Textbook costs have been the bane of students at least since I was a student in the 1980s. I recall having to pay $36 for a slim hardbound text in the fall of 1983, and I thought it was scandalous. Now, health sciences and business students routinely drop $150-200 (and occasionally twice that) on a single textbook. This is not merely old-guy-lamenting-how-expensive-things-have-become rhetoric. According to a recent report by the Education Data Initiative, in 2023, the average college text cost $105.37, with many texts costing much more. That same report noted that the average total price for textbooks for the 2021-22 academic year was around $1,200. Textbook prices are rising at about three times the inflation rate over time, or about 6% per year. And between 1977 and 2015, textbook prices increased 1,041%.
Where We’ve Been
For a long time, fighting the rising tide of textbook prices seemed to be a losing battle for both faculty and students. For most of the last three decades, professors had a difficult choice when it came to textbooks. They either required students to purchase the latest, well-marketed, slick-looking text in their field, or they had to write their own text materials on top of their other classroom prep duties. And students either had to buy that textbook from the campus bookstore, borrow it from a fellow student, or do without and hope the professor didn’t find out.
Students in that last category also risked being thought of as slackers by the professor who looked down on students who didn’t even bother to buy the text for the class. To my shame, I admit I was sometimes one of those professors. It seldom occurred to me that some of my students really couldn’t afford to buy the text for my class.
Things began to change once the digital age came into its own with the turn of the millennium. Students and eventually faculty began to realize that the internet was actually a source of (sometimes accurate) information. Enterprising students eagerly embraced this source as at least a partial replacement for a textbook. And forward-looking instructors actually began giving students assignments that required them to use the internet to find information.
And then there were the reviled book resellers, who would slink through our campuses every academic year and offer us cold hard cash to take old textbooks off of our office shelves. We were well-taught by textbook publishers to hate these grifters who allegedly drove up textbook prices by reselling texts to struggling students at a discount. How dare these entrepreneurs buy low and then sell high, thereby undercutting publishers’ profit margins? Admittedly, the aggressive tactics of these resellers rankled us faculty, and as a chief academic officer I once had to literally chase one off of our campus, with him cursing and gesturing obscenely to me as he drove away.
But in retrospect, I’ve begun to rethink that situation. Textbook publishers responded to the book resellers by ceasing to hand out review copies of textbooks or limiting them to digital viewing only. They accelerated the release of new editions, often with only the most cosmetic of changes. And prices continued inexorably to rise. The publishers responded to the resellers with new tactics. It’s capitalism at work. And despite opinions in some quarters, capitalism doesn’t necessarily make victims of us consumers. We have power as consumers to affect our economic lot as well. And that leads us to the present situation.
Where We Are
Fast forward to the present day, where the complexity and chaos of the textbook publishing industry presents both new problems and opportunities for students and their instructors. In recent years there has been a convulsion of mergers and acquisitions in the industry. Today a mere three textbook publishers occupy fully 80% of the market space: Cengage, McGraw-Hill, and Pearson. Their textbooks are current, pretty, and pretty expensive. They typically make use of “access codes” that students must purchase in order to use the ancillary textbook materials that are available online. Further, the publishers are offering more fully digital texts, so that students must purchase the access codes (at full price) to get the textbook at all. This cuts out the book reseller market entirely.
And even further, these companies are signing “inclusive access” deals with IHEs. In these arrangements, a school agrees to allow its students access to all of the publisher’s textbooks for a discounted price. That price is rolled into the students’ tuition and fees at the institution. With these agreements, the publishers can lock up all of an institution’s students as a market segment. Because the costs are part of tuition and fees, students will not bother with the option of not “buying” the textbook (even though textbook companies provide an opt-out period at the beginning of each semester). Students enjoy the convenience of knowing their textbooks will simply be provided by the school, and they don’t have to do anything (especially if mom and pop are paying that tuition). And publishers never have to reveal the true price that students are paying for their required texts.
Inclusive access arrangements have been derided as a “scheme” in the political arena and have spawned class-action lawsuits claiming that the marketing method is a result of deliberate collusion between major textbook publishers to eliminate competition, lock in customers, and increase prices. In 2021, a U.S.district judge ruled in favor of the publishers, noting that the lawsuit failed to prove there was any collusion and that they had simply come up with the same means of “innovation” in the marketplace.
So what are students and faculty to do? How should we respond to this latest “innovation”? I don’t think the answer lies in litigation or legislation. The government can help support possible solutions by providing funding. But it’s up to us as consumers to adjust to these evolving market realities with some innovations of our own. Luckily, these efforts are well under way.
Where We’re Going
New efforts to control textbook costs are well underway and quite successful. But for that success to continue long-term, students, faculty, and IHEs must remain vigilant for new developments and never forget that the textbook game is a market game and always will be. The best solutions will not be in sloganeering (“free textbooks for all!”), in forms of governmental intervention such as price controls, or even in the legal system through antitrust litigation. Instead, just as publishers are gaming the market through company mergers, digitization of content, and programs like inclusive access, consumers must also create new initiatives that bypass corporate attempts to corner the textbook market. Below is a short description of some of these consumer responses. It certainly isn’t an exhaustive list. The information I summarize below is only a bit of practical guidance to students and faculty who want to keep college textbooks as affordable as possible for as many as possible.
