GAO Report on College Textbooks

The General Accounting Office released a report today about the price trends of college textbooks and the various factors that contribute to the increasingly burdensome cost of books for higher education students.

While not damning of the publishers of college textbooks, the report does note that the following practices have made the price of textbooks rise at double the rate of inflation:

1) Bundling: The practice of including CD-ROMs, mini-books, links to websites and other 'supplemental' materials along with a required textbook. Many publishers indicate that such bundles are helpful for students, yet often the textbook itself is not available in a stand-alone package for students willing to forgo the extras.

2) Superfluous Editions: Quite simply, publishers are putting out new editions that by most standards would not make earlier versions obsolete. These new versions can then sell at the prevailing market price for brand-spanking new books when the vast majority of the text has previously been marketed.

3) Limiting Reimportation: Savvy shoppers will note that textbooks sold in the good ol' USA will go for much less at international stores such as British Amazon. For some reason, publishers are blocking the total ability for college consumers to reimport these books at cheaper prices than those in the US.

Fortunately, Whitman already takes a few steps to mitigate complete domination by publishing companies to dominate prices, as the Whitbooks site has offered a book-trade message board for about a year now. Whitman also has experimented with e-reserves, which allow students to access material without any printing capability.

Things that Whitman may want to try include the following:

• European University-style reading lists from which students select particular essays
• Making faculty post reading lists no later than about 4 weeks before the beginning of the semester to allow for more shopping time online/at other bookstores
• Having faculty negotiate for custom books or unbundled materials
• Pressure departments to ignore superfluous editioning in textbooks

There's a bunch more in the report than can be said here, but feel free to discuss on this post. You can get the report here (disclaimer: it's 8MB).