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R.Steve Dick/University Relations

Hannah Love, Dodge City senior, and Grant Treaster, Shawnee freshman, load up a stack of textbooks. The students served on a task force with faculty and staff to study problems surrounding textbook prices and availability. The group made several recommendations to help lower costs.

Sticker shock

Task force seeks root of textbook problems

Anyone who's ever bought a college textbook or a car has experienced a phenomenon and a realization. Sticker shock is real, and it's cheaper to buy used than new.

Though consumers can bargain with a dealer or settle for an older car to keep costs down, students can only hope used, cheaper versions of needed textbooks are available. If not, the only options are paying for a new copy or going without.

Textbook task force

To help reduce the financial trauma of buying books, a task force was formed last year to determine ways the university community could work together to make sure there is always an adequate number of new and used books available.

University Senate formed the seven-member Textbook Task Force last September. Members were Iris Fischer, associate professor of English; Craig Martin, professor and chair of ecology and evolutionary biology; Bob Basow, associate professor of journalism; Jeannette Johnson, assistant to the provost; Heather Howard, KU Libraries; and students Hannah Love and Grant Treaster. The task force built upon the work of a spring 2006 journalism class that arranged focus groups of parents and students, visited numerous campuses to study their textbook buying arrangements and met with key departments and individuals throughout KU.

Attempts to legislate prices

Earlier this year, Sen. Karin Brownlee, R-Olathe, introduced a bill in the Kansas Senate to reduce the costs of college textbooks. The Kansas Board of Regents used the task force's report in testimony to the Senate Committee on Education and the bill was subsequently dropped.

The idea of tackling the issue has existed for some time.

Two years ago, Martin had success getting prices for biology books down by getting publishers to compete against each other. The bidding war led to some books reduced in price by nearly 50 percent.

Love said student leadership had discussed taking an active role in the past.

"I think it was talked about for a long time, and people wanted to do something about it. It's just that nobody had been willing to take it on," Love said.

A book's lifespan

The group found that most courses are required and are taught every semester. On average, textbooks are changed every three years and a new book will be resold five times before it is retired. The largest number of books is used in lower-level courses. Professors generally use a textbook for three years to avoid having to create a new syllabus and exams geared toward a certain book, and students are more likely to keep their books in upper-level courses in their majors.

Among the task force's charges was to encourage early communication between faculty and the KU Bookstore. Basow said faculty often don't think about textbooks for the next year until shortly before that academic year begins.

"We (faculty) haven't carved into our brain when the textbook deadline is," he said.

The results of knowing early on if a book will be used again can pay dividends, said Tim Norris, director of KU Bookstores. If the store knows a book will be used again, not only will there be more used copies available the following semester, but they can pay students more during book buyback. For example, the bookstores can pay a student $50 for a new $100 book. The store can pay the same amount for a book that was bought for $75 used.

"That can reduce the sticker shock a lot," Norris said.

Better communication

The group suggested improving communication between the bookstores and departments by using an academic administrator listserv to communicate deadlines. They also suggested stronger promotion of the deadline by offering rewards to departments who meet the deadline. KU competes with colleges across the country for the same textbooks. The sooner an order is placed, the better the chances are for getting used books.

Faculty can also help reduce cost to students by extending use of current editions and by ensuring that the books they order for class are used. Love said students often don't buy books right away to avoid paying a large sum for a book they later find out they didn't need to succeed in the course.

Task force members said students are not the only ones who can benefit from improving the textbook process. Faculty can know their textbooks will be on shelves on time when orders are placed early.

"The bookstore's your friend. They're there to help you and enhance the academic mission," Basow said. "We need to make that clear to students as well. They're not there to just take money out of your pocket."

Increased online listing and pricing was another recommendation of the task force. If students could pre-order books, noting the section number in addition to the course number, more books could be made available. The section number is important, as different instructors often use separate texts for the same class.

Though textbooks and their associated costs are a way of life at a university, Basow praised Love and Treaster and task force members for taking the initiative to fight the problem.

"The students did something other than just complain about it," Basow said. "They got together and worked with the task force and did something to address the problem."

NOTABLE ALUMS

KU grad Molly T. Laflin was recently named president of the American Academy of Health Behavior. She is the first female president of the organization. Laflin was student body vice president and earned a bachelor's in public relations from KU. She is now a professor at Bowling Green State University.