3 reasons why reducing the price of textbooks isn't the answer.

For the past few years, the price inflation of textbooks has been publicised ad nauseum. It is now largely common knowledge that textbook prices have increased by over 847 per cent in the past 30 years, which is more than three times the rate of inflation. A cursory glance at social media will allow you to get a sense of the depths of popular student opinion, and with 65 per cent of students having not bought a textbook due solely to it being too expensive, it’s clear that there’s an issue. 

Against that backdrop, in a market where it’s possible to spend more on a university textbook than a second-hand car, the argument against price reduction initially seems fairly obtuse. Surely it rings true that if prices are reduced, students will be better served, and publishers will also win when they see a return to growth when they make up the difference in scale? I think that’s fundamentally short-sighted. Context is of course key though. In the past 10 years, total spending on textbooks has decreased by over 31 per cent, meaning that whilst textbook prices have inflated, the total units sold have decreased. I spoke with one industry veteran who said that in the 1980’s a publisher might expect to sell 2,000 copies of a standard academic title, at a price point between $20 and $30. That picture has now changed to expecting closer to 200 titles at quadruple the price. This trend presents a classic cycle of decline, which is totally unsustainable.

Over the past few years, there has been a clear (and earnest) trend towards reducing these prices. And, to an extent, it’s been working. VitalSource and RedShelf have both seen prices of standalone textbooks reduced by between 26 and 51 per cent since 2016. Both platforms now have an average textbook price of $39. The publishers operating on these platforms aim to use this price reduction as a way to combat the secondary market, and the first signs are positive – all five of the major publishers have seen their total sales on these platforms increase as a result.

It’s not that efforts to reduce prices aren’t commendable – they are. And they’re undoubtedly better than inaction. They’re just not the long-term solution. There is a general consensus that the $40 price point represents some kind of magic threshold under which textbooks can be deemed ‘affordable’. I think a large part of this arbitrary threshold is the collective fear that price reduction needs a defined end point to prevent the dreaded ‘race to the bottom’. Yet that race is inevitable with any significant efforts to reduce prices in an ownership model. The context of the past few decades of price inflation was an unintentional race to the bottom of units sold, whereas price reduction will inevitably lead to squeezing of margins and a race to the bottom in textbook prices. Either way, it’s unsustainable.

Textbook price reduction just isn’t the full picture. It works for a model of ownership that’s never been particularly well suited to the individual student’s demands. So why is it that publishers need to look further afield to better serve students?

Addressing convenience

Firstly, moves towards affordability are meant to also impact upon ease of accessibility too, and yet textbook price reduction doesn’t actually achieve this. If students are still having to pay $39 for a textbook (note: below that arbitrary ‘affordability’ threshold), it doesn’t hold up at scale. Students require breadth of access, which, with an ownership model (even at reduced prices) isn’t feasible for the individual. As a society we ask students to ‘read for a degree’ and yet perpetuate a model that doesn’t feasibly allow the individual to do this successfully. In 2018, Cengage released research showing that 81 per cent of students now say that easy access to digital course materials would impact positively on their grades. This follows a groundswell of student opinion that suggests they are actually less concerned by price of the individual textbook and far more concerned with having all of the content in one place, at a total price that they deem to be affordable.

No price reduction will counteract piracy

Whilst the reduction of textbook prices is, admittedly, having a positive impact for publishers in controlling the secondary market, it has very little capacity to impact significantly on the rise of piracy. If a student looks to buy a book second-hand, they are obviously likely to be swayed by price. Yet significantly more students are now turning to piracy which makes them less likely to be swayed by price as the cost is already zero. These are students that can largely be reached by delivering value through convenience. Indeed, if the industry is serious about countering the huge threat of piracy, it desperately needs to deal with the threat more proactively, by changing not only the perceived affordability, but also the paradigm of how content is made available to students. This statement in a recent article by Michael Kozlowski perfectly summarises the circular nature of the issue:

“The piracy websites obviously are not attending the court hearings. They will likely lose just for not retaining their own council and fighting the charges. Even if one website gets shut down, it will likely just change the domain and continue to run Google Ads and move everything to a new server”.

 Is it any wonder that the likes of SciHub, LibGen and Ocean of PDF prosper when the industry responds with such futile, toothless reactivity? If the extent of the action on piracy is to reduce prices and incessantly fire out cease-and-desist letters, we simply won’t get anywhere. For sake of comparison, would Limewire and Napster have been made redundant by iTunes reducing the price of an album from $11.99 to $5.99? Of course not. The biggest factor in the reduction of music piracy was the advent of Spotify and other aggregated streaming services.

The over-reliance on price reduction of textbooks also perpetuates an ownership-based system of bookselling which, at least in the digital form, is no longer fit for purpose. By championing affordability through reduced prices it obfuscates the need for an overhaul towards access models over ownership. By contrast, with access models, affordability ends up as practically a by-product, whilst publisher remuneration can be kept fair, consistent and most importantly sustainable. Affordability simply needs to be viewed as part of a wider picture, not as the only variable.

 Recovering the publisher-student relationship

Part of the short-sightedness of relying solely on textbook price reduction also lies in the fact that it does nothing to repair what is often a toxic relationship between publisher and consumer. A telling statistic emerged in 2016 in Science magazine, stating that 88 per cent of students do not equate the piracy of academic content with criminality. It is often, in their minds, a ‘victimless crime’ because it is (falsely) assumed that the publisher has been deliberately inflating prices to build ever larger margins at the expense of students. The true danger of viewing textbook price reduction as a method to reduce piracy and repair the relationship with the consumer is that there’s no arbitrary level at which this will happen, thus resulting in the ‘race to the bottom’ on price that every publisher is so desperately keen to avoid. The issue is most apparent when the focus is solely on price point, which inevitably comes at the behest of the factors of content quality and relevance. By engaging with different, access-based models, publishers have the means to allow the quality, relevance, and thus genuine value of the book to speak for itself. The act of simply slashing the price of a textbook by up to 50 per cent overnight does the exact opposite, leaving students with the perception that it was over-priced in the first place. 

Fundamentally, textbook price reduction is definitely better than inaction - I want to make that clear. It just isn’t enough - it’s akin to simply wallpapering over the cracks. The publishing industry must also look at the lack of sustainability in the ownership model itself. By introducing fairer pricing but within an aggregated access-based model, the student (and the publisher) would both be far better served in the long run.