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Zhongruo Wang Kristen Foster CO150.400 26 Oct 2013

Exploratory Essay for the Problem of the Textbooks

The history of textbooks is nearly as long as schools. Textbooks are to school as the petrol to the cars. They are always checked to the students from generation to generation and used in many ways from stressful studying materials to self-learning tools. It is hard to imagine a classroom can operate well without the support from textbooks. So in my general concept, I thought that textbooks are important for my study and the future academic success. Before I came to America for studying, I tried my best to find the textbooks that will be used on the Internet. But a problem came to me that the textbooks are too experience for me to afford. For example, the price of my physics book is about 125 dollars that equal to 750 RMB, which is the 40 times the average price of a book in Chinese. And I found that it is not only the problem for me but also for many American college students and they complains that the textbooks are so expensive for them to afford, which is about 25 times the money they spend on every meal. They also complained that students don't need to buy the textbooks because of its useless content and inconveniences. From this point, I started interesting in the problems on the textbooks. And I started my research project to pursue the question should college students buy the textbooks for their courses in university? The problem is controversial and debated on the Internet because as a convention, the textbook is an important part in education but nowadays, the knowledge is too expensive to purchase and we can gain the same information in the textbooks from the Internet more flexible without paying that much money on them. The problem is also worthwhile being researched because as the time passing, more and more people go to university, as the textbook is an essential part of the higher education, the problem on the textbooks will be more prominent and serious. In this research, the first thing I want to know is the general condition about the students purchasing textbooks. I typed in the words buy textbooks necessary into the Google search and much result came out. I started to read a news report, Students Get Savvier about Textbooks buying, from Chronicle of Higher Education (Marc). This article exactly answered my question and gives me some detail information on the students' view of buying textbooks. I learned that,

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recently, many students skip buying textbooks for their courses in university. A student named Johnny said he skipped buying the textbooks if the textbook is so expensive and the professor rarely use it in the class. I also learned that one out of every three seniors and one in four freshmen don't buy the required materials for the courses because of their price (National Survey of Student Engagement). The author points out that technology and economics are reshaping the textbooks market; students are highly motivated to find the alternatives to the new edition books. The web changes the way people get those textbooks and now, students can shop in the global market and they have more options for buying, renting, sharing and stealing books. The action of downloading e-version textbooks becomes more and more popular among the students. Many students get textbooks though the website like the Pirate Bay, Torlock and Torrentz. And it is an increasing trend, from the research by the Book Industry Study Group; around 21 percent of students acknowledged getting textbooks from a pirate web site in 2012, up from roughly 13 percent in 2011. Except downloading books from the website, many students use comparison shopping to get the cheaper printed copy of the identical textbook. The cheaper copies are usually the used textbooks and or the book in the international version. But sometimes the used textbooks cannot help the students to save money because the new volumes goes up quickly and it is required by the professor, so the used books become useless and the students have to pay much for the new edition. After knowing the general condition about student buying the textbooks, I need more information about the general information on the increasing price of textbooks and why the textbooks become more and more expensive. This time, I use the Google Scholar to search for my answer. I just plug in the words textbooks expensive into the search bar. My eyes were caught by a survey report The Investigation into the Rising Cost of Textbooks-A back ground Study of the Context of Michigan Initiatives with an Eye towards Launching a Library-based College Textbook Publishing Program, which is compiled by the scholarly publishing office of the University of Michigan Library. In this article, the author first introduce the nationwide and Michigan trend of the price rising in the textbooks. I find some key information about the trend of price on the textbooks: College textbooks prices have increased at twice the rate of inflation over last two decades (GAO 2005); Today, students and their families are estimated to spend as much as $6 billion on College textbooks and supplies per semester(National Association of College Stores 2005; Koch 2006),and every undergraduate student spent $942 on textbooks and supplies per semester(Bell and Bado lato

