Textbook

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Textbooks

A textbook is a manual of instruction or a standard book in any branch of study. They are classified by both the target audience and the subject. Textbooks are usually published by specialty printers to serve every request for an understanding of every subject that can be taught. It is a big business that requires mass volume sales to make the publications profitable. Although most textbooks are only published in printed format with hard covers, some can now be viewed online.

Textbooks emerged as teaching instruments with Johann Gutenberg's printing press. Early textbooks were used by teachers, who relied on the books for lesson guidance. Later books were printed for children, and have become the primary teaching instrument for most children since the 19th century.

United States

K-12

In most K-12 public schools, a local school board votes on which textbooks to purchase from a selection of books that have been approved by the state Department of Education. Teachers are usually not required to use textbooks, however, and many prefer to use other materials instead. Textbook publishing in the U.S. is a business primarily aimed at large states, especially California and Texas. This is due to state purchasing controls over the books. When publishers succeed in making a sale to either or both states, they are guaranteed a large print run and therefore a profitable product. The Texas State Board of Education spends in excess of $600 million on its central purchasing of textbooks.

Because textbook publishing is a competitive business, when mistakes occur they are costly to remedy and when objections to either the inclusion or the exclusion of material are voiced, the publishers attempt to compromise in an effort to make the sale. As a result of this procedure errors have been known to crop up in textbooks covering almost every subject.

College and university

In U.S. institutions of higher education, textbooks are chosen by the professor teaching the course, or by the department as a whole. Students buy their own copies of their books.

Criticisms and controversies

High school

In recent years, high school textbooks of United States history have come under increasing criticism. Authors such as Howard Zinn (A People's History of the United States) and James W. Loewen (Lies My Teacher Told Me) make the claim that U.S. History textbooks' mythical untruths and omissions paint a whitewashed picture that bears little resemblance to what most students learn in universities. Selectively retelling history, through textbooks or other literature, has been practiced in many societies, from ancient Rome to the Soviet Union. History textbooks are not subjected to review by professional academics, nor can authorship of a high school textbook be used to advance an academic toward tenure at a university. The content of history textbooks thus lies entirely outside the academic forum of fact and social science and is instead determined by the political forces of state adoption boards and ideological pressure groups.

Science textbooks have been the source of some 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 are also one theory on declining grades in mathematics and science in the United States and organizations such as the AAAS have criticized the layout, presentation, and amount of material given in textbooks.

The Smith v. Board of School Commissioners of Mobile County brought forward a debate about secular humanist values being presented in textbooks.

In his popular book Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!, the late physics Nobel Prize laureate Richard P. Feynman described his devastating experiences as he once sat in a commission 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 - and, at last, Feynman himself experienced veritable attempts of bribery.

College and university

Many university students complain of unreasonably high textbook costs, however, the college textbook market is a fairly complicated economic model which most students do not fully understand. Since the 1980s, prices have risen much more rapidly than the rate of inflation^*, and many students feel that this represents price gouging on the part of the publisher. Furthermore, they contend that publishers print new editions of a textbook with unnecessary frequency, solely to make older editions of their books obsolete; this has the effect of hindering the used textbook market, where publishers make no money from sales. Publishers feel that they are providing the most current information when they create new editions of textbooks. Publishing houses are most often publicly traded companies that are in the business of making money.

Some publishers have started bundling extra materials such as CD's and website access cards to textbooks in the hopes of increasing the value of the textbook. This is a valuable marketing tool for their use with the professors who select the textbooks. Professors have no real concept of what textbooks cost and feel that the "extras" provide great tools for their students. They are often shocked to discover that only a tiny fraction of their students ever use the websites or CD's that are bundled with the textbooks. The publishers tell the professors that these items are free, which is a bit disingenous on the part of the publishers as the development costs of these items are factored into the cost of the textbooks.

Recently, publishers have taken to creating custom versions of the textbooks for specific universities and/or professors. These customized textbooks are generally shorter and edited versions of full textbooks. Some students feel that these are ploys used by the publishing companies to limit used book sales.

Publisher representatives are paid, to a large part, based upon the sales of their books. It is therefore in their best interest to find ways to increase the sale of new books.

Books that come shrinkwrapped with other items may not be returnable, even if the student drops the course during the "shopping for classes" period, though this is unusual. In most cases, the bundling and customization makes it difficult for college bookstores to determine which book to buyback from students at the end of the semester. In some cases, the publisher refuses to sell the book without the other items.

