Textbooks

Introduction

Although our study is not limited to textbooks, particularly when one considers how digital expressions of educational content have begun to blur the definition of a “textbook”, the prominence of this form of EM acts as an important gateway to understand the rest of the EM field. The price of and access to quality textbooks, particularly at the higher education level, has been a recent highly controversial issue. Notably, The Student Public Interest Research Groups (PIRGs) brought the issue to widespread attention with the publication of their report Rip-off 101: How the Current Practices of the Publishing Industry Drive up the Cost of College Textbooks (see #Summary of The Student PIRGs Findings below).

Subsequent government-funded studies and policy movements have created a proliferation of research on the textbook market that unites the ideological questions of access and regulation. Simultaneously, technological affordances have resulted in alternative models of EM production and delivery gaining ground in both the K-12 and higher education levels.

Textbooks in Higher Education

Summary of The Student PIRGs Findings

The Student Public Interest Research Groups (PIRGs) have brought the issue of access to quality textbooks to widespread attention through their Make Textbooks Affordable campaign, inaugurated in 2004 when they published a research report entitled Rip-off 101: How the Current Practices of the Publishing Industry Drive up the Cost of College Textbooks.

As noted in trade magazines like Publishers Weekly (http://www.publishersweekly.com/article/CA500814.html), the PIRGs study criticizes the industry on the following points:

• Textbook prices are rising "at more than four times the inflation rate for all finished goods" (Rube 2005, 1);
• The most popular texts have new editions published every three years;
• New editions are priced 12% higher than the editions they are replacing, "almost twice the rate of inflation" (Rube 2005, 1);
• Bundled texts are on average 10% more expensive than unbundled counterparts;
• 55% of bundled textbooks are not available unbundled;
• The average textbook costs 20% more in the U.S. than U.K. and some are dramatically more expensive.

Price and Access Issue

Between 1986 and 2004, textbook prices rose 186 percent in the United States, or slightly more than six percent per year. (GAO 2005, 8)

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