As the long hazy days of summer grow shorter, students begin to turn their thoughts away from the beach and back to the books. But knowledge isn’t cheap, and the rising costs of textbooks can put a serious dent in your bank accounts.
With the average cost of a single book being $100, the US Government Accountability Office (GAO) reported that in the school year 2003-2004 the average cost of books for a college student per year was $886.
Because textbooks undergo frequent revisions to keep pace with teaching trends and current events, students often are asked to buy the most recent edition. Although many students turn to popular websites like half.com, alibris.com or bookbyte.com, to save money on buying and reselling books, the lowered cost is often made up for with the poor quality of the books, late shipping or unavailability of new editions required for a course.
Many students also run into buying required books that may not even be used during the course, or even changed by a professor.
Add these high costs to the environmental costs of using so many tons of paper, the pollution from shipping and transport for the heavy books and the waste of unusable books that end up as garbage, and it seems these books are costing everyone - the environment included - a small fortune.
Progress seems to be pointing towards digital textbooks. High schools in Arizona have begun implementing Beyond Textbooks, an online tool that provides digital resources, curriculum sharing, and web-based tools that meet educational standards to progress away from static and traditional texts.
Across the map, colleges and high schools are hoping to implement online and free "open source" books available to students, to cut costs for schools and students.
With open source textbooks, education becomes a two-way street, with students sharing analysis with one another, teachers sharing insights on a text, or curriculum with one another. Professors are able to mix and match sources to better fit their own course aims, and with several of the sites, students can access an entire book or a single chapter, eliminating the need for buying a whole book to only use a small portion of it.
“The nice thing about open content is it gives faculty full control, creative control over the content of the book, full control over timing, and it give students a lot more control over how they want to consume it and how much they want to pay,” says Eric Frank, co-founder of Flat World Knowledge in an interview with Wired.
Flat World Knowledge gives professors the option to register to buy a book and then use it to create their own content, and students can choose how they access it: self-printing, PDFs, affordable soft-cover versions, etc.
CourseSmart, rather than using open source format, is selling ebooks to instructors and students at a highly reduced cost from traditional texts. According to the site, CourseSmart saves students an average of $62.49 per book, and has saved over 300,000 trees.
Other popular sites include Zinio, iChapters, eCampus.com, McGraw-Hill eBooks, and Textbook Revolution.
Detractors, however, point to the economic divide between the wealthy, who can afford computers, and the poor, who often cannot. Turning textbooks digital may widen this gap. Digital textbooks and web tools may offer a more flexible curriculum, will open a world of sources to students and may improve education and teaching methods. However, if this opportunity is only offered to those who can afford it, students from lower economic situations will lose out on the benefits.
Hopefully, educational reform will address this issue, but for those with online access, digital textbooks are huge leaps towards cutting costs for students, institutions and the environment.
