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A textbook is a book containing a comprehensive compilation of content in a branch of Study skills with the intention of explaining it. Textbooks are produced to meet the needs of educators, usually at educational institutions, but also of learners (who could be independent learners outside of formal education). Schoolbooks are textbooks and other books used in schools. Today, many textbooks are published in both print and digital formats.
The Greek philosopher Socrates lamented the loss of knowledge because the media of transmission were changing. True Stuff: Socrates vs. the Written Word, 27 January 2011. By David Malki Before the invention of the Greek alphabet 2,500 years ago, knowledge and stories were recited aloud, much like Homer's epic poems. The new technology of writing meant stories no longer needed to be memorized, a development Socrates feared would weaken the Greeks' mental capacities for memorizing and retelling. (Ironically, we know about Socrates' concerns only because they were written down by his student Plato in his famous Dialogues.)Marcia Clemmitt, "Learning Online Literacy," in "Reading Crisis?" CQ Researcher, 22 February 2008, pp. 169–192.
Petrus Ramus (Petrus Ramus) in 16th Century France challenged the curriculum taught at university and published a text book that could be used by anyone. It was a textbook with a structure of headings and summaries. [1]
The next revolution in the field of books came with the 15th-century invention of printing with changeable type. The invention is attributed to German metalsmith Johannes Gutenberg, who cast type in molds using a melted metal alloy and constructed a wooden-screw printing press to transfer the image onto paper.
Gutenberg's first and only large-scale printing effort was the now iconic Gutenberg Bible in the 1450s – a Latin translation from the Hebrew Old Testament and the Greek New Testament. Gutenberg's invention made mass production of texts possible for the first time. Although the Gutenberg Bible itself was expensive, printed books began to spread widely over European trade routes during the next 50 years, and by the 16th century, printed books had become more widely accessible and less costly.
While many textbooks were already in use, compulsory education and the resulting growth of schooling in Europe led to the printing of many more textbooks for children. Textbooks have been the primary teaching instrument for most children since the 19th century. Two textbooks of historical significance in United States schooling were the 18th century New England Primer and the 19th century McGuffey Readers.
Recent technological advances have changed the way people interact with textbooks. Online and digital materials are making it increasingly easy for students to access materials other than the traditional print textbook. Students now have access to electronic books ("e-books"), online tutoring systems and video lectures. An example of an e-book is Principles of Biology from Nature Publishing.
Most notably, an increasing number of authors are avoiding commercial publishers and instead offering their textbooks under a creative commons or other open license.
In the United States, the largest textbook publishers are Pearson Education, Cengage, McGraw-Hill Education, and Wiley. Together they control 90% of market revenue. Another textbook publisher is Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.
The market for textbooks does not reflect classic supply and demand because of agency problems.
Students who look beyond the campus bookstore can typically find lower prices. With the ISBN or title, author and edition, most textbooks can be located through online used booksellers or retailers.
Most leading textbook companies publish a new edition every 3 or 4 years, more frequently in math and science. Harvard economics chair James K. Stock has stated that new editions are often not about significant improvements to the content. "New editions are to a considerable extent simply another tool used by publishers and textbook authors to maintain their revenue stream, that is, to keep up prices." A study conducted by The Student PIRGs found that a new edition costs 12% more than a new copy of the previous edition (not surprising if the old version is obsolete), and 58% more than a used copy of the previous edition. Textbook publishers maintain these new editions are driven by demand from teachers. That study found that 76% of teachers said new editions were justified "half of the time or less" and 40% said they were justified "rarely" or "never". The PIRG study has been criticized by publishers, who argue that the report contains factual inaccuracies regarding the annual average cost of textbooks per student.
The Student PIRGs also point out that recent emphasis on e-textbooks does not always save students money. Even though the book costs less up-front, the student will not recover any of the cost through resale.
According to the Student PIRGs, the typical bundled textbook costs 10%–50% more than an unbundled textbook, and 65% of professors said they "rarely" or "never" use the bundled items in their courses.
A 2005 Government Accountability Office (GAO) Report in the United States found that the production of these supplemental items was the primary cause of rapidly increasing prices:
While publishers, retailers, and wholesalers all play a role in textbook pricing, the primary factor contributing to increases in the price of textbooks has been the increased investment publishers have made in new products to enhance instruction and learning...While wholesalers, retailers, and others do not question the quality of these materials, they have expressed concern that the publishers' practice of packaging supplements with a textbook to sell as one unit limits the opportunity students have to purchase less expensive used books....If publishers continue to increase these investments, particularly in technology, the cost to produce a textbook is likely to continue to increase in the future." College Textbooks: Enhanced Offerings Appear to Drive Recent Price Increases ." U.S. Government Accountability Office, Washington, DC, 2005. Abstract. Retrieved 7 October 2011.
Bundling has also been used to segment the used book market. Each combination of a textbook and supplemental items receives a separate ISBN. A single textbook could therefore have dozens of ISBNs that denote different combinations of supplements packaged with that particular book. When a bookstore attempts to track down used copies of textbooks, they will search for the ISBN the course instructor orders, which will locate only a subset of the copies of the textbook.
