Today I read an article by Thad McIlroy on Educational Publishing (http://www.thefutureofpublishing.com/industries/the_future_of_educational_publishing.html).
I knew that there is an issue with the pricing of textbooks, but I was unaware that in the US prices for a college textbook are even higher than here in Ireland. There also seem to be differences in the way colleges are making books available to their students through their libraries. A common problem is that sometimes books arrive in the library when the course is close to finishing (which is mostly, because publishers are too slow in meeting their customer’s demand) or only a few copies are available to too many students. The biggest issue is that lecturers are deciding which books to use and students have no influence on price decisions. Often these lecturers receive free copies from the publishers. On the other hand lecturers sometimes refrain from asking students to buy course books, because they are aware of their high prices and they know that they might only use one or two chapters of a book anyway.
In McIlroy’s article he goes on to describe start-up companies that are trying to be creative in offering free books online or reducing the price of printed books. One of those is the US-based company Flat World Knowledge (http://www.flatworldknowledge.com/). They have a selection of course books in their online catalogue, which can be viewed for free or downloaded. They also offer print-on-demand copies, audio books and even single chapters of the books, which are much cheaper than the original from large publishing houses. And the company does not break any law by doing so, ‘it commissions new textbooks from well-established authors, and offers them as free electronic downloads’ (McIlroy, 2009).
This development shows that it is time for publishers to change their way of doing business. I think that Mass Customization could help publishers to sell their textbooks. It would be beneficial to students as it would lower the cost of textbooks. It would also be valuable to lecturers, who could select their course material from different textbooks, which might suit their teaching needs more, instead of advising students to buy a number of different books that they would not use much. However, the digitization of books does also need to be considered, but I will come back to this issue later.