(Image taken from New York Times.)
According to one study, the average student will pay almost $1,000 for books during a single year. An undergraduate student may end up paying up to $4,000 on books before he or she receives a degree. - Jamie Littlefield from about.com
The internet has changed it all. A digital revolution that unfolded with the influx of mass internet users has changed the way business is done today. And, textbooks sale is no exception.
Big textbook publishing houses such as McGraw Hill and big retailers such as Barnes and Nobles have started revamping the traditional way they did business. McGraw Hill has recently partnered with book rental businesses such as Chegg and is encouraging others to try out book rental programs and share revenues. Barnes and Nobles too has started pilot programs at many universities to allow students to rent textbooks. And, they have also started focusing on online sales. At Trinity University too, Barnes and Nobles encouraged students to order books online with ease of few simple clicks. Textbook rental Businesses have started flourishing along with other online textbook sellers such as half.com.
As revenues for publishing houses have decreased over the years since online businesses started biting into their pies, they have become even more innovative and have resorted to bringing out newer editions more frequently. More often than not, these new editions do not have that much of varying material except for same content on different page numbers or newer problem sets, also differently numbered. While this does compel students to buy new textbooks every year instead of purchasing used ones at a cheap price, some college professors have started to adopt policies that would frustrate these 'innovative publishing houses'. For instance, my mathematics professor for 'Differential Equations and Linear Algebra' course assigned second edition of the textbook instead of the third one so that we could borrow the textbooks cheap.
Not unlike students and publishers, college professors too must have started to realize that newer editions not necessarily have different or 'edited/updated' material. Also, for my 'Media Intepretation and Criticism' course, my college professor asked us to return back the textbooks if we had already purchased since she would make the texts available online in pdfs. This is what real digital revolution is, in my view- Saving a lot of resources.
If college professors can be okay with older editions and also make the necessary readings available online then, textbook publishing business could be in real trouble. But, that's good for consumers. Those publishing houses would probably get better at innovation and actually come up with newer and updated stuff in newer editions. That way, it would be a fair trade, I would say.
One of the best resources when you are buying textbooks would be to read this article on about.com from one of the experts.
No comments:
Post a Comment