A Report on the Feasibility of Textbook Rental - IBHE

items sold in a package and 2) faculty order packages because they believe the supplementalmaterials are necessary for their students success in their class.• Bullet 3 – “Provide faculty members with…price of materials sold at the bookstore…revisionhistory of course materials.” – Publishers cannot provide bookstore, i.e., retail, prices to faculty.Publishers sell their products at wholesale. Bookstores markup course materials as they choose,generally around 33 percent for new texts and course materials, and set the final price paid bystudents. The copyright dates of a textbook, i.e., the revision history, are generally printed in thefront the text. If, for example, a book is copyrighted in 1994, 1998, 2002 and 2006 you canreasonably assume a new edition will be issued, on average, every four years. According to theFollett Bluebook, the average new edition has come out every four years for the last decade.ConclusionThe conclusion that the joint efforts of institutional administrators, students, faculty and publishers arerequired to help hold down student spending is valid. There are, however, other players and factors thatshould be considered. The report does not reference the role of the bookstore in students’ final cost ofcourse materials nor the practice at colleges and universities of levying a hidden fee on students byrequiring bookstores to rebate a percentage of their revenues to the institution where they are located.Eliminating this hidden levy could immediately reduce the amount students pay for their course materials.You may want to reconsider the statement that legislative action has curtailed textbook costs. Legislativeactivity has generated healthy debate and encouraged faculty to be more cost conscious when adoptingtheir course materials, but no legislation has been passed that attempted to influence prices.It is important to note that the range of course material choices and prices is tremendous. For example,for just two subjects, introductory psychology and introductory algebra, bookstores currently have 450printed titles on their shelves at retail prices ranging from $23.50 to $127. Those numbers grow whenyou include e-books and custom course materials. According to the National Association of CollegeStores, the average retail price of a textbook is about $52, meaning the average publisher wholesale priceis about $39.INTRODUCTION• Page 11, para. 1, line 8 – Suggest a change in language from “textbook costs” to “students’spending”Textbook CostsPage 12 – Suggest you note that:• The CPI used by the GAO includes any book designated as a required text, which could includemany novels, technical books, professional journals, etc. that are not sold or distributed byindividual publishers of postsecondary textbooks. Additionally, AAP has objected to the CPIfigure which, by its own disclaimer in the GAO report, before 2001, did not accurately reflect theincreasing penetration of lower-cost alternatives that are replacing unabridged, hardcover texts.Consequently, BLS data exaggerates textbook price increases over the course of the reportingperiod. BLS acknowledges "textbooks are increasingly wrapped in packages along withadditional materials, making it difficult to collect all of the qualitative characteristics of thetextbooks. As a result, it is difficult for BLS to obtain the information necessary for qualityadjustment, and other times the price recorded as the textbook price may also include ancillarymaterials."A paper entitled “Faculty Selection and Use of Publisher-Provided Textbooks and SupplementaryMaterials in the United States” released only last week also addresses the weaknesses in the CPI’s-75-