The first week of every quarter at UCLA means two very different
things in terms of textbooks.
Students dread having to pay hundreds of dollars for books,
while the Associated Students of UCLA textbook store and publishers
see this time as one of their most profitable.
Recent efforts taken by the California Student Public Interest
Research Group have been aimed at textbook publishers and the
ASUCLA textbook store to bring costs down.
CALPIRG is trying to combat increasing textbook prices by
showing that some publishing companies are releasing new editions
of textbooks with little to no change in the actual material.
Beginning this quarter, Thomson Learning, a major mathematics
textbook distributor, has released a new series called Advantage
series, which the company says is 25 percent cheaper.
But Thomson Learning’s efforts to lower textbook prices
are not related to CALPIRG’s demands, said Adam Gaber, the
senior director of public relations for Thomson learning, in an
e-mail. “Publishers set regional prices in the context of
local market conditions and consumers’ purchasing power. Upon
establishing a price for the U.S. domestic market, publishers set
fair prices for textbooks in foreign countries by carefully
examining the social, political, and economic realities of foreign
markets.”
The changing nature of the textbook market and introduction of
technologies is creating new competition between publishers.
“When students purchase their course materials, they are
getting much more than just a book; they are getting an entire
teaching and learning program,” Gaber said in the e-mail.
“If we didn’t provide learning aids and supplementary
resources with textbooks, we would lose the sale to other
publishers who do.”
Textbook expenses also rise because many people are involved in
bringing them to print.
“Publishing is an industry that is very misunderstood
because the cost of producing a particular book is a very minor
part of the total cost of the book itself,” said William
Gehr, the general manager of Legal Books Distributing, which mainly
handles law and engineering textbooks for various publishers.
“The production cost for a 500-page book is less than $10,
yet the book probably sells for $69.95,” he explained.
The team behind a textbook will probably include editors,
professors, salespeople as well as the people involved with its
production.
“One of the most expensive things publishers do is verify
every single word that goes into (a) textbook to make sure they are
not committing libel; an editor has to clear each word,” Gehr
said. “That is an expensive process, but no one ever thinks
(about) that.”
More drawbacks to sales publishers and bookstores include
used-book services, discount textbook stores and Internet
sites.
“Publishers do not make any money from used books,”
he said in his e-mail. “Used books greatly reduce the amount
of time publishers have to gain back our initial
investment.”
Regardless, the ASUCLA bookstore realizes that students are
after the most inexpensive options possible.
“When (a used book) is adopted again, we buy as many …
as we can to get them on the shelves,” said Neil Yamaguchi,
the academic support director for the ASUCLA textbook store.
As a business, the ASUCLA textbook store realizes it faces
inevitable competition from other stores.
Though the rising cost of textbooks is beginning to be solved,
students still face other problems.
“When you stop and consider the cost of your education,
what it costs to go to school, … you have to get a
perspective,” Gehr said. “The legislative bodies and
CALPIRG need to concentrate on lowering the cost of public
education in California, but they can’t do anything about
that because of the bureaucracy that is in place … so they attack
the thing that is second on the list, which is
textbooks.”