Regents have no solution to textbook costs

Friday, Feb. 4, 2005 | 10:05 a.m.

Nevada college students may just have to live with the rising cost of textbook prices, university regents decided Thursday.

There is very little the Board of Regents or its academic institutions can do to quash the cost of books because prices are controlled by the publishers and the book stores, according to a faculty and student committee established to investigate the issue.

In fact, the very nature of academics, with the need to stay constantly relevant to ongoing research and the low volume for each book printing, drives the cost of books, regents said.

Thus the high costs "may be the price they (students) have to pay" for their education, Regent James Dean Leavitt said.

Students typically pay anywhere from a couple of hundred dollars to up to $600 a semester for books, depending on their majors, system officials said.

The textbook committee, chaired by Nevada State College English professor Edward Baldwin and UNLV Student Body President Henry Shuck, found that bookstores regularly mark up books about 25 percent from the publishers' price, but that book prices are relatively standard across the industry.

Book stores make the most off used books, which they buy back from students at 50 percent of the original price and then sell them back to other students for about 75 percent of the original, Baldwin said.

Regent Mark Alden suggested that Congress investigate the publishers and book stores for price gouging.

"The book publishing people make the pharmaceutical people look good," Alden said. "Talk about a conspiracy."

Baldwin's committee did recommend that regents investigate current bookstore contracts at the system's institutions to see if there might be ways to cut prices and to evaluate whether it might be more cost effective to have the institution run the bookstore. Many bookstores contribute some of their profits back to the university to be used for student services.

Baldwin also recommended that individual departments delegate book ordering to one person who can help faculty get orders in sooner. That would give the bookstore a better chance at finding the best deals. Professors may also want to consider using Internet-based books that are often cheaper than print editions.

Individual departments can also establish default textbooks that are used for general education classes like English 101, Baldwin said.

Baldwin cautioned the regents against establishing a policy that faculty must order the least expensive books because, he said, that might impugn academic freedom. But he said faculty should be encouraged to consider cost when deciding what books to have their students buy.

Individual faculty members can use their ordering power to put pressure on publishers and bookstores to unbundled books that come with unnecessary extras and to reduce the cost of textbooks overall, Baldwin said.

Regent Howard Rosenberg, an art professor at UNR, said faculty members should also distinguish between books that are absolutely required for a class and those that are just recommended reading. If a professor is only going to use about 10 percent of a textbook, students shouldn't be asked to but it, Rosenberg said.

The regents' academic, research and student affairs committee voted to accept Baldwin's report and forward the recommendations to the system's institutions.