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2008) . According to other reports, for the students in University of Michigan the author introduced that simply multiplying the total number of undergraduate students at this institution as of Winter 2007 (26,083) by the average total cost of textbooks ($126) generates approximately $3.3 million if each student took a single course in Winter 2007. Given that most students take 4-5 courses per semester, the estimated total costs of textbooks would reach approximately $15 million. This survey also gives me the information on the factors that contribute to the changes to the textbooks prices: First, the revision cycle for many books are three to four years, regardless of whether or not the previous edition needed updating, contributes to the changes in textbooks prices. Due to this short revision cycles or more frequent revisions, limit students' ability to reduce their cost by purchasing used textbooks and selling their textbooks back to the bookstore at the end of the term; The second reason that causes the significant rising in the cost of textbooks is a more recent trend, additional instructional materials such as software and workbooks bundled into textbooks. The bundled version was more than twice as expensive as the unbundled version of the textbooks. Publishers said the additional materials particularly web-based tutorials and self-assessment tools can meet the requirements for the instructors who want to enhance the student's learning. However, most faculties report them rarely and never use those materials for the courses; The last reason is that, students have no authority to choose their textbooks for their courses and many faculties members choose and assign their textbooks with little regard to the cost of the textbooks. These discoveries help me to better know the trend in the rising price of textbooks and know the element that causes the textbooks more and more expensive. As my first source introduces, many students choose to find the alternatives for the textbooks and this gives me some brief information about it: the digital educational sources is an essential part in the alternative for the textbooks. So after research into the price of textbooks, I want to know more about the alternatives for the traditional textbooks. I want to find the answer to the question: what kind of alternatives for textbooks do we have? When I further reading this survey report, I found that this article also gives me some answers to the question above: electronic books and Open Educational Resources are two popular alternatives for the textbooks now. Electronic books, also named digital books, are usually presented on-line, free of charges or low price by the publishers and school libraries, with its advantage of portable, light-weighted and timely updated, have become an increasingly popular

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option among the students. Open Education Resources (OER) are digital resources shared at no charge over the Internet, established by faculties who usually engage in teaching and research. OER can be used and adapted for non-commercial purposes by teachers, educational Institutions and students (US Department of Education 2007).Open textbooks is one development in the Open Education Resource. Open textbooks covers can range from the public-domain books to existing textbooks, which are available to download and print in variable file formats from websites to repositories. Not only can it solve the problem of high cost of textbooks, but also can solve the problem in book shortages and the difficulties in accessing to the textbooks. Another form of the OER is Open Courseware, started by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. It contains free lecture notes, syllabus, reading materials, course calendars, exam and quiz questions with some answers (in PDF forms) and some video lectures for undergraduate and graduate students. And its primary goal is to provide the content that supports and education. (Kirkpatrick 2006; Lerman and Miyagawa 2002; Lerman et al. 2008) So far, I know that the digital files, also name e-books are the main part of the alternatives for the traditional paper version textbooks. Although we can find many e-books we want from the Internet, a question came up to me: do all the students prefer using the e-books? And what feeling do they have when they have when they are using the textbooks? This time I want to find the answer to it and I want to find some academic articles which are published in peer-reviewed journals. I use Web of Science search engine to find my answer. I typed in the words etextbooks using, many results came out. I located an article titled, Journey to Textbook Affordability: An Investigation of Students' Use of eTextbooks at Multiple Campuses International Review of Research in Open and Distance Learning (Baek and Monsghan). In this scholarly survey article, the author wanted to gain an understanding of the students' e-books using experience in order to involve more students in using the e-books. The author conducted the survey in five four-year state university in California which participated in the eTextbook pilot project during the fall of 2013. From the result of this survey, the author find that 1)75% students prefer to use print version textbooks; 2)more than one-third of the students were satisfied with the e-books; 3)older students (22 or older) tended to have more positive experience with the e-books than younger students; 4)more than half of the students felt that the e-books are easy-to-use; 5)students

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most like the e-books cost, accessibility, light weight and key-word search features. I think this article partly answered my research questions: Not most students are willing to use the e-textbooks (e-books), but in the students who use the e-textbooks, most of them have a positive feeling toward the e-books. After doing many research on the e-books, I interested in searching my preferred books on-line. There are many e-books websites provide books in PDF format for users to download. And I began to search for some information about the e-book websites, about their origin and user's comments on them. I find that there used to be an e-book website called library.nu and it was shut down because some issues in the copyright from the publishing industry. I searched the key words library.nu in the Google, and I know some detail information about the library.nu from the Wikipedia: Library.nu, also named gigapedia.com or ebooksclub.org, used to be the biggest ebooks website in the world. The website was accused of copyright infringement by giant publishing houses like the Oxford Press and it was shut down by court order on February 15th, 2012. According to the takedown notice, it shared 40000 e-books, which values over $10 million. Once reading this news about the library.us, I started to think about the problem of the copyright issues that exist in the e-books. I go to the Google and Academic Search Premier to acquire the answers. My eyes were attracted by an article titled In India, Academic Defend Photocopying of Textbooks for the course. from Chronicle of Higher Education (Relph). This article talks about many universities and photocopy services in India photocopy the paper version study materials like textbooks into PDF format files or duplicated into another paper printed books, and sell them in a low price to the students and professor in the universities. The world largest publishing press like Cambridge University Press, Oxford University Press claims that course packs violate various copyrights, hurt their bottom lines, and reduce residual payments to the academics in India, the United States, and elsewhere whose work is being copied. But the behavior of photocopy the paper textbooks are legally accepted by the professor and students in India, and it is necessary to spread the knowledge in developing countries where students dont have enough money to buy a legal copy. Many specialists said the copyright problem is not very significant in India because the giant publisher do not have big market in the India. The purpose of what the publisher do is to open the market in India and make more money from the readers in the developing countries like China and

