Upon attempting to order my textbooks this semester, I was shocked to find that I had $289.72 less in my Textbook Affordability Program (TAP) account than I thought. “Where did the funds go?” I asked myself. Upon investigation, I found they had gone to purchase TAP+ (Pilot), a service that I had not particularly wanted nor chose to purchase. TAP+ is the latest weapon in Swarthmore’s arsenal of sustainability. It seeks to replace physical textbooks with digital copies. As the email I received enrolling me in TAP+ states: “Welcome to TAP+. Your professor has partnered with the Campus Store to take steps to lower the price of required course materials for your course. …This program ensures you are receiving your course material(s) at a significant discount. These items are covered by your TAP funds.” Through TAP+, I received digital copies of nine books. Of those nine, only one, “Christian–Jewish Relations 1000–1300”, was more expensive to purchase on Amazon than the price quoted by TAP+. The difference, by the way, is seven dollars. A quick Amazon search quoted me $156.56 for all nine books. However, $289.72 of my TAP funds were instead used to give me digital copies of the books, available only through Moodle. The difference is $133.16, a significant portion of my TAP funds. I am only left to wonder, where is my “significant discount”?
I spend a large portion of my day staring at a screen for emails, papers, and other things. Therefore, I prefer a physical copy of a book to a digital copy. Sustainability cannot be used as a justification for offering a worse, more expensive, paperless alternative to physical books. Students should have the choice of whether to use their TAP+ funds to purchase physical or digital copies of their textbooks.
I do not mean to come off as a Swarthmore Campus and Community Store hater. In theory, I like Swarthmore Bookstore. Sure, the clothes are too expensive, but I like the Swat-themed tchotchkes, and being able to use Swat Points to purchase necessities is nice. However, going forward, I have a few recommendations for the bookstore. Firstly, get your house in order as far as pricing for e-books is concerned. Since the bookstore’s inception as a campus institution, there has been a near-constant argument about whether it should be run for profit. I think plenty of items can, should be, and are being sold for profit. The overhead on slapping Swat’s logo onto a five-dollar t-shirt cannot be so high that Swarthmore is losing money selling them at $40 apiece. Almost everything in the bookstore is unreasonably expensive, in my opinion, let us not make the books a part of it. Secondly, there needs to be more transparency regarding TAP+. I got an email one day before the fall semester informing me that I was enrolled in the program, and two semesters later, I’m $290 out with precious little to show for it. Thirdly, in light of the emissions from the near-constant construction on campus, students having physical copies of their textbooks is not the primary hindrance of To Zero by Thirty-Five. This is especially true since many students purchase used books. The college ought not to label something that feels like a scam and scheme as “more sustainable” and “lowering prices.” As a senior, this whole debacle in practice means very little to me, since, as a senior, I will not be ordering textbooks from here again. But in theory, it has reopened a sore that has long remained with me about Swarthmore’s textbook policy. Between course reserves, TAP funds, and the wildly varying prices in textbooks between courses, I found myself with almost $500 worth of TAP funds left after my first year, $200 after my second year, and in my third and final year, I will need an additional $300 to cover all my textbooks. The system is unbalanced and makes planning difficult.
A quick look at the College’s finances makes one fact apparent: Swarthmore College is not hurting for money. I advocate for Swarthmore to leave TAP and TAP+ behind and pursue a different course of action. Hundreds of textbooks are left in dorms at the end of the academic year. Not all students want them but plenty do. I propose that Swarthmore offer all of its students their textbooks for free as rentals for the duration of the semester, with the option to purchase them at the end. Some schools, such as Muskingum University, already do this digitally through a program called eCampus. Swarthmore could certainly afford to allow students to choose between digital and physical rentals and then make back some of the money spent by selling the students their books at the end of the semester. It is a program that actually lowers costs for students and expands accessibility, reduces the waste of hundreds of textbooks left at the end of the year, and still allows for student agency in choosing between physical and digital rentals and whether or not to purchase their textbooks at the end of the year. Anyway, I hope you all enjoy TAP++, the exciting new program for the 25-26 school year where all textbooks are delivered as PDFs in 10pt Comic Sans font with no text search functionality.
