I am teaching an introduction to business course. The hardcover text is $115 on Amazon. We wouldn't really use the whole book, so through Primus we created a shrunk version. It is black and white, and costs $71. The same Primus version is available online for less than $50. The instructor resources, which are very good, are all available from the publisher. This seems to make it a much better value proposition for students and instructors.
We are also using an online business simulation, which provides, in some ways, more learning opportunities than some texts. For $45 the students get a desktop version of the sim, which includes lots of embedded instructional material that students can explore through links (the way they may find most information these days). They also get a 60+ page pdf student manual and access to the multiplayer sim for the semester. This is my first experience with simulation. It provides core conceptual material and a high level of challenge and integration.
Dave.
Hi all,
I'm with Michael here... I have also fairly recently moved to teaching in the US, and frankly, I am appalled by textbook prices... A text that would cost 25 pounds (say $40) in the UK costs $150+ here, and I can see no 'proper' reason for the disparity.
I don't have an answer, but I am actively trying to design my classes here around less academic-based textbook content.
_________________________________________________
Dr Steve Leybourne Ph.D
Metropolitan College
Boston University
808 Commonwealth Avenue
BOSTON, Ma 02215
Phone: (617) 358 5626
Fax: (617) 353 6840
Email: sleyb@bu.edu
Web: http://people.bu.edu/sleyb
From: Management Education and Development Discussion [mailto:MG-ED-DV@AOMLISTS.PACE.EDU] On Behalf Of Michael Pirson
Sent: Monday, March 16, 2009 5:17 PM
To: MG-ED-DV@AOMLISTS.PACE.EDU
Subject: Re: Open source texts
I just wanted to chime in, as the continental European student experience regarding textbook costs is quite different. Never in my student career (including France, Germany and Switzerland) did I have to purchase a textbook costing more than USD 70. In fact, for most of my classes students screamed if they had to buy class material costing more than USD 50; despite having significantly lower tuition costs.
Currently as professor in the US, I feel ashamed by the prices. One textbook alone can cost more than 150 USD..
Without knowing too much about the respective structures, the results are very different..
I think there is a lot that can be done and your experiences as textbook authors seem to confirm that the profit maximization objective just leads to squeezing the students more..
Some textbook authors are using the free textbook model, used by freeload press. I understand royalties might come from advertising..
Not sure what exactly can be learned from that, but I needed to say that there seem to be different models out there, and that we are not necessarily trapped in the current one...
----------------------------------------------------------------
Michael Pirson, Ph.D.
Assistant Professor, Graduate School of Business,
Fordham University, New York
----------
Lecturer, Harvard Extension School
Research Fellow, Psychology Department, GSAS
Harvard University
----------
Co-founder Humanistic Management Network, www.humanetwork.org
Sent: Monday, March 16, 2009 4:13 PM
Subject: Re: Open source texts
Thanks, Sheila, exactly same experience and language with same Publisher. Thank you for confirming.
Cheers,
Jim
James G. S. Clawson
Johnson & Higgins Professor of Business Administration
Darden GSB, University of Virginia
Mail: Box 6550 Charlottesville, VA 22906
Packages: 100 Darden Boulevard, Charlottesville, VA 22903
Phone: 434-924-7488 Fax: 434-243-7680
Web: http://faculty.darden.virginia.edu/clawsonj/
Podcast on Powered by Feel: http://www.darden.virginia.edu/podcasts/index.asp
Jim asked whether W.Europe had similar structural problems. I can only speak from a UK perspective, and two publishers, FT-Prentice Hall for The MBA Handbook (now 6th edition) and The Business Student's Handbook (now 4th edition) and The CIPD for Practical Business Research Methods (about to appear).
My experience on editorial churn is that it is similarly high. I often deal with two editors during the 9 months or so I'm allowed for a new edition, and am on my seond editor at the CIPD although we only signed the contract last autumn.
I'm similarly obliged to produce new editions on demand – usually every 3rd year, though one time they shortened the interval. To be fair they do ring up and ask me nicely, but if I didn't accept nicely, I'd be in the same position of losing royalties to whoever did it in my stead.
I feel that since the first edition appeared (would you believe 1991?) things have changed radically. I felt really cherished by my first editor, and that the book was a shared venture. Now it is more like being book-fodder. The publisher will cheerfully commission other books to compete with yours, as the production costs have now shifted radically towards the author. They can afford to launch several competing books and quietly drop those which don't make it.
