The rising global cost of textbooks

EDUCATION is not cheap. It is not a new discussion, and it certainly isn't without a degree of conflict as schools raise fees across the world to meet increasing costs while at the same time, free knowledge flows among those with the means to access it through digital media.

One of the topics of central discussions in the debate between the human right to an education and the costs to support it are books, particularly textbooks.

In Brunei, government schools do provide textbooks. The memory of holding a battered old advance maths textbooks with all the answers filled in and the margins scribbled on still remains with me to this day (I disliked math).

In that sense, as Bruneian citizens, we are lucky. Even for those less fortunate, Ministry of Education, non-government organisations such as the Yayasan Sultan Haji Hassanal Bolkiah Foundation and private individuals all seem more than willing to provide school materials, so that everyone can have access to education.

Textbooks for secondary students in this country cost around $200 to $300 a year for private students, and while textbooks are provided in government schools, workbooks do run over $100 for their students every year.

For Bruneians, with an average GDP per annum of $31000, the cost would be an annoyance to a majority of the population. To others around the world, or even in the region, with an annual GDP of $3000 or less, paying hundreds of dollars is a significant chunk out of a family's livelihood.

In 2008, our paper ran an article entitled "Facing battle between books and bread". One paragraph of the article was particularly heart wrenching, in which the author writes about Iis Widya, a 38-year-old Indonesian mother of three living in in Central Jakarta. "How can I buy books when even paying for enough food for our family is already hard enough," she said, adding that she could barely afford the schoolbook of her two children.

Books for one semester for her senior high school student son, who studies at a private school, cost Rp 700,000 ($111.50); her fifth grader daughter needs Rp400,000 ($63.70) for her textbooks.

To supplement their children's reading, Iis Widya said that her husband, a civil servant, borrowed newspapers and magazines from his friends at the office.

Past secondary education, the situation becomes somewhat more alarming.In the United Kingdom, while doing a biotechnology course, a single textbook could cost over $200. In a 2011 article ran by the Huffington Post, entitled "Rising Costs Force Students To Skimp On Textbooks" Dr Steven White, a professor of marketing and international business at the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth, said that many of his students that had to work their way through college or rely on student loans had trouble affording the US$1,000 to US$2,000 ($1264 to $2528) a year for textbooks that comes on top of tuition, fees, rent, food and other costs.

So what is behind the rising cost of textbooks? At the college level, an investigation into the cause was launched by the University of Michigan Library, Scholarly Publishing Office. In the report, it noted that "While there are many factors that affect textbook pricing, the price of textbooks has increased in recent years for two major reasons".

The first was the revision cycle of three to four years, meaning that a new edition of a book was re-introduced into the market in a relatively short period of time. It noted that this "limit student's ability to reduce their costs by purchasing used textbooks and selling their old textbooks back to bookstores at the end of term".

The second contribution to the significant rise in textbook cost, according to the report, was the enhanced offerings of additional instructional materials such as software and workbooks bundled into textbooks.

Bundled versions of textbook including multimedia material were twice as expensive as those without.

At the end of the day, however, the rising cost of textbooks had forced scholars, students and those simply seeking knowledge to search online. Some organisations took it upon themselves to 'share' published materials for free, provoking some harsh responses from publishers and other interests.

Christopher Kelty an Associate Professor of Information Studies and Anthropology at the University of California, Los Angeles wrote an opinion piece for Al-Jazeera regarding the matter entitled "The disappearing virtual library" in response to the shutdown of 'library.nu', what was once home to allegedly 400,000 to a million books, on accusations of piracy.

Kelty had a simple message: "the global demand for learning and scholarship is not being met by the contemporary publishing industry. It cannot be, not with the current business models and the prices".

He said that the scholarly publishing industry had entered a phase "like the one the pharmaceutical industry entered in the 1990s, when life-saving AIDS medicines were deliberately restricted to protect the interests of pharmaceutical companies' patents and profits."

He said that rather than provide their work at cheap enough prices that anyone in the world might purchase, they (the publishing industry) have taken the opposite route - making the prices higher and higher until only very rich institutions can afford them.

"Scholarly publishers have made the trade-off between offering a very low price to a very large market or a very high price to a very small market".

Kelty shares also a number of sobering messages, one in particular that all institutions, especially our own in this country, should take to serious consideration: "Our university libraries can no longer afford to buy these books and journals; and our few bookstores are no longer willing to carry them. So the result is that most of our best scholarship is being shot into some publisher's black hole where it will never escape. That is, until library.nu and its successors make it available". The views are author's own and do not necessarily reflect those of The Brunei Times.

The Brunei Times