Legislation at state and federal levels seeks to limit the practice of bundling, by requiring publishers to offer all components separately. Publishers have testified in favor of bills including this provision, but only in the case that the provision exempts the loosely defined category of "integrated textbooks". The Federal bill" Higher Education Opportunity Act ." H.R.4137, U.S. House of Representatives, 110th Congress (2007–2008.) Public Law No. 110-315. Retrieved 7 October 2011. only exempts 3rd party materials in integrated textbooks, however publisher lobbyists have attempted to create a loophole through this definition in state bills.
No data suggests that this is in fact true. However, The Student PIRGs have found that publishers actively withhold pricing information from faculty, making it difficult to obtain. Their most recent study found that 77% of faculty say publisher sales representatives do not volunteer prices, and only 40% got an answer when they directly asked. Furthermore, the study found that 23% of faculty rated publisher websites as "informative and easy to use" and less than half said they typically listed the price.
The US Congress passed a law in the 2008 Higher Education Opportunity Act that would require price disclosure. Legislation requiring price disclosure has passed in Connecticut, Washington, Minnesota, Oregon, Arizona, Oklahoma, and Colorado. Publishers are currently supporting price disclosure mandates, though they insist that the "suggested retail price" should be disclosed, rather than the actual price the publisher would get for the book.
When students resell their textbooks during campus "buyback" periods, these textbooks are often sold into the national used textbook distribution chain. If a textbook is not going to be used on campus for the next semester of courses then many times the college bookstore will sell that book to a national used book company. The used book company then resells the book to another college bookstore. Finally, that book is sold as used to a student at another college at a price that is typically 75% of the new book price. At each step, a markup is applied to the book to enable the respective companies to continue to operate.
According to textbook author Henry L. Roediger (and Wadsworth Publishing Company senior editor Vicki Knight), the used textbook market is illegitimate, and entirely to blame for the rising costs of textbooks. As methods of "dealing with this problem", he recommends making previous editions of textbooks obsolete, binding the textbook with other materials, and passing laws to prevent the sale of used books. The concept is not unlike the limited licensing approach for computer software, which places rigid restrictions on resale and reproduction. The intent is to make users understand that the content of any textbook is the intellectual property of the author and/or the publisher, and that as such, subject to copyright. Obviously, this idea is completely opposed to the millennia-old tradition of the sale of , and would make that entire industry illegal.
Although the largest question seems to be who is going to pay to write them, several state policies suggest that public investment in open textbooks might make sense. To offer another perspective, any jurisdiction might find itself challenged to find sufficient numbers of credible academics who would be willing to undertake the effort of creating an open textbook without realistic compensation, to make such a proposal work. Currently, some open textbooks have been funded with non-profit investment.
The other challenge involves the reality of publishing, which is that textbooks with good sales and profitability subsidize the creation and publication of low demand but believed to be necessary textbooks. Subsidies skew markets and the elimination of subsidies is disruptive; in the case of low demand textbooks the possibilities following subsidy removal include any or all of the following: higher retail prices, a switch to open textbooks, a reduction of the number of titles published.
On the other hand, independent open textbook authoring and publishing models are developing. Most notably, the startup publisher Flat World Knowledge already has dozens of college-level open textbooks that are used by more than 900 institutions in 44 countries. Flat World Knowledge President Eric Frank Addresses Oregon Legislators on Solving Textbook Affordability. Pressitt. 21 February 2011. Their business model was to offer the open textbook free online, Organizational Behavior v1.1 by Talya Bauer & Berrin Erdogan. Irvington, NY: Flat World Knowledge. 2010. (Free online open textbook format sample – PDF view) Introduction to Psychology by Charles Stangor. Irvington, NY: Flat World Knowledge. 2010. (Free online open textbook format sample – web view) and then sell ancillary products that students are likely to buy if prices are reasonable – print copies, study guides, ePub, .Mobi (Amazon Kindle), PDF download, etc. Flat World Knowledge compensates its authors with royalties on these sales.See Flat World Knowledge's website With the generated revenue Flat World Knowledge funded high-quality publishing activities with a goal of making the Flat World financial model sustainable. However, in January 2013 Flat World Knowledge announced their financial model could no longer sustain their free-to-read options for students. Flat World Knowledge Website. Flat World Knowledge intends to have open textbooks available for the 125 highest-enrolled courses on college campuses within the next few years.
