PZ Rants About Science Textbooks

This is a posting about science textbook publishing. I have a vested interest in this debate because I'm the co-author of two biochemistry textbooks published by Pearson/Prentice Hall—one of the largest textbook publishers in the world.

PZ Myers posted an article about the high cost of textbooks [Textbooks, again]. He says,

Everyone in academia knows it: textbook publishers abuse the system. Jim Fiore decries the high cost of college textbooks, and I have to agree completely. Basic textbooks at the lower undergraduate levels do not need a new edition every year or two, not even in rapidly changing fields like biology.

There are two points here. The cost of textbooks is determined by the market and lots of other factors. As a general rule, the publishers are not making outrageous profits on individual college textbooks. They try to make their money on volume.

Most people don't understand that a large part of the cost of a textbook is due to the mark-up at the retailers. Much of the rest of the price is due to the cost of production and marketing. Look at the list of people who contribute to a textbook. You'll usually find them listed on the back of the title page. There are artists and editors as well as people who manage the project and people who market the books. Each new edition of a major textbook like biology can cost close to $1 million dollars these days. You have to sell more than 20,000 copies just to recover the production costs. (Really popular books will sell more than 100,000 copies but the difference isn't all profit.)

So let's understand and agree that the original price of a textbook is not unreasonable. My biochemistry textbook in 1965 was Conn & Stumpf and it cost $9.95. This works out to $65.80 in 2007 dollars using the handy-dandy inflation calculator on the US Dept. of Labor website. The 1965 textbook was much smaller, covered less material, and had no color figures. Modern biochemistry textbooks cost about $120-150 and they are very much better than the books published 40 years ago.

Even if we didn't want to make substantive changes in each edition and even if there were no second-hand market, we would still be forced to update our books because of pressure from competitors. Those other authors are hard at work revising and improving their books and if you don't follow suit you'll soon end up having no market share. What I'm saying here is that there are many reasons for new editions and it's very simplistic to attribute the cause to ripping off students. That's not how it works.

PZ's second point is more complex. Textbooks come out with new editions every few years. A typical cycle is four years—not the "year or two" that PZ suggests. While it is true that some of the pressure to produce new editions comes from a desire to eliminate the second-hand book market, that's not the only reason. There really is new material to add and new ways to approach the subject. In my case we're into the 4th edition of my Principles of Biochemistry textbook. The dates of publication are: 1992, 1996, 2002, and 2006. The next edition is scheduled for 2010. We're just about to start work on it. The differences between these editions are not trivial: they're part of a plan to transform the way we teach biochemistry. This is not unusual.

Churning editions is just a way for the publisher to suck more money out of a captive audience. It makes it difficult for students to sell off their used textbooks, it gives faculty the headache of having to constantly update their assignments, and if you allow your students to use older editions, it means we have to maintain multiple assignments. It's extraordinarily annoying, and to no good purpose at the university (to great purpose at the publisher, though).

This is simply not accurate. It's part of the urban myth about publishing. Everyone likes to blame someone else for the cost of textbooks.

I'm surprised that PZ would complain about having to update his assignments. You can't have it both ways, PZ. Either the new editions are trivial, in which case you don't have to change much, or they contain substantive changes, in which case your complaint about it being motivated to rip off students is unjustified. If you were using my textbook then be aware of the fact that my goal is to get you to change the way you've been teaching biochemistry. That's why I have new editions.

PZ, it sounds like you would never consider switching textbooks because it would be too much trouble for you to change your teaching. Is this a correct assumption?

On the plus side of their ledgers, though, I also urge the students to keep their textbooks once the course is over. These are valuable reference books that they may well find handy throughout their college careers and in their life afterwards. I've never quite understood the rush to dispose of those books the instant the semester ends — I kept my undergraduate biology and chemistry books until they fell apart (another gripe: the increasingly cheap bindings of these books), and I still have several of my old history texts on my shelves.

I'm with you on that one, PZ. I have all my old college textbooks. They are my friends. I never, ever, thought of selling them. They are full of notes in the margins and text highlights that reflect how I learned the material and what was important or controversial. I don't understand why students want to get rid of their textbooks when the course ends. Unless, of course, they never really cared about the subject in the first place and just needed a grade to graduate or get into medical school. But that's probably being too cynical.