Our friends at university bookstores have long been charged with gouging students. As a result, they have been forced to embark upon public relations campaigns that have, for the most part, been remarkably successful. At the bookstore at the University of Lethbridge, I can see, by way of a large pie chart, what small percentage of student dollars paid becomes bookstore "profit." (It is like the sticker put on fuel pumps by gasoline retailers.) Our students know far more than they ever thought possible, I suspect, about bookstore rent, shipping and reshelving fees, and the overhead challenges to buying and selling used textbooks.
But while I start each semester with an explanation of why I choose the books I choose, professors have been largely unsuccessful in explaining to students their relative lack of control over inflated book prices.
A story in our student newspaper last week claimed simply that "instructors and the individuals that are responsible for deciding what textbooks are used for a course but are not the same individuals that are paying for them." That part would be self-evident, I suspect, but the larger implication is that by concerning ourselves only with "content and quality," professors fail to put pressure on publishers to keep prices low. Moreover, we are complicit in a racket, essentially, where new editions are introduced about once every two years, making worthless any used book on the market.
Rubbish, I say. While teaching from a well-worn novel is fabulous, its notes a palimpsest of past experiences, I will often forgo my favored edition in order to use a less expensive one. I spend hours copying over notes into the new edition, a text that, more often than not, is cheap because its publisher cut back on proofreading and production values. If this inexpensive edition cut out the background material I use, I make that stuff available to students at no additional cost to them. When a new edition of a textbook is introduced, I have to try to secure a teaching copy, often difficult itself, and sometimes pay out of pocket, just like my students, to be able to have the same book they are using. Prepping a new textbook is often as much work, or more, than prepping another edition of a novel.
Sometimes, as a new edition appears, there is the opportunity to get one more semester out of the old one. This I will always try to do, even though it means relying almost exclusively on the used textbook market, and there are inevitable delays and shortages. One ends up discovering, often, that the price charged for used copies this way is not much less than the new edition. So, why all the bother?
I guess my point is that there is no magical payola, not even a particularly good system for distributing desk copies. Professors have much less influence, and derive much, much less benefit, from textbook retailing than students seem to imagine.
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