Professors have until Friday to place orders for fall semester’s textbooks, bringing with that deadline the challenge of securing a good deal for students.
That wasn’t always a focus, said biochemistry professor Paul Siliciano.
“We were leaving untapped the power of the competitive marketplace,” he said, particularly given the school’s size. He said that when publishing company representatives presented new books to professors, their price was rarely mentioned.
“It’s sort of like somebody buying a really loaded car, except they don’t have to pay for it,” he said. “There’s a disconnect there.”
But Siliciano said that has changed in recent years, helped by a trend of some professors who teach large courses, like chemistry, to negotiate multi-year contracts with publishers in exchange for lower costs.
According to University of Minnesota Bookstore manager Bob Crabb, that strategy seems to be working. Despite publishers increasing prices 5 to 6 percent over the last several years, he said, the average price of textbooks in the University’s bookstore has gone down since last year.
“The only way that can happen is if faculty are making a concerted effort to select lower-price books,” he said.
Still, the profit motive of booksellers can frustrate professors.
Professor Tom Holmes said the substance of the textbook for his introductory economics course changes little year to year, but they update the text with different graphics and examples from current events.
“The edition doesn’t change at all,” he said. “They only things they change are the pictures. It’s shocking.”
While Crabb called publishers “relentless in their pursuit” of higher costs despite the scrutiny of those costs, he acknowledged that publishers need to cover production expenses. He said by the third or fourth run of a volume the sales pale in comparison due to used book sales.
Tom Stanton, spokesman for textbook publishing company McGraw-Hill, said publishers’ revenue comes from the first sale of the print textbook only.
“The largest percentages of the wholesale textbook price,” he wrote in an email, “cover author royalties, paper [and] printing,” among others.
Crabb said the business used and rental books take from new books forces publishers to raise prices, which in turn drives students to purchase more used and rental books.
“It’s kind of a vicious circle,” he said.
Despite the appeal of alternatives, Crabb said cheaper e-books haven’t caught on. “It’s got the whole industry baffled.”
He said part of the reason might be because many e-books don’t add any value, despite the potential of their electronic platform.
“Currently they’re pretty much PDFs of paper books,” he said, adding that publishers are developing interactive features on books.
Until then, he said, “They just don’t stand up to a paper book you can flip back and forth in and mark up.”
“We don’t see e-books as a game changer,” Stanton wrote.
Textbook rentals have proven more popular with students. They accounted for 7 percent of the bookstore’s sales in the last year, but among textbooks available in all forms, that rate jumps to more than a third.
The federal government has also become a force in changing the textbook market. Last summer, regulations requiring publishers to detail information about prices, revision histories and alternate formats went into law, according to a McClatchy report. The law also required publishers to sell multimedia supplements to textbooks separately from the book.
Siliciano said he was pleased with the bookstore’s attempts to keep book prices close to cost. He also said he thinks there should be a “renewed, concerted effort” to bring prices down across the University.
“We haven’t come as far as we’d like to,” he said, citing the difficulty of lowering prices for courses that use multimedia software, website keys and other supplements.
“It’s frustrating because we can’t do anything about tuition,” he said. “But the faculty feels very strongly for the students.
“If we can [help] control textbook costs, it’s a good thing.”