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India. After reading this news report that the copyright is a problem because the e-books sometimes are produced in an illegal way without pay attention to the issue of copyright. But sometimes we needed to use the e-books because the copyrights maybe a method to make money which is used by the publishers and writers. It takes me to a new question, the main purpose for the author to write and edit textbooks is not to spread the knowledge and help students studying. Maybe they just want to make money from our innocent students and teachers. Now, I begin to go into the market of the textbooks and I just want to find out how the publishers make money in the textbooks. I search my answer on the Internet and I looked into an article titled Never Pay Sticker Price for a Textbooks Again, which is published in a magazine named Slate (Carey). In this article, the author indicates how the textbooks author make money by different methods: The author always make the textbooks so expensive and the content does not match to its price; the publisher make some essential part of the books like problems solutions into a digital content and software, making the students to have onerous loans; the publisher usually combine with the professors and make an atmosphere that we really need to buy an textbooks despite it is useful or not and the person who decided which textbooks should buy is not the students themselves but the professors and the publishers always combine with the professors in order to make more money and protecting the rents they are extracted from the college students; the textbooks publishers always make the textbooks for the lower case courses more expensive with bad content, because the majority of the students have to take the lower-case courses. The example in the article shocked me, the profit from the book Stewarts Calculus allows the author Stewart to build a $24 billion home with his own concert hall and digital control system. This Calculus book is what I am using for my Calculus 3 course in Colorado State University. After look into this source, I found the factors that contribute to the expensive price of books are exactly the methods that publisher and the textbooks author use to make money. And our college students are always the innocent victims. I have working on my topic for several days. I feeling I have learned a lot from this research. During this process, I have changed my attitude towards the textbooks. Now, I dont think we should buy the textbooks because Internet change the way people gain the knowledge. Students can learn what they should learn from the Internet more efficiently and cheap: they can download the

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identical e-version of the paper textbooks from the Internet for free and they can use the online education resources like the Open Education Resources and Open Courseware. It is true the copyright is a problem when we use the textbooks which are made by photocopy technology. Nowadays the economy change the market of the textbooks: publishers and the book authors do not want to help students for their academic, what they are most interested is making more money. Textbooks are not scared as a simple in my heart. Now the problem of copyright is not the copyright itself, copyright has become the reason for the publisher to make money from the universities. But I still dont know the detail information about the problems related to the textbooks, like the purchasing psychology involve in choosing paper textbooks and e-books and how different kinds of e-readers affect the quality of reading. I need to go on my research to solve these and the further problems as much as I can and find more interesting problems for me to solve.

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Works Cited Beak, Monaghan. Journey to Textbook Affordability : An Investigation of Students' Use of eTextbooks at Multiple Campuses. International review of research in open and distance learning 14.3 (2013):1-26. Web of Science. Web 16 Oct. 2013. Bell, Julie Davis, and Vincent Badolato. 2008. Textbook Turmoil: Is Containing the Cost of College Textbooks a Role for State Legislatures? State Legislatures February, 26-29. Government Accountability Office (GAO). 2005. College Textbooks: Enhanced Offerings Appear to Drive Recent Price Increases. Washington, D.C. Available at Kevin Carey. Never Pay a Sticky Price for a Textbooks Again www.slate.com. Slate, 20 December 2012. Web 20 October 2013 library.nu. Wikipedia: The free Encyclopedia. Wikipedia Foundation, Inc. 1 September 2013. Web. 20 October 2013. <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Library.nu> Marc, Parry. Students Get Savvier about Textbooks Buying. Chronicle of Higher Education 59.63 (2013). Academic Search Premier. Web.19 Oct. 2013. Relph, Mridu Khullar. In India, Academics Defend Photocopying of Textbooks For Course Packs. Chronicle of Higher Education 59.42 (2013): A15. Academic Search Premier. Web. 16 Oct.2013. Scholarly Publishing Office, University of Michigan Library. The investigation into the rising cost of textbooks. 2010. Google Scholar. Web.16 Oct.2013. http://www.gao.gov/new.items/d05806.pdf (accessed January 30, 2009). University of Michigan Office of the Provost. 2007. Textbook Task Force Report: Research and Recommendations Concerning the Costs of Textbooks. Ann Arbor, MI: UM Office of the Provost. Available at http://www.provost.umich.edu/reports/Textbook_Task_Force_Final_Report.pdf US Department of Education. 2007. Turn the Page: Making College Textbooks More Affordable. Report presented to Advisory Committee on Student Financial Assistance, a Federal advisory committee chartered by Congress, Washington D.C. Available at http://www.ed.gov/about/bdscomm/list/acsfa/turnthepage.pdf