By the Books: Textbook Solutions to Textbook Fatigue
Something that routinely vexes university students and their budgets is the ritual of textbook shopping. Every new term or semester, loads of money is spent on papers and access codes to be shuffled away once the schooling is done, or doffed onto an underclassman or Craigslist. These costs can range from the hundreds to even the low thousands annually for every student, and make up a huge part of their budgeting concerns for education. Most of the time these books just end up collecting dust or sitting as an untouched digital simulacrum on the students hard drive for years. What ends up making this more upsetting is when institutions require publisher content to be purchased for online homework submissions or labs, an increasingly common practice. Even this seems like a lot right? A really overwhelming mountain of issues.
What might also make this even more egregious from the environmental perspective is the amount of paper required just to churn out one of these books. For the swathe of knowledge, parchment and ink required to print enough texts for a single class, only a fraction of the content may actually be utilized. Once again, just to end up in a forgotten bin or worse, in a landfill (although textbook recycling is also something to consider). There are lots of potential problems with post secondary education textbook distribution and usage, and modern computing solutions should help provide students with a better way to get access to the tools they need.
There’s more to a book than the Cover
What should be made clear is that I’m making a lot of assumptions by proposing potential changes to the way textbooks might be published, distributed, and utilized. Education is a constantly changing landscape, subject to myriad criticisms and revisions, so I think the practice of conventional textbook distribution should be examined with the same scrutiny. That said, it’s a large, multifaceted and nuanced industry. It’d be impossible to provide such sweeping suggestions without prefacing that it’s mostly in my interest to approach this from an up-front, technical problem solving perspective. I want to approach this as if financial and employment aspects could be solved simultaneously and non-disruptively as possible.
With that being stated, it’s important to start embedding specific knowledge into college infrastructure. Identifying a blanket source to scrape and distribute textbook material from would be ideal; no remembering dozens of publisher institution passwords or memorizing individual textbook keys. Just a one and done student status check and you have the content you want. This might prove easier with public schools, given that you could link government funded school ID programs with publicly available and open sourced textbook libraries. It’s interesting to consider the idea of making textbooks open source as well, but that might come off as too radical a step for the purposes of identifying computing solutions to a distribution problem. A simple way to do this might be RFID or existing student ID numbers. Collaborations with schools would help incentivize publishers to make their content more easily accessible, potentially to the tune of a cut from tuition, although this might just risk spiking costs further.
Another potential solution would be a Class ID system. Register your course number with a set required ISBN, and simply sync your schools online course shell with an online provider automatically. This would be a free, easy way to make textbooks simpler to access. And if publishers are concerned about use once the academic term is complete, simply bar access to currently enrolled students only. While I think they should be free to access by all, this is a potentially tech-enabled compromise between access and maintaining revenue. Third party purchasers would still be able to acquire the full texts for unlimited amounts of time outside of college online systems, while students get the access they need, when they need it.
Take it case by case; one page at a time
One option worth exploring for tracking what texts are necessary for each student is via school libraries. Schools individually acquire and license the necessary material internally, potentially eliminating the need for a single, ubiquitous source. Many campus environments already require an ID card to be scanned to fully access a library setting, so it’d make sense for students to check out material they need in house. An ISBN scanner app might also be helpful. Just grab a text you need at your campus library, grab a picture of the back cover with your phone, and load a full scan of the text whenever you need it. Many students keep copies of the textbook on their mobile devices for quick reference and easy storage. This benefits both accessibility and environmental stability, as keeping low numbers of physical copies that are scanned out and accessed as needed would help reduce the extreme cost required to print each book.
However, a potential hole in the idea of more easily accessible textbooks is piracy. Scrape a scan of a text via a school provided source, then sell it for cheaper via unregulated channels.While this seems like a sound argument, it kind of becomes a moot point when you consider that textbook piracy and scanning is already wildly popular on college campuses. It’s a free, easy alternative to paying exuberant amounts of money for something that’s only required for a short period of time. Rather than be stuck with a load of expensive paperweights, it seems obvious to just grab the PDF from a quick google search. However, it’s also worth considering that the reason why these textbooks are obtained illicitly on a regular basis are addressed by the solutions listed above. Make the textbooks accessible only for the period you need them, and minimize the immediate barrier of cost. By using a class tracking and temp distribution system for existing and future textbooks, you reduce the demand and need for students to avoid paying for them in the first place.
References
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/whats-behind-the-soaring-cost-of-college-textbooks A brief article on rising textbook costs. A few years old at this point but still relevant to the current landscape
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/answer-sheet/wp/2014/09/17/more-students-are-illegally-downloading-college-textbooks-for-free/?noredirect=on A short piece on textbook piracy and how you might come to classify what does an does not constitute legitimate acquisition of a text.
https://www.nwf.org/~/media/PDFs/Eco-schools/McGraw%20Hill/12-4-12%20A%20Research%20Study%20on%20Textbook%20Recycling.ashx I briefly noted above at textbook recycling and how it compares to the resources needed to make them. While nothing can fully offset the cost, it’s good to explore what options are currently being implemented.
