Further Thoughts on Textbooks: How did they get so big and what can we do about it?

People complain about the price of textbooks. Rising textbook prices diminish the affordability and availability of “Education for all.” I was pleased to receive emails responding to my first blog on textbooks.

Dan Rinn at Cengage Learning wrote that many factors have caused higher production costs for textbook makers and these costs result in higher bookstore prices. Dan pointed out Cengage’s ichapters.com provides lower cost digital access to textbook materials and is one way his company is addressing the high cost of textbooks.

How did textbook prices get so high? Art Bardige in his book New Physical Ideas Are Here Needed describes what happened in the textbook industry over the last 20+ years.

In the 1980’s elementary textbook publishers made most of their money from “consumable” workbooks sold each year for each new class of students, not the textbooks. In college, students were likely to keep their textbooks for their personal library so publishers sold new books to each class.

But in elementary schools, workbooks went out of fashion and out of budget around the same time schools could easily copy materials with high speed copiers. Profit from workbooks took a dive. Publishers added material to books for obscure state standards to win state adoptions and began making books more colorful and bigger.

In college, book prices reached the point where students could no longer justify keeping old class textbooks for their library so publishers started making new, bigger editions every year or two -- older editions were obsolete.

Bigger books means higher development, production, shipping, and warehousing costs to the publisher and higher costs to schools and students. The typical textbook today can be 4 times larger than the textbook 20-30 years ago.

What can we do to stop textbook bloat? Seven years ago I worked with the formation of a portfolio company called Classwell Learning. Classwell deliverd online assessments to identify a student's skill gaps and let the teacher select supplementary materials for each individual student under a single school or district subscription fee. The teacher clicked a button and a colorful, personalized workbook printed at the local Kinko’s. Each student had only the explanations, examples, and problems he or she needed.

This seemed like a great idea. But like other innovative ideas, it seems to have gotten acquired, incorporated and then diluted or forgotten. It was ahead of its time. Can we catch up now?

John Stuppy, john@tutorvista.com