Dr. Leah Savion has spent the summer fighting for her students.
The senior lecturer of philosophy at Indiana U. has written six textbooks through various publishing companies for her courses at IU and said she works every year to make sure new editions are as inexpensive as possible.
“We go through page by page,” Savion said. “I’ve worked all summer to reduce the price.”
But Savion is part of a small minority of professors who can adjust the price of their required reading. For other teachers, pricing choices are entirely in the hands of publishers and bookstores.
To help lower costs, Durbin’s College Textbook Affordability Act — part of the Higher Education Opportunity Act — was recently enacted to simplify and improve communication between publishers and professors.
Assistant Senate Majority Leader Richard Durbin, D-Ill., had the idea for the act when he saw how many professors were unaware of the cost of their own required reading.
But will it work?
“I think it’s a good step, because basically it adds more transparency to the textbook market,” said IU senior Ben Greenberg, creator of Textyard.com. “Students will be able to save money.”
The act will require all publishers to disclose prices to professors as they choose textbooks, information on cheaper formats and a history of revisions.
Professors will thus have more time to make the most cost-efficient decisions.
“One of the main objectives of the U.S. Higher Education Opportunity Act is to increase transparency in the higher education textbook market — a goal we share and support as well,” said Tom Stanton, communications representative for McGraw-Hill Education.
The act will also require colleges to report textbook information for a course before registration, giving students enough time to plan for the expenses and bookstores more time to stock used copies. Savion said she believes this should be easy for all colleges, including IU, to accomplish.
The third provision of the act states that various parts of textbook bundles — including CDs and study guides — must be sold separately.
These changes might help students save money, even as early as this fall, but both Savion and Greenberg agreed working with the IU Bookstore to lower costs is also important.
“Since we partnered with Barnes & Noble, the prices have shot up dramatically,” Savion said.
Though Savion estimated a significant percent increase, the numbers could not be confirmed with Barnes & Noble.
Greenberg said the inflation comes from the costs of running a bookstore, but in the future this problem will become moot. The rental industry will dominate, Greenberg said, comparing it to Blockbuster and Netflix.
“The whole rental model has taken over,” Greenberg said. “That’s happening to the book market. The whole point of having a bookstore is pointless — you could just download from anywhere. It’s going to be huge.”