With our roots in price comparison technology, Verba holds textbook affordability near and dear to our hearts.
As the Higher Education Opportunity Act’s textbook transparency provision suggests, textbook affordability is an important topic generating lots of attention these days. Here are some general areas where its being addressed:
Open-Source Textbooks: Flat World Knowledge is just one recent start-up with a lot of buzz surrounding it. They’re offering expert-authored, modifiable web-based textbooks to the public–for free. Students can print materials for a price, and purchase additional study materials (flash cards, podcasts, among other items). Flat World currently has fewer than 20 titles so far, but we can expect their catalog, as well as those of other open-source textbook providers, to increase in the coming years. With California Governor Schwarznegger’s announcement of the adoption of open-source textbooks for California K-12 students, we’ve seen large educational systems adopt open textbooks, and more are sure to follow.
But without the army-like on-the-ground sales forces that the large publishing companies utilize, it’s difficult to imagine open-source textbooks being able to achieve majority market penetration in the next decade or more. Many professors choose a textbook for a certain course of study, and stick with that textbook and its updated editions for years. In terms of affordability, however, there are no better solutions for students than expert-authored open source textbooks, and there’s no reason to expect that these open-source offerings can’t measure up to the quality of some of the best traditionally published textbooks.
Textbook Rentals: Several start-ups have also been formed recently that seek to resolve the issues of textbook rentals, in which students pay to temporarily use a textbook over the course of a term. Chegg.com and textbookrentals.com both offer students such rental services. Even publishers are getting on board, with Cengage offering its own textbook rental program.
Some bookstores offer textbook rentals to students, but have been hindered by the fact that few professors will commit to a specific edition of a textbook for two or more years, which approximates how long a textbook rental program need be in place for it to be profitable for the bookstore.
E-Textbooks: The largest academic textbook publishers jointly formed CourseSmart several years ago to offer e-textbooks to students. Now, the company has 11 publishers signed on board and offers over 7,000 textbooks among its online offerings. Other e-textbooks have also appeared from other providers, and the Kindle DX has been much vaunted for its potential to reshape the textbook industry. Typically, the e-textbooks are offered at a substantially lower price than a new textbook, although when one considers the absence of any resale value the savings drastically decrease. Textbook rental affordability is similarly affected by the absence of resale value, but the prices of textbook rentals generally appear lower than the price of e-textbooks.
At Verba, we believe that price transparency on both the faculty selection and student purchasing side of things are crucial elements in promoting textbook affordability. When faculty select their books through a Verba interface, we let them know the price of any book they choose, and the various low-cost alternatives associated with that text. For students, we take a vendor-neutral approach to textbook affordability, offering users of the entire range of purchasing options. Students can buy books new and used at any of the top online retailers (in the past we’ve offered the top 7 retailers, but users told us–and their clicks confirmed–they vastly preferred a less cluttered interface). If there’s an e-textbook alternative to a book, we let the student know it’s available.
