“Just what the professor ordered” redux

Ian Ayres

I received hundreds of emails in response to my textbook oped and thought it might be worthwhile to share some of the feedback (I’m not sure whether it is kosher to reveal the names in these emails, so at least this time, I will leave them out. But most of the ideas posted here are from other people).

1. School ownership of books helps Voldemort.

Close readers of Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince will realize that for
the first time Harry used a used textbook with somewhat ruinous results.

2. Textbook Rentals already occur at some colleges (Southern Illinois University, some University of Wisconsin branches).

3. The Harvard Crimson published an article 7 years ago that made virtually all the points that I made – maybe the biggest difference is that the General Chemistry textbook was only $97 instead of $148.

4. Congress might consider a rule that when a new edition is published any edition that is more than three edition in the past comes into the public domain. This idea (which is inspired by a similar idea of the great Aaron Edlin) would really dampen the edition churn. Publishers would only want to crank out a fourth edition if they were pretty sure it was an improvement over the 1st edtion.

5. The possibility of Xeroxing or ripping textbooks and illegally putting pirated pdf versions up on Grokster may drive publisher to cut licensing agreements with Universities. If a university has 130 students taking calculus, it would license 130 pdfs from the publisher.

6. One law dean wrote and said he plans to publish prices of assigned textbooks so that students have more info.

7. Judith Chevalier has really great articles on the workings of the used text book market: see her http://www.cs.duke.edu/courses/spring05/cps182s/assign/project/fall03/twh3_1/project.pdf http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=8077057.

8. Of course, some people reasonably suggest that we can solve problems if professors just are a bit more altruistic and give away their materials on the Internet. Some have succeeded with the Lessig-like hybrid of giving away pdfs but giving consumers the option of buying for price a traditional bound copy.

9. Some people criticized my analysis of high textbook prices. One professor claimed that it was inappropriate for me to generalize in a 600 word oped and that he in fact did pay attention to price. Another professor said that my ideas were not new and that I lacked the courage of my convictions because I didn’t give away my copyright. I was also criticized for not giving sufficient attention to the publisher’s response to GAO report, and for not mentioning that the GAO report concluded that the market was competitive.

10. As to my $11 rebate: I’ve received emails that other professors have given out cash rebates in the past and that a bunch have started to do it in response to my action (one professor even reported an increase in enrollment because of his cash rebate). One problem with rebates is that they don’t get the taxes right. After tax I only earn $7.50 but I give a non-deductible $11 to the students (maybe IRS would accept $11 as a cost of doing business ethically or to avoid fiduciary liability (but I doubt it); maybe IRS would accept deduction if school mandated this rebate). Rebates have some advantages over professorial charitable contributions: (1) they don’t have the problem of forcing students to contribute to professor’s charity; (2) rebates are transparently incremental gifts, while hard to know whether professor actually gave more money than she would have given otherwise.
Posted 3:14 PM by Ian Ayres [link]