Free textbooks! What's not to like?

As every college student knows, textbooks are expensive!  The game is rigged: publishers are constantly releasing new editions of textbooks with only slight changes to the material, but if you don't buy the overpriced textbook, you're going to have a hard time passing the class.

Wouldn't it be great if textbooks were free and high-quality?  That's the premise behind the open textbook movement.  The Open Textbook Network, a large collection of colleges and universities including Ohio State and Penn State, is at the forefront in promoting the creation and use of open textbooks.  You can browse available textbooks in their Open Textbook Library.  Can't find a textbook that matches up with your class?  If you're a student, ask your professor to consider writing an open textbook for the class.  If you're a professor, consider writing an open textbook for your subject area.  Lots of students will thank you.

Arrr, how ye be getitng ye textbook?

So, let's get this straight right off the bat - I am in no way asking you to self incriminate in any way.

That said, however, I do wonder what hoops you have had to jump through in order to get access to the required textbooks for your class? If this recently published study is to be believed, you might have been like one of the 25% of surveyed students who resorted to illegally downloading a copy of an eTextbook.

Here in the library we are directly impacted by those rising costs as well, which is why we can not possibly have on hand a copy of every textbook used on campus; we could spend our entire annual budget on textbooks and only buy a fraction of them you need. And, unlike those in the survey (perhaps unfortunately), our professional code forbids us from resorting to piracy. This leaves us with the question - how do how do we work together to get you access to the textbooks you need without breaking either of our banks or the law?

Though I am sure my colleagues in our Book and Document Delivery department, specifically those who work on providing reserves, might have more to say on this than I do, there are a couple things that come to mind. One, perhaps more long term solution is to support open access projects like Open Access Textbooks. They are a grant funded organization, based in Florida, that is working to set a model for states around the nation for Creative Commons licensed textbooks.

Another might be to call out publishers for their predatory pricing practices, as @techdirt mentions in the above tweet. But again this is more of a long term solution. And, while encouraging faculty to author more open access textbooks, and publishers to reign in their tactics, might be fine goals, they're not particularly helpful for you today.

Another strategy that might help more quickly, is to encourage your faculty to partner with the library to provide the textbooks you need on reserve. Talk to them about the very real impact the skyrocketing cost of course materials is having on you, and refer them to us. We have policies and procedures in place to help them provide you with the materials you need in your classes.

And, in the meantime, what other solutions have you found to this problem?

Finding Inspriration from the Great Library of Alexandria

The Bibliotheca Alexandrina (photo: Argenberg)

If you are a student, you probably have a feeling that textbooks are enormously expensive. It turns out that over the past few decades the cost of textbooks have been rising at a rate much higher than inflation, even outstripping the rate of medical services.

For this reason, one of the most common questions students ask at the beginning of the semester is whether Langsdale Library has a copy of their textbook. In some instances we do have a copy, but it is usually put on reserve for in-library use since we only have one copy available. However, in most cases we do not have textbooks or maybe we only have an older edition, because we simply cannot afford to buy new editions of every textbook used on campus while still providing the resources students, staff, and faculty need to do independent research.

So, what can a library do?  Well, it turns out we have found inspiration in an article by Daniel Heller-Roazen entitled “Tradition’s Destruction: On the Library of Alexandria.” According to Heller-Roazen, one of the ways the Library of Alexandria became so great was by adopting a rather aggressive collection development policy. By aggressive, what I really mean is stealing. Apparently when ships would visit Alexandria, if there was a scroll on board that the library did not have, they would simply take it, make a copy and keep the original for themselves. They would also borrow items from other libraries, make a copy and keep the originals for themselves.

So, if that worked for the Great Library of Alexandria, why couldn’t it work for the Great Library of Langsdale? In today’s more enlightened times, we have laws that prevent us from fully following the Library of Alexandria model. As I am sure you have figured out, the laws to which I am referring are the copyright laws which prevent us from making an unauthorized copy to give back to the original owner. As a state institution, what we can do is use the doctrine of eminent domain to confiscate books for the general good of the UB community. Eminent domain does demand that owners be fairly compensated for their property, however we are pretty sure we can get around that by merely offering a credit towards any fines the textbooks' original owners may incur during their stay at UB.

So this summer we will start a pilot program where, for the first few weeks of the semester, we will be checking the bags of all visitors to Langsdale Library.  If you have a current edition of a textbook that we do not already own, we will take it and put it on reserve for the class. Don’t worry, you can still read it in the library. Well, as long as none of your classmates are using it. Plus you can use your late fee waiver to keep that book out overnight once or maybe even twice before having the fines exceed the value of the waiver.  So if you are lucky enough to have your textbook chosen for this pilot program, go ahead and keep that DVD out a few extra days over the summer, and rest happy in the knowledge that the textbook you purchased is now going to help the entire class.

Happy April 1 everyone.

Will Apple change the future of textbooks?

News is flying around Apple's new tool to create multimedia textbooks for the iPad. Last week Apple announced its iBooks Author, which allows anyone to create an e-book on the ePub3 platform. Touted as the "Garage Band" app for authors, many think that this could cut e-textbook publishers out of the production loop and make ebooks more affordable for students.

For more on this story, read the arsTechnica article and campus responses to the news in the Chronicle of Higher Education.

What are your thoughts? How will this change the e-textbook landscape?

(Image from Apple iBooks Author)