MichaelGowin.com/blog

As a college instructor, I am aware of and sensitive to the financial plight of my students–especially when it comes to textbooks.  Seth Godin recently wrote that the college textbook industry is one that “deserves to die.”  While I’m not sure that I’d go that far, I am, like most others, extremely frustrated by the high prices of textbooks.  A few thoughts, randomly:

The Good

• I appreciate having a good test bank provided with an instructor’s edition of a text, “good” being the operative term.  I teach six to eight different classes each year and rely on these instructor’s supplements to help me manage the workload.  Of the many textbooks I’ve used over the last decade in numerous classes, only one (Mary Ellen Guffey’s Essentials of Business Communication) has had a decent test bank.

The Bad

• Prices are too high.  While looking for a textbook for an introductory accounting class, I found three titles of interest.  Two were priced at $185, the third at $80.  I won’t consider the first two, even if they are, in some sense, “better” than the $80 book.
• Few changes are made in new editions to justify the expense of adopting new books every year.  And yet they keep on coming…
• Customization is weak.  Having used one author’s text for several years, I’ve come to learn what I like and what I don’t in that book.  The publisher, Cengage, offers customized versions that allow instructors to include only the chapters they want.  Great!  But they won’t print a custom edition unless they get a minimum run of 100 copies.  I teach at a small school and most of my classes have an enrollment of 10-20 students.  Blurb can print one copy of any book; why can’t Cengage?
• Bundled PowerPoint presentations?  Most are worthless.  Textbook publishers: spend some time here or get the book.
• Too much material.  I’ve taught introductory finance and can cover maybe 1/4 to 1/3 of the information in the textbook in a given semester.
• Students don’t read them because most textbooks are boring.

Alternatives

The textbook dilemma being what it is, I’ve tended to use trade titles rather than traditional textbooks in recent years.  This fall I’m using titles like StartupNation, Guy Kawasaki’s Art of the Start, and Groundswell in my classes.  They are less expensive as well as more interesting and relevant.  The students are more likely to read them as well as keep them for later reference.  Traditional textbooks get sold back to the bookstore at the end of the semester, often for a fraction of what the students initially spent on them.  Using trade titles creates more work for me since I lose the nice supplements like cases, exercises, and a test bank, but I can give the students far more with two or three great titles that cost under $30 each than I can with a $190 textbook with all of the instructor’s goodies.

Any suggestions from students or other teachers?  How do you manage with textbooks?

Filed under: Education by Michael