Book News: A push for free textbooks
For this week’s addition to the library school book news project we’re stepping a bit outside the usual trade book publishing focus here at The Butterflies & Aliens Library. But in the big business that is publishing, textbook publishing is the biggest. So as a bibliophile and a student, any push to make textbooks free is going to get my attention.
Hence my curiosity at finding this article about some in the US House of Congress pushing to do just that.
The article highlights again the dominance of a few major players – in this case Cengage, McGraw Hill, and Pearson – including linking to a 2016 report that, among other things, argues that these large publishers “tend to avoid publishing books in subject areas where their competitors have found success, instead focusing in on their own particular subject or issue areas [which] gives these publishers near market monopoly and allows them to effectively lock out competition that could undercut their prices” (Senack, 2016).
Not surprisingly, the article quotes a representative of the Association of American Publishers saying course material costs have been dropping, while the national organizing director for Student Public Interest Research Groups, author of the above report, says the textbook system is completely broken.
At first glance my own concern was that any proposal, while technically helping students, would also turn out to be just another way to funnel public funds into the hands of private publishers. But I was heartened to see that the article did describe it as “a situation ripe for a disruptor” and going on to say that “[o]pen textbooks is one popular solution, and one that's been successfully implemented via local grants across [the US]” (Hall, 2023). And apparently not only is there a financial benefit, there are pedagogical ones as well (Colvard, 2018).
So linking back to my earlier post on open access resources, there do appear to be efforts on many fronts in support of better access to information resources. But whether this will be enough to substantively change the overall publishing ecosystem remains to be seen.
Meanwhile, I’ll just throw one more out there: The University of Alberta’s Open Educational Resources (OER) page.
Happy Learning!
– Winston
Works Cited
Colvard, N. B., Watson, C. E., & Park, H. (2018). The Impact of Open Educational Resources on Various Student Success Metrics. International Journal of Teaching and Learning in Higher Education, v30 n2, p262-276. https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/EJ1184998.pdf
Hall, M. (2023, March 3). College students are struggling with the cost of textbooks. There's a push in Congress to make them free. Insider. https://www.businessinsider.com/make-college-textbooks-free-congress-2023-3
Senack, E. & Donoghue, R. (2016, February). Covering The Cost: Why We Can No Longer Afford To Ignore High Textbook Prices. The Student PIRGs. https://publicinterestnetwork.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/02/National-COVERING-THE-COST.pdf