CK-12 are the open textbooks designed for United States K-12 courses. CK-12 FlexBooks are designed to facilitate conformance to national and United States and individual state textbook standards. CK-12 FlexBooks are licensed under a Creative Commons BY-NC-SA license. CK-12 FlexBooks are free to use online and offer formats suitable for use on portable personal reading devices and computers – both online and offline. Formats for both iPad and Amazon Kindle are offered. School districts may select a title as is or customize the open textbook to meet local instructional standards. The file may be then accessed electronically or printed using any print on demand service without paying a royalty, saving 80% or more when compared to traditional textbook options. An example print on demand open textbook title, "College Algebra" by Stitz & Zeager through Lulu is 608 pages, royalty free, and costs about $20 ordered one at a time (March 2011). Carl Stitz/Jeff Zeager on Ohio Textbook HQ 2010. (Any print on demand service could be used – this is just an example. School districts could easily negotiate even lower prices for bulk purchases to be printed in their own communities.) Teacher's editions are available for educators and parents. Titles have been authored by various individuals and organizations and are vetted for quality prior to inclusion in the CK-12 catalog. An effort is underway to map state educational standards correlations. Stanford University provided a number of titles in use.
Curriki is another modular K-12 content non-profit "empowering educators to deliver and share curricula." Selected Curriki materials are also correlated to U.S. state educational standards. Some Curriki content has been collected into open textbooks and some may be used for modular lessons or special topics.
Following closely behind annual increases in tuition and fees at postsecondary institutions, college textbook and supply prices have risen at twice the rate of annual inflation over the last two decades.Rising at an average of 6 percent each year since academic year 1987–1988, compared with overall average price increases of 3 percent per year, college textbook and supply prices trailed tuition and fee increases, which averaged 7 percent per year. Since December 1986, textbook and supply prices have nearly tripled, increasing by 186 percent, while tuition and fees increased by 240 percent and overall prices grew by 72 percent. While increases in textbook and supply prices have followed increases in tuition and fees, the cost of textbooks and supplies for degree-seeking students as a percentage of tuition and fees varies by the type of institution attended. For example, the average estimated cost of books and supplies per first-time, full-time student for academic year 2003–2004 was $898 at 4-year public institutions, or about 26 percent of the cost of tuition and fees. At 2-year public institutions, where low-income students are more likely to pursue a degree program and tuition and fees are lower, the average estimated cost of books and supplies per first-time, full-time student was $886 in academic year 2003–2004, representing almost three-quarters of the cost of tuition and fees.
According to the 2nd edition of a study by the United States Public Interest Research Group (US PIRG) published in February 2005: "Textbook prices are increasing at more than four times the inflation rate for all finished goods, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics Producer Price Index. The wholesale prices charged by textbook publishers have jumped 62 percent since 1994, while prices charged for all finished goods increased only 14 percent. Similarly, the prices charged by publishers for general books increased just 19 percent during the same time period."
According to the 2007 edition of the College Board's Trend in College Pricing Report published October 2007: "College costs continue to rise and federal student aid has shown slower growth when adjusted for inflation, while textbooks, as a percentage of total college costs, have remained steady at about 5 percent."
Textbook publishing in the U.S. is a business primarily aimed at large states. This is due to state purchasing controls over the books, most notably in Texas, where the Texas Education Agency sets curricula for all courses taught by the state's 1,000+ school districts, and therefore also approves which textbooks can be purchased.
Commonly used American history textbooks are customized for students in California and Texas.
Science textbooks have been the source of ongoing debates and have come under scrutiny from several organizations. The presentation or inclusion of controversial scientific material has been debated in several court cases. Poorly designed textbooks have been cited as contributing to declining grades in mathematics and science in the United States and organizations such as the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (AAAS) have criticized the layout, presentation, and amount of material given in textbooks.
Discussions of textbooks have been included on Creationism and evolution in the public education debate. The Smith v. Board of School Commissioners of Mobile County case brought forward a debate about scientific fact being presented in textbooks.
In his book, Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!, the late physics Nobel Prize laureate Richard P. Feynman described his experiences as a member of a committee that evaluated science textbooks. At some instances, there were nonsensical examples to illustrate physical phenomena; then a company sent – for reasons of timing – a textbook that contained blank pages, which even got good critiques. Feynman himself experienced attempts at bribery.
In some European countries, such as Sweden or Spain, students attending institutions of higher education pay for textbooks themselves, although higher education is free of charge otherwise.
With higher education costs on the rise, many students are becoming sensitive to every aspect of college pricing, including textbooks, which in many cases amount to one tenth of tuition costs. The 2005 Government Accountability Office report on college textbooks said that since the 1980s, textbook and supply prices have risen twice the rate of inflation in the past two decades. A 2005 PIRG study found that textbooks cost students $900 per year, and that prices increased four times the rate of inflation over the past decade. A June 2007 Advisory Committee on Student Financial Assistance (ACSFA) report, "Turn the Page", reported that the average U.S. student spends $700–$1000 per year on textbooks.
While many groups have assigned blame to publishers, bookstores or faculty, the ACSFA also found that assigning blame to any one party—faculty, colleges, bookstores or publishers—for current textbook costs is unproductive and without merit. The report called on all parties within the industry to work together to find productive solutions, which included a movement toward open textbooks and other lower-cost digital solutions.
Textbook prices are considerably higher in law school. Students ordinarily pay close to $200 for case books consisting of cases available free online.
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