BY NELSON PAVLOSKY

In print | Published April 7, 2005

The student Public Interest Research Groups (PIRGs) released a study a couple of months ago called “Rip-off 101: Second Edition — How the Publishing Industry’s Practices Needlessly Drive Up Textbook Costs,” accusing publishers of various nefarious price-gouging practices. They say that publishers push new editions of textbooks without adding any new value, that publishers often “bundle” textbooks with CD-ROMs, workbooks and other unnecessary materials, and that publishers charge American students far more than they charge students overseas.

Whatever the reasons, it’s clear that our textbooks simply cost too much, no matter how you slice it. What can be done to save our emaciated wallets from certain doom?

Many students already take advantage of one option: exercising your rights of first sale, by buying and selling used textbooks. The “first sale doctrine” is a statutory exception to copyright law, which allows you to “transfer” a legally acquired copy of a copyrighted work to another person without permission from the copyright holder. Once a copyright owner sells you a book, you can sell it, rent it, trade it or chop it up into little pieces and mail it to the textbook publisher as a gag; it’s all perfectly legal. However, this doesn’t get at the root of the problem: Why are the textbooks so expensive in the first place? Is there a way out of this trap?

Perhaps it’s time to take a page from the open access publishing movement, which currently focuses on scientific journals but could conceivably expand to all kinds of academic publishing and beyond. Peter Suber, a professor at Earlham College, defines the open access movement as “Putting peer-reviewed scientific and scholarly literature on the Internet. Making it available free of charge and free of most copyright and licensing restrictions. Removing the barriers to serious research.”

This may sound idealistic, but all that it may require is some creative thinking and some new business models. One of the early successes of this young movement is the Public Library of Science, a collection of prestigious, peer-reviewed journals that charge authors who want to publish in a journal, rather than charging readers for access to the publication. It publishes both print editions and electronic editions, appears to be financially sustainable and, despite its upstart status, it already fields journals that most scientists would consider it an honor to be published in. Given this success in the field of journals, which require up-to-the-minute material, it’s reasonable to believe that we could achieve similar successes in the world of textbooks, where we can leverage public domain materials in many fields to kick-start book projects.

It is, of course, difficult to create a new journal that is prestigious enough to compete with the existing, “closed access” journals that dominate the field; it is similarly difficult to create a textbook that will be accepted by a professor at an elite institution like Swarthmore. The successful open access journals solved this problem either by making existing prestigious journals open access or by arranging for the board of a prestigious journal to defect to a new open access journal en masse, taking their prestige with them. Similar arrangements could be effective for forcing the academic world to take open access textbooks seriously.

Multiple projects already exist for making open access textbooks a reality. The same folks who built Wikipedia have opened a site called Wikibooks, which is already producing useful texts, and other initiatives like The California Open Source Textbook Project at OpenSourceText.org are working to bring open access textbooks into the classroom. Combined with on-demand printing technologies, such as the portable “printing press” used by the Internet Bookmobile or Web sites like LuLu.com, the open access movement could place free electronic books or cheap physical copies of books into the hands of students eager to escape the constant purchasing and repurchasing of overpriced textbooks.

Nelson Pavlosky is a junior. You can reach him at npavlos1@swarthmore.edu.

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