Comments on: My $140 Textbook

By: bill

bill — Fri, 19 Sep 2008 03:21:24 +0000

@reader

Your critique of what you call my analogies (I might call them suggested data points) would be more valid if you had picked something other than the laughably low CPI as your measure of inflation.

Even Bloomberg has published explanations on how fraudulently low CPI is as a measure of inflation.

http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=newsarchive&sid=a2SUCQ3Bslk0

The CPI essentially omits important things like housing and medical care and pretends that all it needs to count are things like canned peas — and if canned peas double in price, it omits them and counts cheaper canned beans instead on the assumption that the consumer will switch.

By: Gene Koo

Gene Koo — Fri, 19 Sep 2008 00:03:24 +0000

I have high hopes that our eLangdell project will, through open-source/remixable materials, help bring the costs of these vital resources down to something more reasonable. Not that we are opposed to profit, just that there seem to be high inefficiencies in this market that I'm not even sure the publishers benefit from

By: Maryland Conservatarian

Maryland Conservatarian — Thu, 18 Sep 2008 23:18:06 +0000

so a Law School Bookstore charges $142 for a textbook that, let’s face it, only has value as an intro to helping wealthy people keep their money from going to governments upon their death (i.e. Ted Kennedy, Jay Rockefeller…).

Meanwhile, that same $142 would buy over a 35 month supply of many prescription drugs at WalMart….so which is the more evil enterprise?

By: reader

reader — Thu, 18 Sep 2008 20:49:57 +0000

As a law student, the high casebook prices are a killer but what’s worse in my view is when the professor assigns additional texts that we barely ever use. Please don’t assign a book unless it is integral to the course. $40 statutory supplements that have one tiny section on the course topic (and that are listed as “required” in the reading list) don’t count. Students will generally buy whatever is listed as “required,” so please think hard about those extra books.

And Professor Solove, your comments perfectly illustrate the moral hazard and price creep issues. I’m already paying $20,000 a year, what’s another $1200? Any price increase can be justified if you frame it like that.

Bill, your analogies don’t hold. House purchases are negotiated real estate transactions. Gas prices are determined by global markets and the availability of a finite resource. The consumer price index shows that $60 in 1993 equals $90 today.

By: Bruce Boyden

Bruce Boyden — Thu, 18 Sep 2008 19:04:56 +0000

I worry constantly about how much the books I assign cost students. It’s always been a factor in my textbook selection, but I’ve been frustrated by the fact that most textbooks cost roughly the same — I suspect because not enough profs are doing price comparisons. However, price is much more of a factor in my choice of supplemental materials, because there you can see some real (and puzzling) differences. I.e., the same set of statutes sometimes costs twice as much.

Dan, I agree it’s not that large compared to tuition, but many students cover tuition from loans, whereas textbooks come out of their lunch money. 4 x $140 plus supplements adds about another $700 per semester.

By: Daniel J. Solove

Daniel J. Solove — Thu, 18 Sep 2008 18:25:05 +0000

It is hard not to agree that the textbooks are quite expensive, but given how much law school tuition is at most law schools, is an extra $500-700 a semester really that onerous by comparison? Law schools could offer “free textbooks for all students” by just raising their tuition by 1 to 2K per year and then buying the books to provide to the students. It wouldn’t seem like such a big expense then.

That said, I certainly agree that professors should do anything they can to keep book costs down for students.

One unfortunate development that has students paying a lot more is that many academic publishers are charging high fees for using excerpts of books for supplemental course packs. This inflates the cost to students of materials professors prepare and have copied at copy centers.

By: none_

none_ — Thu, 18 Sep 2008 18:22:23 +0000

i took a civ pro class where the prof didn’t use a textbook, but instead assigned a list of cases per topic, and we’d pull them on westlaw or lexis. since west and lexis both provide free printing of cases, it basically made the class free, and it also freed us to pick and choose what to cover and what level of detail to go into.

By: Eric Goldman

Eric Goldman — Thu, 18 Sep 2008 17:36:52 +0000

A first step is for us as professors to *find out* how much we are asking students to pay and considering if they get commensurate value from the assigned materials. Because we don’t bear the economic consequences of our assignment choices, many of us don’t have a pressing motivation to reflect on the students’ buying experiences. Eric.

By: Joe Miller

Joe Miller — Thu, 18 Sep 2008 17:13:44 +0000

Sarah,

I think your questions are excellent. One assumption that underlies them is that a traditional casebook publisher actually adds editorial value with a “rigorous” editorial process. I have heard that the casebook publishers do not actually add much rigorous-editorial-review value; and that the contract copy editors they hire introduce errors (rather than eliminate errors) at a distressing rate.

In any event, again, I think you’re asking important questions here.

By: John Armstrong

John Armstrong — Thu, 18 Sep 2008 16:55:56 +0000

If you don’t squint as hard you see an important difference: drug manufacturers turn a not-insignificant part of their revenues back into fundamental research. Textbook publishers do no such thing.

More and more academic fields are coming to see publishing companies as a once-necessary evil, if not an outright cancer, which we now have the technology to do without. More and more online journals are replacing print journals that charge exorbitant fees not just to purchase them, but for the privilege of publishing in them, and which already operate entirely on volunteer labor.

Textbooks are just the next step in the fight to get rid of these robber-barons entirely.

By: bill

bill — Thu, 18 Sep 2008 16:49:11 +0000

actually, you can get it for less than $125 on Amazon.

given that 15 years ago, books like this cost $60, that doesn’t seem unfair.

think about how much prices of other things we buy over that time period have inflated:

houses

gasoline

milk

bread

I’m not sure that all of this whining over textbook prices is so warranted. I wish that the prices of these other goods would only “creep” as opposed to rocket upwards.