Publishers say that textbooks are indeed as expensive to produce as their prices indicate. Textbooks have a very limited market—almost exclusively students who need the book for a course—and publishers claim they would be unprofitable to produce if they were priced any lower. Textbooks are often thick, printed on heavy paper, and printed in color, all of which dramatically increase their cost. The major publishers who provide a vast majority of the textbooks employ a large number of sales representatives to sell their textbooks and send out thousands of free samples to professors. According to the National Association of College Stores, typically 12% of the price of a book goes to the author's royalties, 23% goes to the store, 32% pays for the publisher's paper, printing, binding, and editorial costs, and another 32% is taken by the publisher for profit or to cover expenses such as marketing and administration.^*

Some publishers sell copies of their textbooks to foreign markets at a much lower cost. The rationale is that these sales are additional, unpredictable income and should not be a factor in the pricing of textbooks in America. These books must be sold at a competitive price in the foreign market which leads to resentment from some students of the American market. The publishers have taken steps to block the re-importation of these "international editions" to the U.S. market, but these steps only seem to work with college bookstores, as individual students are freely able to order these books online. The international editions are typically identical to the U.S. version with only a change of ISBN and cover. Many college bookstores do not buyback international editions from students which sometimes leads to a higher net cost of ownership than a seemingly more expensive U.S. edition. A study by a Duke University student found that, as the Internet as become more prevalent and facilitated the reimporation of international editions, publishers have responded by raising the price of the international editions. ^* Additionally, textbooks (especially anthologies) often contain a lot of copyrighted material including photos, artwork and previously-published articles or chapters. The permissions fees for printing this material are a substantial (but often-overlooked) cost of the publishing process. Because such rights fees are based on the breadth of distribution, putting these materials on the World Wide Web is seldom an economically feasible alternative. Contrary to popular opinion, obtaining the world rights necessary to publish on the Web can actually incur more costs than would a printed textbook with limited distribution. The cost of world rights is also one reason why publishers have purposely excluded some books from the U.S. market.

Sometimes students and parents claim that certain textbooks have been selected for use because of factors irrelevant to their teaching efficacy. The most common complaint at the university level is that professors will use a textbook written by themselves or their colleagues.

Used textbook market

As with many media products, a market for used textbooks exists. The goal of such trade is to acquire textbooks for less money than the price of new copies or to sell unneeded books to recoup some or all of their purchase price.

Most college bookstores allow students to sell their textbooks back to the store. This price is typically 50% of the original price if the book is going to be re-used at the same college. The books that are not being re-used typically yield zero to thirty percent of the new price. These wholesale prices are set by national used textbook companies and are based upon an economic model which predicts national sales of the books and compares them to inventory levels. Different companies set different prices.

An example of a book being purchased for a national used book company follows. First, the student sells the book back to their college bookstore. That book is then sold by the college bookstore to a national used book company. The same book is then sold 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 margin is applied to the book to enable the respective companies to continue to operate.

Students also tend to sell textbooks amongst themselves. After completing a course, sellers will often seek out members of the next enrolling class, people who are likely to be interested in purchasing the required books. This may be done by posting flyers to advertise the sale of the books or simply soliciting individuals who are shopping in the college bookstore for the same titles. Many larger schools have independent websites set up for the purpose of facilitating such trade. These often operate much like digital classified ads, allowing students to list their items for sale and browse for those they wish to acquire.

Used textbooks are also sold on a national and even global scale through online merchant and auction websites. The largest and best-known American online marketplaces for used textbooks include Amazon Marketplace, Half.com, and Abebooks, which allow shoppers to search many major new and used book sellers at a time for specific titles. Such services can usually locate books based on their title, ISBN number or UPC.

Textbook exchanges

In response to escalating textbook prices, a few online textbook exchanges have arisen over the past few years that allow students to easily sell their textbooks to other students. These sites provide alternatives to the low payments made by most on campus bookstores. The TextbookScene allows students to select their courses and then tells the student what books they need. It then returns pricing of the required books for the selected courses from over a dozen online book vendors. Campusbookswap.com is probably one of the most trusted as it is run by a branch of the Public Interest Research Group (PIRG). Other notable exchanges, however, include bookfaced.com which attempts to facilitate the exchange of books on a student's specific campus, thus eliminating the hassle of sending your used books to buyers from different universities, and the nascent switchtextbooks.com which is a membership-based site that allows students to accrue positive trading points for the used books they send in and use these points to get new books. It's kind of a newfangled NetFlix for textbooks, instead of DVDs. The company recently bought out the popular site ratemyprofessor.com in an effort to increase awareness of the site through cross-promotion. In Australia, the two biggest free textbook exchange sites are textbookexchange.com.au and urbanone.net.

Economics

With the large number of schools, subjects and grades in the United States, textbook publishing is a lucrative market, especially if a publisher can have a series of books adopted by politicians in a large state such as California or Texas. The three largest textbook publishers in the United States are McGraw-Hill, Houghton-Mifflin and Harcourt General (a division of Reed Elsevier).

External links

Books by type | Educational materials

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United States

K-12

College and university

Criticisms and controversies

High school

College and university

Used textbook market

Textbook exchanges

Economics

See also

External links