Washington Week: Student Voices (O)

Digital textbooks lessen U. Massachusetts student expenses
By Caitlin Quinn & Emily Reynolds
Massachusetts Daily Collegian (U. Massachusetts)
10/24/2006

(U-WIRE) AMHERST, Mass. — Browsing the Internet for cheap or even free products is nothing new to the average college student. But newly added to this list of products are textbooks, one of the biggest sources of college students' disappearing funds.

Students across the country are turning from traditional print resources to electronic ones.

According to the Government Accountability Office (GAO), there was a 186 percent increase in the price of textbooks between 1986 and 2004.

The price of textbooks dramatically increases the expenses college students have each semester. The GAO reported in 2005 that the average college student spent $900 on books and supplies, which is 26 percent of the cost of tuition and fees at average four-year public universities.

The textbook industry is a $6.5 billion a year business. The increase comes from the fact that publishers can only profit from new books sold at high prices. To try to compete with the used textbook market, publishing companies put out new editions with only slight variations.

"The textbooks often are not improved, but they almost always are more expensive," said Dr. Frank Werner, an associate professor of finance at Fordham University, in an editorial submitted to the New York Times.

In these new editions, publishers include supplemental materials such as CD-ROMs, online passwords and workbooks in order to increase the price. The New York Times also said that most teachers don't use the supplemental materials.

Frustrations about rising prices have led to the creation of many Web sites that provide free online texts. Freeload Press (textbookmedia.com), for example, publishes the book for free and offsets the costs with commercial advertisements. They also sell print versions of the books for about 65 percent less than the competitive price.

The University of Massachusetts is now involved in this new technology using a program called eBooks. The library rents the rights to certain books for an annual fee, making these books available to students so they don't have to buy hard copies.

Access to eBooks is free for students. UMass uses marketing.books24x7.com and netlibrary.com as a source for the books.

"Both offer a lot more books then we have access to, but we don't take all that they offer," says Jim Kelly, humanities bibliographer for the W.E.B. DuBois Library. "What we try to get from these are those that we would otherwise not buy."

The Lamar Soutter Library of UMass Medical School's Web site is part of the ebooks system. It includes 261 online biomedical textbooks.

UMass also uses the Ereserves digital library. "Ereserves is used for excerpts, class notes, and anything short," says Janet Hughes, an employee of the UMass Library. "Ereserve is not a substitute for textbooks, it's for supplemental readings."

On Ereserves, only 10 percent of a text can be put online.

Professor Stephen Simurda of the Journalism department chose Ereserves over an expensive course packet this semester. "It seemed like $150 or more was a lot for the reading packet," he said.

Another professor at UMass, who chooses to remain anonymous, uses his own textbook for one of his courses, and makes the text available for free online in order to make the material for his course more accessible to students. He wants to "save students money" as well as to make the material easily accessible for students of online courses, who also use the book.

The professor said that most of his students use the online version instead of buying the book.

In addition to free resources, cheaper textbooks are now coming in the form of CD-ROMs. Etext.net is one Web site that sells textbooks in CD-ROM or PDF file form for cheaper than store-bought textbooks.

There are also drawbacks to online sources. Simurda says, "It's not perfect. It's easier for students to physically have a book in their hand."

Simurda has suspicions that not all students do the readings for class because they're online.

"Books are portable and easy to mark up," said Kelly.

Many students are simply more comfortable reading books, as well. Sitting and staring at a computer screen for long periods of time can lead to eye strain, headaches, fatigue and difficulty focusing, according to pasadenaeye.com, the Web site for an eye care facility in Texas.

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