Web 2.0 and Textbooks

As a textbook author, I try not to get too defensive when I read about how horrible textbook publishers are and how they rip off the student. As I’ve mentioned many times in this blog, many people do not understand the reasons behind the prices of today’s textbooks.

One more time: The key issue is the used book market. Let’s pick some round numbers for purpose of illustration. A textbook is adopted by a professor who teaches classes of 100 students per semester, and the life of the text is five years. This means that 1000 students total will use the text. The first 100 students buy the text new, and this is the only money that the publisher will ever recover on the textbook. The remaining 900 students will buy the book used, and 100% of that money will go to the used book seller, and none will go to the publisher.  The publisher pays not only for paper and ink, but also for editorial and production staff time (development editors, proofreaders, etc.), production of illustrations, photo permissions, marketing materials, and sales force time, not to mention their buildings, taxes, and other business costs.  Let’s assume that these costs for the textbook are $10,000. If the publisher were able to recoup these costs from the sales of 1000 textbooks, each purchaser’s share would be $10. However, due to the used book market, the publishers’ costs can only be recovered on first-time sales, which in this case is only 100 textbooks, making each purchaser liable for $100 instead of $10. This is the main reason that popular press books (think Harry Potter) cost around $20 and textbooks cost more than $100. Nobody sells Harry to the next reader, so the publisher can spread costs across all sales. It’s a trap–until books are so cheap that the hassle of selling them back to the campus bookstore isn’t worth it, we’re stuck. Students buying the book new continue to subsidize the costs of their peers who buy the book used.

Discovering Biological Psychology, Second Edition

People complain about the costs of texts, but they complain a lot louder when a textbook is poorly written or inaccurate. This means that the author must spend considerable time and effort on producing the best book possible, and few people are willing to do so for free. I was asked by one of my students how long it took me to write my Discovering Biological Psychology textbook. I told her to think of writing sixteen 100-page Word papers with about 200 references each, which scared most of the students to death. I estimate that I spent a minimum of 15-20 hours per week for five years on my first edition, and for two years on my revisions for the second edition. In many weeks, the number was much higher. I really, really don’t want to compute my hourly wages on that. I get my modest royalties when students buy the book new, but nothing when they buy it used.

Nobody is arguing that the business plan here isn’t broken. Clearly, we need better ways to deliver content to students. I like the iChapter model, but am surprised that this approach is still very expensive–the student saves about $30 off the cost of a book. I’m not sure the solution lies in online free books paid with advertising, however. Trent Batson covers some of these options, and suggests that students should be “pushing faculty members to adopt free online textbooks instead of unaffordable print versions.” One question here is quality–I think in the world of textbooks, you often get what you pay for. There is no way I could have produced the same quality product on my own without the expertise of my publisher and my army of paid reviewers.

And what is really “unaffordable” about textbooks? Personally, I think Starbucks coffee, at about $5 a pop, is unaffordable, yet some of the same students who complain about buying a $100 textbook (20 coffees) think nothing about living at Starbucks every day. Perhaps this is a Napster hangover–we are entitled to free content.

In the meantime, I keep writing and hoping that new or used, my work makes psychology exciting to students.