs ten pounds,
with all the pages decorated in full color?  Plus a 300-page throwaway
workbook?

In Europe, a typical textbook is 300 pages of just text and diagrams.
That's all you're going to read anyhow.

Not only are American "giants" expensive, they give you backaches from
carrying them around!

(4) The needless revision.

Publishers want a new edition every three years to destroy the market
for used copies.

Some subjects, such as economics, really need frequent revision.  But
chemistry or physics doesn't change that fast, and mathematics doesn't
change at all.

Every author deserves a chance to correct errors and refine the
presentation.  But after the second or third edition, if the subject
isn't changing very fast, the book ought to be stable.

Pushing for new editions can even make a book worse, as the author
reshuffles chapters that used to be well organized.

One last thing.  Should professors be allowed to require textbooks
that they themselves wrote?  I think so; otherwise, some useful books
wouldn't get written and courses wouldn't exist.

I'm the author of two textbooks myself.  I wrote them because suitable
books did not exist.  My books are used in small, advanced courses at
several universities and I earn a few hundred dollars a year, total.

The stakes are higher when a professor authors a $150 "giant," then
persuades a department to require it in all sections of a big course.
Royalties can amount to thousands a year from a single campus.

The state has lots of other rules to deal with conflicts of interest.
It would be perfectly appropriate, when a professor wants to require
his own book, to have someone else review whether it's to the
University's benefit.  Don't prohibit it; just keep an eye on it.

-end-