Student Loan Blog : textbook publishers

Renting May Be Solution to High Cost of College Textbooks

Student Loan Girl — Tue, 08 Jul 2008 02:51:00 GMT

Hoping to reduce the premium prices college students pay for textbooks, which on average cost students $900 a year, some colleges and universities are opting to let their students rent their books rather than buy them.

For the first time, six schools in the Minnesota State Colleges and Universities System are allowing students to rent selected textbooks, according to a Minnesota Public Radio report (“College Textbook Rental Coming to Minnesota,” June 20, 2008).

"Each semester I pay anywhere from $300 to $600 on books, so renting them would probably save me quite a bit,” University of Minnesota student Sonya Sturgis said.

The Minnesota schools are following the model of online book rental sites like Chegg.com and Bookrenter.com, which have offered students an alternative to buying their textbooks for years.

The sites claim that book rental programs could save students 75 percent or more on new and used textbooks, which would allow students to use less of their financial aid and student loans for books and free up more of those funds for tuition and other education-related expenses.

Propelled by studies that show the prices of textbooks are rising faster than the rate of inflation, Congress proposed legislation in February that would require publishers to make unbundled and less expensive versions of textbooks available to students and would require publishers to disclose retail prices and a history of textbook revisions from edition to edition when presenting any new materials to faculty.

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Proposed Bill Combines House, Senate Versions of the Higher Education Act

Student Loan Girl — Wed, 14 May 2008 23:51:00 GMT

Congressional aides hope to finalize a renewal of the Higher Education Act by Memorial Day that merges different versions of the proposed bill passed separately by the House of Representatives and the Senate last year, according to an article in The Chronicle of Higher Education (“Compromise Higher-Education Bill Takes Shape in Congress,” May 14, 2008).

Although the draft of the measure that is circulating Washington does not include provisions on graduate education, new programs, or private student loans — three of the bill’s 11 sections — the measure is already nearly 700 pages.

The issues that the two houses appear to have reached a compromise on include college cost watch lists, accreditation, and campus piracy:

Negotiators hope to give consumers more accurate and useful information about higher education costs by bolstering current watch lists. These lists, established by the House bill, already identify the most and least expensive colleges and those with the highest percentage of tuition increases. But under the compromise bill, institutions with the highest and lowest “net price” would also be listed.

The current 15 members of the National Advisory Committee on Institutional Quality and Integrity, which advises the Department of Education on accreditation, would be replaced with 18 new members, six each appointed by the secretary of education, the Senate, and the House.

Colleges would be required to develop plans to detect and prevent illegal downloading of music and videos on college campuses and to offer alternatives to such illegal downloading.

Issues that are still being negotiated include whether states should be punished for cutting their higher education budgets, whether textbook publishers and colleges should be required to disclose more information about the costs of the books, and whether colleges should be required to notify students and employees within 30 minutes of a campus emergency.

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Publishing Company to Offer Free Online Textbooks

Student Loan Girl — Mon, 28 Apr 2008 23:27:00 GMT

To help reduce the rising cost of textbooks, which are approaching $1,000 a year for the average college student, digital-textbook publisher Flat World Knowledge will begin offering free online textbooks starting next year.

The publishing company is signing authors it believes are the best in their fields, Flat World Knowledge co-founder Eric Frank told The Chronicle of Higher Education, (“An Online Company Tries an Unexpected Publishing Model: Free Textbooks,” April 24, 2008).

“We want to show professors that they’re not deciding between price and quality,” Frank said.

The online textbooks will include images, audio, and video features, and will be structured as “social learning” sites, meaning students can chat and share notes online while reading and instructors will be allowed to edit the author’s words without permission.

While its electronic textbooks will be free, Flat World Knowledge hopes to make money from the sales of supplemental materials like study guides or print-on-demand hard copies. The company also plans to take a cut of the sales of user-created study materials sold through its website.

But the company will have to find a market. Digital textbook sales currently represent only a small fraction of traditional publishers’ revenue.

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