Textbook publishers and many professors just won’t give students a break. There’s a good’price deal on a textbook you need for their class, but you can’t take advantage of it because they insist on twisting our arms to buy newer versions of recycled tomes.
Many professors might need to take a break – perhaps an extended vacation. After all, it isn’t their money they’re committing to publishers in what amounts to highway robbery. It has to be exhausting to spend students’ hard-earned hundred dollar bills.
Certainly, most have to be tired of hearing students groan about the price of required course materials that have no buyback value.
Thanks to two California legislators, though, there’s an outside chance that students will get relief due to legislation they’ve penned and sent to the governor’s desk, as long as the “Educ-Hater” doesn’t use the bills as paperweights.
The pending bills target publishers, who believe that by adding a few words here and a 10-cent CD-ROM there, they must also charge a pile of dollars here and a stack of cash there.
Sen. Ellen Corbett is pushing the College Textbook Affordability Act, which would make publishers give instructors an estimate of how long it plans on keeping certain textbooks in print, giving them a chance to choose one that better suits students’ pockets.
Corbett is using her own struggles as a political science professor trying to “find book pricing and edition information” to ease the challenge of providing affordable textbooks as a template for the bill.
Assemblyman Jose Solorio authored the College Textbook Transparency Act, which would provide faculty with a list of differences between new and old editions of the same textbooks. This would allow professors to determine whether the old stuff still applies to their lessons.
Solorio’s bill would also require bookstores to post pricing information, and would make it illegal for teachers and others to get kickbacks on books sold for their courses.
One of the problems with getting either bill signed is that both authors are claiming theirs is the better option. That back-biting approach could cause the governor to keep his quill in the ink well and not sign either.
Both bills seem like equitable solutions that, if greed doesn’t play a big part in the equation, would be fair to faculty, students and the publishing company itself.
Surprisingly though, the publisher’s association opposes both bills, claiming it would actually cause textbook prices to rise. That almost sounds like defensive posturing.
Textbook gods forbid that laws might be enacted to lessen the stress of buying over-priced books.
Publishers don’t wish to eliminate the illusion that the thicker the book and the more plastic mini-Frisbees they include in the Bubble Wrap, the more students will learn. For that concept to apply, they’d be forced to pump out a new and improved ethics library.
Quality education isn’t calculated by the extra chapter in last year’s textbook – with a couple of expensive paragraphs cut and pasted. It’s measured by the accumulated knowledge faculty presents in the classroom, added with the capacity to keep students engaged in learning.
All too often, professors force students to buy a new edition that merely adds a few words to the older version, while students cringe at having to choose between groceries or the required textbook.
Rather than making students overload their backpacks and drain their budgets, decision-makers should find ways to lighten the burden. One way is to push one of the awaiting bills under the governor’s nose and make him choose.
Yeah, right. And who knows, maybe one day, the CSU Textbook Affordability Task Force will join forces with Superman and the X-Men to keep textbook prices in check.
