NYTimes Editorializes on High Textbook Prices

The NYTimes Editorial Board wrote at piece lamenting the high prices of college textbooks and praising Congressional action to limit them:

College students and their families are rightly outraged about the bankrupting costs of textbooks that have nearly tripled since the 1980s, mainly because of marginally useful CD-ROMs and other supplements. A bill pending in Congress would require publishers to sell "unbundled" versions of the books -- minus the pricey add-ons. Even more important, it would require publishers to reveal book prices in marketing material so that professors could choose less-expensive titles.

I hear the NYTimes editors on the high prices. Like most consumers of higher education, I have spent an obscene amount of money on books that were usually a waste of money. I also don't appreciate the recent tendency of book publishers to milk students by publishing new editions repeatedly or adding bells and whistles.

The state of textbooks is particularly egregious (in my opinion) in neuroscience. Most of the ones I have are either simplistic to the point of uselessness or so comprehensive that only graduate students will ever buy them. (Just because I know people will ask, my favorite of the bunch is Purves et al., Neuroscience which strikes a good balance between depth and brevity.)

What I don't get is why the NYTimes editors believe that government action is appropriate in this case? First, college professors largely determine the textbooks used in their courses, yet I don't see the editors lambasting them for their hard-hearted indifference to their students' financial state. Second, if a book is useless, the students don't buy it. There were plenty of courses in college where I said "the hell with this" and didn't get the book. There were plenty of courses where I bought an older edition -- often despite clear admonitions by the professor not to do so.

Third, the editorial (oddly) goes on to detail the myriad ways that institutions respond to these issues -- all without government intervention:

The bill is a good first step. But colleges and universities will need to embrace new methods of textbook development and distribution if they want to rein in runaway costs. That means using digital textbooks, which can often be presented online free of charge or in hard copies for as little as one-fifth the cost of traditional books. The digital books can also be easily customized and updated.

Right now, textbook publishers are calling the tune. They add as many bells and whistles as they can and pump out new editions as quickly as possible -- as a way of making perfectly good textbooks obsolete. Not every book can be cheap. A specialized text that only a few people know how to write and that reaches a small audience will be costly by definition. But there is no reason for an introductory textbook to carry a price tag of, say, $140 in an area like economics where the information changes little from year to year.

Schools are beginning to balk at outrageous pricing. Rice University offers textbooks for some classes free online and charges a nominal fee for the printed version. A new company called Flat World Knowledge, based in Nyack, N.Y., plans to offer online textbooks free and hopes to make its profit by selling supplemental materials like study guides and hard copies printed on demand.

A study being carried out by the geographer Ronald Dorn at Arizona State University suggests that students who use free online textbooks perform as well academically as students who buy expensive copies from traditional publishers. Colleges and universities should take advantage of these new developments.

There is a lot of information available for free on the Internet that is making the cumbersome textbook only necessary for the extreme connoisseur. Further, whenever I TA courses I try and have relatively comprehensive class notes; many of my professors abandoned the textbook idea in favor of class notes and papers.

If textbook publishers are dumb enough to fail to see the demand for inexpensive and concise textbooks, they are going to lose their business. Technology will continue to advance until -- much like news coverage's conversion from print to Internet -- academic information is virtually free. Why Congress need get involved is beyond me.

Greg Mankiw has one more suggestion:

To me, this reaction seems strange. After all, the Times is a for-profit company in the business of providing information. If it really thought that some type of information (that is, textbooks) was vastly overpriced, wouldn't the Times view this as a great business opportunity? Instead of merely editorializing, why not enter the market and offer a better product at a lower price? The Times knows how to hire writers, editors, printers, etc. There are no barriers to entry in the textbook market, and the Times starts with a pretty good brand name.

Hat-tip: Greg Mankiw