The royalties are nice, but I do worry that the costs are too high for students. And I find the 'you must do a new edition every 3 years because otherwise there are too many 2nd hand books in circulation' argument makes good commercial sense, but is not student-friendly if the subject has not moved on that much in the couple of years since the last edition appeared.
Would I kill myself writing books if there were no royalties? Probably not. I only agreed to write the current one because they use a bigger publisher's sales force....
Sheila Cameron
s.cameron@open.ac.uk
Dear Colleagues,
There is a structural problem here in the "cost-of-textbook" issue that needs to be solved. Text books, on average, have a smaller, captive audience. Smaller because there's no guarantee a text will be adopted widely, and captive because students have to buy a text that is assigned. Further, those who write textbooks usually have in their contracts that they must update their books whenever the publisher demands. I say "demands" because going from the third to fourth edition of one of my books, the first inkling I got was a terse email from a production editor saying that my manuscript was due in four months, would I be complying. Total news to me. Then they said, well, if you don't write it, we can use your name and the title and get someone else to write it and charge your royalties for that cost. True story. Today, I cannot even contact my current editors-they change so often and all of the people I've "replied" to from emails two years ago come back "no such address."
This is similar to the big-pharma problem-how do you compensate the investment companies make on the front end if the back end is a low probability return? Text book publishers charge high rates, even higher rates for the least popular books, so they can get their investment back. How can we restructure that value chain?
Publishing open source books on-line is one alternative with its own issues. The cost of printing is pushed downstream to the students. If there's no cost to buying the book, why would anyone want to write them? Where's the return other than the psychic return (see the related on-going flood of emails on extrinsic vs. intrinsic motivation) of putting one's view out there?
One could publish on Xlibris or similar on-line services and still get a hard copy in the mail/bookstore. They only print on demand and charge a fee for that-and there's more lead time-since there's no inventory.
Professors could take more responsibility for writing their own materials for their courses (including teaching manuals and materials), but then why re-invent the wheel is someone else has already put it down on paper? Plus this apparently takes too much time as so many want to be handed a course complete with bells and whistles and complain if they aren't. This preparation would take away from research time collecting data, analyzing, writing, submitting, revising, etc.
The government could specify standard texts thus reducing the number of competing texts in the market so choice would be limited and volume runs would go up thus lowering costs. How many of us would want that?
Why would anyone want to publish a textbook if they couldn't like an actuary see some "on average" return for their investment?
My conclusion is that this is a tough economic structural nut to crack-and unless we want to push the cost of printing onto students and their inefficient printers or get more oversight that limits choice so they can up their runs, we've got the system that we have.
Does anyone know what happens in the Western European world? Do they have the same problems? Since it's structural, my guess is yes.
Should we all self-publish on Xlibris? You get a little royalty, they only print on demand, and there's NO marketing involved. At the moment this seems to be the only way to limit these high costs (less margins than costs). But if you wrote a book, wouldn't you want a sales force out there selling it? Wouldn't you want your book to be adopted? Maybe you'd/we'd have to rely on our own web pages to market our texts....????
Jim
James G. S. Clawson
Johnson & Higgins Professor of Business Administration
Darden GSB, University of Virginia
Box 6550, Charlottesville, VA 22906
100 Darden Boulevard, Charlottesville, VA 22903 USA
Tel: 434 924 7488 Fax: 434 243 7680
Web: http://faculty.darden.virginia.edu/clawsonj
You've raised an issue that I think is of emerging importance. Many thanks for raising it to the group. Please forgive me but I am about to take issue with your implied support for open access in affluent nations.
Although your intentions are clearly meritorious, I think if you dissected the "open source" movement from a broader perspective, you'd realize that it is potentially corrosive. If academics were to embrace open access in a scale that was large enough to influence the market for text books, current text book authors would be disincentivized to create the types of quality academic materials that one can now find in the market. Remember what text books were like 20-30 years ago? Consider how far the industry has come and what features have been added (lecture notes, CD support, video cases, embedded case studies, PowerPoint support slides etc.). This has all occurred because the venture is attractive enough for authors to commit the necessary time and for publishers to encourage supplemental material development. As a previous respondent stated, if you have any issue at all with text book prices (which I don't given the comparative value added nowadays), the issue should be with the middlemen not with the authors of text books.
Excuse this light brief rant about the state of affairs in business education but....given the enormous demands that are being placed on business educators to churn out correlation studies for "top tier journals", the pool of talented text book writers is already under siege. A text book takes a enormous amount of time to put together and while compiling the work, text book writers frequently have to put up with criticism from department heads who are upset that their journal output is slipping.
