We’ll give you a deal on textbooks if you don’t mind some ads.

In light of my earlier post on academia and capitalism, occasional commenter Jake asks what I think about the newish move, described in this story from the Associated Press, to cut textbook prices by putting advertisements in them.
So, I’ll give you some key bits of the article with my thoughts interspersed.

Textbook prices are soaring into the hundreds of dollars, but in some courses this fall, students won’t pay a dime. The catch: Their textbooks will have ads for companies including FedEx Kinko’s and Pura Vida coffee.
Selling ad space keeps newspapers, magazines, Web sites and television either cheap or free. But so far, the model hasn’t spread to college textbooks — partly for fear that faculty would consider ads undignified. The upshot is that textbooks now cost students, according to various studies, about $900 per year.
Now, a small Minnesota startup is trying to shake up the status quo in the $6 billion college textbook industry. Freeload Press will offer more than 100 titles this fall — mostly for business courses — completely free. Students, or anyone else who fills out a five-minute survey, can download a PDF file of the book, which they can store on their hard drive and print.

Textbook are hellaciously expensive, and seeing as how the majority of my students are working at least one job (and often more than that) to pay for school plus housing, transportation, and sometimes food, I’m generally pretty open to ways to lighten their financial load. Cheaper textbooks would help.
Yes, the reduction in price comes from delivering their textbooks with advertisers’ messages. But at least among college students, please note that they seem to be remarkably good at tuning things out. (Really, you should watch some of them in class!) Also, while copying services and coffee are the kind of things college students may well consume more of than your average consumer, to my eye they don’t have a great deal of brand loyalty here — they’ll go for the best balance of what’s cheap and conveniently located (i.e., there’s time to access it between classes). But, they like coupons.
And, there seems to be an obvious benefit to free downloadable textbooks beyond the price: it’s possible to get them when you need them, rather than falling victim to a publisher’s backorder (yes, Oxford University Press, I am looking at you) or a bookstore ordering SNAFU.

The model faces big obstacles. Freeload doesn’t yet have a stable of well-known textbook authors across a range of subjects, and it lacks the editorial and marketing muscle of the “Big 3” textbook publishers (Thomson, Pearson, and McGraw-Hill). Its textbooks don’t come with bells and whistles such as online study guides that bigger publishers have spent millions developing in order to lure professors — who assign textbooks and are the industry’s real customers.

Maybe things are different in business classes, but I have no use at all for those “bells and whistles”; as such, I wouldn’t order a textbook with such add-ons. The main thing they add, in my field, is expense. (I say this as someone who developed an online course, start to finish. None of the “online resources” bundled with philosophy textbooks address any pedagogical issues that I can’t address better with my own stuff.)

… What Freeload has going for it is its arrival on the scene at a time when textbook publishers are under immense pressure to moderate prices. A recent government study found prices have risen at twice the rate of inflation since 1986.
A new Connecticut law requires that textbook sellers tell professors what their books will cost students, and other states are considering similar measures. Cost complaints come not just from students and parents but also teachers. A 2005 study by the National Association of College Stores Foundation found 65 percent of students don’t buy all the required course materials — which means many probably aren’t learning the material, either.
Students “are saying, ‘to heck with it, we’ll try to wing it,'” said Jack Ivancevich, a longtime University of Houston professor who helped found Freeload.

Excuse me, do you mean to tell me that there are professors adopting textbooks without knowing what the required texts will cost students? What’s with that? I’m not saying one should never teach from a text that happens to be pricey — if it’s the best text for the course, it’s the best text for the course — but shouldn’t you at least try to have a sense of what that’s going to cost your students, and acknowledge that they will be paying a lot for what you see as quality? And, in cases where there is a choice — where all the available anthologies have the six main papers on a given subject and only differ in the other papers they include — for goodness sake, see if it’s not possible to get the pedagogical job done with the cheaper anthology.
News flash: there are already students who don’t buy the texts because of the expense. At least for some students, the price tipping point on the buy/don’t buy decision is lower than the professor’s estimate even when the professor is striving to minimize the prices of the books adopted. And it’s so much less fun to teach a course when a significant portion of the class will never do the reading for want of books.

Publishers answer criticism by saying textbooks are expensive to produce, and note they are clobbered by the rapidly expanding secondary market for re-sales in bookstores and on the Internet. Publishers get nothing from those sales, so they essentially have to recoup their investment in one year’s worth of sales.

