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Seattle Times
Trend toward online codes is bumping cost of college textbooks, students say
By Katherine Long
February 5, 2018
Book publishers that bundle online access codes with college textbooks
are thwarting attempts to bring down the price of the books, which can
cost as much as $1,200 per academic year, a student advocacy group says.
The proliferation of access codes — which are sold along with textbooks
and hide homework and quizzes behind an online paywall — makes it
impossible for students to buy or sell used textbooks at the end of the
semester or quarter, said Madison Longbottom, the chair of WashPIRG
Students, a state chapter of U.S. Public Interest Research Group
(PIRG). PIRG is a nonprofit consumer-research agency with a number of
student chapters.
The access codes usually expire at the end of the quarter or semester,
making it impossible for students to resell or reuse them, said
Longbottom, a student at the University of Washington.
PIRG released a report late last month showing the growing trend of
faculty members teaching introductory courses using textbooks bundled
with access codes. That drives up the cost of taking these courses,
which are required for many majors.
PIRG is urging faculty to choose “open educational resources” — free
online textbooks that are usually written by groups of instructors to
cover essential college courses. Longbottom said faculty members are
usually open to the idea of switching to open resources, but many
aren’t familiar with them.
As part of their campaign to lower costs, WashPIRG students have been
visiting UW professors during office hours and asking them to sign a
faculty pledge to consider other textbook options, Longbottom said.
John Danneker, director of the UW’s Odegaard Undergraduate Library and
an open- textbook advocate, said in an email that the university has
been making “slow but steady progress” at getting faculty to switch to
the free textbooks, such as the ones offered through Open Textbook
Library and Rice University’s OpenStax.
But he said the paid access codes have become a real barrier to adoption of open textbooks.
To counter that trend, he said, open-textbook advocates are working to
create no-cost online resources to supplement free textbooks, such as
question banks and problem sets. “We feel that having open ancillary
materials will be a great improvement to the landscape and may inspire
greater adoptions of open textbooks,” he said.
The UW has also offered grants to help pay for the creation of new open textbooks, he said.
According to the PIRG report, the price of textbooks has risen more
than four times the rate of inflation during the past decade. And while
many students have found ways around paying top dollar for textbooks —
tracking down used copies online, for example — the trend toward
requiring access codes cuts off that option.
Longbottom said there are many open textbooks available for core
classes, so requiring a pricey new book bundled with access codes is
“frankly absurd.”
Read this and other articles at the Seattle Times
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