Open Educational Resources (OEM)
Open educational resources have been developed by academics specifically for the purpose of creating textbook material in the public domain. They are free and available for anyone to use. Currently, around 40% of faculty report that they use such materials, and that percentage is slowly growing. For faculty teaching in disciplines that evolve relatively slowly, such as the arts and letters, this is a game changer for students struggling with the high cost of textbooks. Arts and letters faculty should make the development, dissemination, and usage of OEM a priority. Unfortunately, for students in rapidly-developing disciplines such as business and the sciences, OEM will not be a great solution, except perhaps in some introductory courses.
Textbook Scholarships
There are plenty of textbook scholarship programs out there. Although these funds probably won’t be sufficient to cover all of a student’s textbook needs, every little bit helps. For students who must have the latest textbook materials for their courses but who don’t have the funds to cover them, scholarships could be a great option. CollegeScholarships.org has a list of these sources, as does DirectTextbook.com.
Shop Around
Speaking of DirectTextbook.com, students should definitely shop around whenever possible. If you’re one of those unlucky students enrolled at a school that has an inclusive access agreement with a publisher, you may want to opt out and go online to find better deals on new or used textbooks. Remember, the textbook conglomerates want you to sacrifice that choice for the convenience of being able to get your texts handed to you by the campus bookstore all at once and without your doing anything. If mom and dad are the ones footing that bill by paying your tuition, lucky you. But keep in mind that many of your student colleagues lack that financial resource Many of them may be members of other disadvantaged groups. Instead, shop around–and encourage your financially struggling fellow students to do the same.
Use of Prior or International Editions
Textbook companies are notorious for creating new editions with only cosmetic changes. In some cases, using a prior edition or an international edition of a text will serve you well in a class. But that will work for students only if faculty agree not to purchase new editions automatically or to use teaching materials that are available only to a specific American edition of a textbook. More about this particular topic in a later section.
Free Online Resources
In addition to OEM resources, faculty and students should research to see whether textbook materials are available online for free. Resources like Project Gutenberg, Google Scholar, and OpenStax provide thousands of resources that can help students who need older resources for classes.
Textbook Sharing
Textbook publishers hate this method, but students have been using it for a long time. Publishers try to prevent textbook sharing by tying digital textbooks to access codes that in turn connect into learning management system sites for textbooks. It is tempting for professors to use these textbook company-managed sites to run their courses, including the management of assignments and grades. That provides a convenience to instructors, but it also limits access options for struggling students. It prevents students from sharing logins without also sharing access to their assignments and grades. There are moral quandaries related to the issue of textbook and access code sharing. Perhaps I will attend to these issues in a future post. Generally, even when students buy their own copy of a text, they only rent the access code for a set period of time. That rental status makes it improper to sell or give away an access code.
Wise Pedagogy
Resolving the problem of soaring textbook costs cannot be resolved without strong faculty commitment to address the issue. It is vital that faculty participate actively in the effort to limit textbook costs for students. I recommend faculty take the following steps to mitigate this problem.
Faculty should use OEM or public domain teaching materials whenever possible.
Bookscouter.com maintains a list of sites providing such materials.
Teach the material, not the textbook.
Teaching the textbook is often a habit we cultivate early in our career while we are still learning the pedagogy in our field. But teaching the material will mean that we will need to work harder to provide students with pedagogical materials ourselves. That will mean more work for us. And it will leave some students feeling insecure without having a text to fall back on.
Make sure that new and adjunct faculty have the proper resources.
Just as we needed to lean upon textbooks when we were new to teaching, many of our adjuncts will face the same pressure. They may be skilled practitioners in the field. But they are unlikely to be expert in the landscape of textbooks in their teaching area. Therefore, be ready to provide them with help by lending them your class notes, audiovisual aids, and handouts. Believe me, if you don’t provide this help to adjuncts, the textbook companies are more than ready to do that. And students will pay the price in further textbook cost increases.
Collaborate, and then collaborate again.
Join focus groups, professional societies, and other networking groups with like-minded professors who are looking for effective teaching materials. Share materials you have developed, and take advantage of teaching aids shared by others. My professional society has had a large repository of teaching aids for my field for a long time. Yours probably does as well. This collaboration will help reduce textbook costs for students.
Resist changing textbooks whenever possible.
In quickly-moving fields such as the sciences, you cannot afford to take this step. No one wants to be treated by a doctor or nurse who learned her craft with ten year old textbooks! And you don’t want an accountant doing your taxes who hasn’t been instructed in the latest tax laws and strategies. But if you really remain abreast yourself in your own field, you might be able to supplement an older textbook with ancillary, up-to-date materials you develop for your students. At the very least, review digital copies of new editions to evaluate the necessity of adopting them before doing so automatically. Quite often, you can keep working with an older edition of a text for at least a year or two if you provide students with some help in obtaining out of date editions on the used market. But you must be intentional about this process, always keeping in mind the limited resources of students.
We Can Control Textbook Costs If We Work Together
Faculty, students, and institutions need to work together to keep college and university textbook costs under control. Textbook publishers–especially the big three–will continue to pursue marketing strategies to maximize their profit. After all, that’s exactly what their shareholders will demand. Consumers–students and faculty–should respond with creative strategies of their own that will help them make ends meet and make sure that the textbook market remains responsive to their concerns. Don’t forget that textbook companies only charge what they do because we’re out there in the market buying them. Let’s work together to keep that market working for us consumers as well as for the publishers.