There’s a chicken-egg issue here: would resale be such a popular option if new textbooks (or even used textbooks purchased through campus bookstores) weren’t so darned expensive? When you factor in the shipping time (and cost) of getting books from online vendors, this is only a reasonable way to get your books for class if the price is way less than the campus bookstore price. And, students can’t help but feeling gamed here.

The industry also is exploring ways to use technology to cut distribution costs and prices. Thomson, for instance, is making “ichapters” of textbooks available, similar to the iTunes model for music. But so far, publishers have resisted selling ads.
A Canadian subsidiary of McGraw-Hill briefly rolled out an ad-based model, but dropped the plan last year. Susan Badger, CEO of Thomson Higher Education, said her company tested the idea with focus groups, in biology, but the professors were adamantly opposed.
Tom Doran, Freeload’s CEO, says McGraw-Hill’s experiment failed because it didn’t use the ad revenue to reduce prices enough to get students’ attention. As for faculty, Doran says he realizes not everyone will go for it.

It would be interesting to see just how much of a savings the per-chapter electronic delivery would be for students. Sure, it would make sense if a class were only using three out of ten chapters in an assigned text … but the big publishers may not be making huge cuts in the price to students simply because big publishers have have big expenses in the form of promotions. Glossy catalogs in faculty mailboxes at least a few times a year, reps coming through faculty offices at least once a term — it all adds up. And, at least for me, none of that gets me to adopt a book I wasn’t already going to adopt.
Hey, that says something about the limited power of advertising, doesn’t it?

… As to objections that textbooks shouldn’t have ads, Doran notes ads already appear in academic journals. He says Freeload’s ads won’t be distracting; they will be placed only at natural breaks in the material, and won’t push products like alcohol or tobacco. Schools with other concerns could customize their standards; for instance Brigham Young University, founded by Mormons, could nix ads for caffeine products.

There are some kinds of advertisers you just wouldn’t want in textbooks. Online papers and online diploma mills are two that leap immediately to mind, and I’d be just as happy if there weren’t tobacco or pornography ads, either. But college students can tell when they’re being sold to. Besides, some of them won’t make it to the end of the chapter, one of the “natural breaks” where one assumes ads would be located.

… “I was pretty disgusted with the basic textbook model,” [Fordham University professor Frank] Werner said. Textbook authors, he says, often waste time making pointless revisions just so publishers can justify putting out new editions.
“That didn’t seem like an ethical thing to do and it seemed like a hell of a waste of time,” he said, adding there’s no need to do that with Freeload.

This is the “students being gamed” I was talking about earlier. I’m pretty clingy with my books, but there were a few courses in college for which I bought super-expensive textbooks, deciding in advance to sell them back to the bookstore at the end of the term to recoup some of the loss. In every case, the bookstore wouldn’t buy them back, because a new edition was about to come out. I was steamed. (And, the next term, when I paged through the table of contents of the new edition at the bookstore, there would be very little discernable difference from the previous edition.)
In some fields, obviously, things move quickly and new editions are essential. In others, it would seem the new editions are just about protecting the publisher’s profits.

Shannon Langston, a rising sophomore at Georgia Tech taking classes this summer while also juggling two jobs, said she often won’t buy textbooks unless she hears from other students that it’s absolutely essential.
But when her accounting professor assigned a Freeload book, she was glad not to have to make that call — and worry that she wouldn’t be able to sell back a new book because the publisher had already rushed out a new edition.
“I definitely don’t mind ads,” she said, “if it helps with the price.”

College students — the people buying college textbooks — are old enough to buy TVs and magazine that expose them to huge amounts of advertising relative to the content. Requiring them to buy a textbook that has ads is not subjecting them to some Clockwork Orange-style forced exposure to ad content. (If we had that kind of power, more required reading would actually be done for college classes.) And, here’s a college student saying she can handle the ads if it makes the books affordable. I’m not going to recommend that we get all paternalistic and say, “No, sweetie, the ads are bad for you, so you’ll just have to pay more for your books.”
Exposing younger students to lots of ads this way might well be inappropriate, but it’s already happening. My kids bring home school lunch menus that are packed with advertising for movies, video games, and junk food. Luckily, it turns out even little kids can be taught to recognize when they’re being targeted by advertisers and to start tuning that out.
So, in the evolutionary arms race between advertisers and consumers, the advertisers start looking for ways that they can’t be tuned out. I’ve heard tell of embedded advertising, or something very close to it, in the word problems in kids’ math books. If the ad is all mixed up with the stuff the students are required to read, it is harder to tune it out.
My inclination, at that point, would be to opt for in-class ruthless mockery of the products advertised in the embeds. Call it a teachable moment.