There are a host of other options you could pursue to minimize the financial impact of book purchases on students:
Option 1: Provide university support (i.e. seed money, PR support) to students to encourage them to get together (nurturing teamworking skills) and form social ventures (fortifying business skills) for the purpose of earning some money to offset the cost of books.
Option 2: Use the $100,000 you spoke of to start a not-for-profit publishing house that sells direct to the public (run by business students). By doing so you will cut out the retailer who applies large mark-ups to these materials.
Option 3: Review how your book co-op purchases and marks up books.
Option 4: Look at improving your second hand book program at school. Most book co-ops have buy back programs but they gouge the students during the buy back and then charge excessive prices for reselling the books.
Option 5: Create a university fund for helping financially disadvantaged students purchase books at a discounted price.
Option 6: Form purchasing unions in your business school to put pressure on suppliers to reduce costs. If a rep from Thompson awards contracts to publishers for the entire curriculum...they may be more apt to provide your with deeper discounts.
However, if you feel strongly about open source as the way forward, then I would encourage you to consider putting together a committee to review open source materials. For every kind soul who releases a good book to open source access, there is a wannabe writer who publishes their text via open source because they cannot find a publisher to publish it.
As an aside, if you posted this comment in criticism to the high price of text books in developing countries, I think you would find mass support for open access. In fact, I'd argue that it would be worthwhile to convene a workshop into how academics can band together to put pressure on publishers to exclude developing countries from generic publishing contracts in order to allow authors to print and sell their books in developing countries at cost. Publishers have compromised somewhat by printing "International Editions" which are typically soft cover versions of a US hard cover text sold at a lower price. However, the discounts for these editions are not low enough for students in developing countries to afford. This is an area that can benefit from open access.
I realize that the last paragraph contradicts my position on open access somewhat but I would argue that a distinction should be drawn between supporting open access for developing countries (a hearty yes to that) and supporting open access in affluent countries (keeping option 5 above in mind).
Gosh, as I read through this I realize that I may have latent Republican leanings....God help me, next thing I know I'll be advocating for intensification of off-shore oil drilling ;-).
-------------------------------------------
Dr. Scott Victor Valentine
Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy
National University of Singapore
469C Bukit Timah Road
Singapore 259772
----- Original Message -----
Sent: Friday, March 13, 2009 10:46 PM
Subject: Open source texts
-- Fair warning: I'm cross-posting yet again. When will I ever reform?
Textbooks are expensive. In Florida public universities, textbook costs rival tuition costs. I'm currently chairing a "Textbook Affordability Initiative" at the University of South Florida to help resolve this problem (and not simply by raising tuition costs to make textbook costs appear cheaper by comparison!). We've tried direct negotiation with a major publisher to purchase blanket access to their electronic archives (cf. library purchase agreements with journal publishers), but the price they've quoted makes it infeasible.
And so now we've turned to exploring open source textbook options and ways to use other course materials in lieu of texts. I'd rather not recreate any wheels, should they already exist, and so I ask for your advice and experiences with open source projects, should you have any. I don't know if the quantity and quality of open source texts is adequate. I don't know all the challenges of incentivizing authors to release texts and course materials for open source. I don't know all the challenges of incentivizing professors to adopt open source texts and materials for their courses. And I don't know if I should be prepared for serious legal or other challenges from publishers who want to maintain the gravy train of privatizing a bit too much of what, in my mind at the moment, should largely be public knowledge. And, of course, many recipients of this e-mail are also recipients of royalty payments, so what are the implications of upending this system for you?
I have a perhaps overly optimistic idea that I can create a pool of funds on the order of, say, $100,000, within my university that could be used to provide grants to authors and adopters. Where viable open source materials don't already exist, we'd offer new authors, say, $5,000 for releasing a text that at least, say, two other professors have agreed to adopt. We'd put the text through external review, and to receive the full grant, the authors would have to agree to a few revisions to ensure the text is of adequate quality. I'm hoping that there are enough out-of-print or unpublished texts of relevance out there that this becomes feasible without great effort. Professors would be offered grants of, say, $500, for completing a tutorial on open source use and then adopting open source materials for a course. I'd rely on student pressure to encourage professors to adopt open source as well.
Please let me know of your experiences and your thoughts on this idea. I'm glad to summarize for the list, should folks desire. I currently can be reached at: mbarnett@coba.usf.edu.
University of South Florida
College of Business Administration
Department of Management & Organization
4202 E. Fowler Avenue, BSN 3527
---------------------------------
The Open University is incorporated by Royal Charter (RC 000391), an exempt charity in England & Wales and a charity registered in Scotland (SC 038302).