{"id":3143,"date":"2005-09-16T18:39:21","date_gmt":"2005-09-16T22:39:21","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.kith.org\/journals\/vardibidian\/2005\/09\/16\/3143.html"},"modified":"2018-03-12T16:53:06","modified_gmt":"2018-03-12T21:53:06","slug":"insert-text-here","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/2005\/09\/16\/insert-text-here\/","title":{"rendered":"insert text here"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Well, and as long as Your Humble Blogger is going to blog all day, here’s another little tidbit. The New York Times op-ed page hosted a column called Just What the Professor Ordered<\/a>, by Ian Ayres. It’s about textbook prices. They are, you see, too high.\n

Prof. Ayres references a GAO report<\/a> that examines the trends in textbook costs for college students, and notes that they are unbelievably fucking high. I mean, forget inflation, this shit is crazy. Even viewed in the context of rapidly rising tuition costs, textbooks are out of control. The GAO study concludes that, on the whole, this is because publishers have to spend a lot more money on making texts, what with all the supplemental web-sites and CDs and iPods and other peripheral crap. Prof. Ayres magisterially dismisses the conclusion and all the evidence behind it and declares that the real problem is a lack of competition.\n

Now, my immediate thought was that Prof. Ayres was just being stereotypical Yale faculty guy; any actual research done outside of New Haven can be ignored. However, I wasted quite some time reading through the GAO report and, honestly, it can<\/I> be ignored. Well, people interested in rhetoric might enjoy it as a tremendous example of the attempt to seem disinterested (like an umpire!) while actually privileging the views of one group over those of any another. The publishers (through their trade association, I believe, and encompassing as far as I can tell only the major houses rather than small or university presses) are asked a variety of things, and their responses are always transmitted transparently, as if dissimulation were unthinkable. In any matter where the publishers might be at odds with retailers, the retailers’ perspective is given first, and the publishers’ response follows and contradicts it. As for other players, well, there is no research done whatever into the views of instructors or students.\n

My favorite bit is this: “Publishers understand that when students spend money for course materials that are never used they may perceive the purchase as unnecessary.” Well, students may possibly and I should point out completely irrationally perceive<\/I> the purchase of access to crap websites or 7th-grade-level multiple-choice chapter reviews on CDR bundled with this year’s fuckteenth edition as unnecessary, but at least they know that publishers understand<\/I>. Of course, there is no need to do<\/I> anything, but they understand, and that’s what is important.\n

Not, let me say, that Prof. Ayres’s vision of a Textbook Affordability Board to which Profs would apply for permission to waste the Corporation’s money on an Art History book with color plates is anything like a solution. Some textbooks are more expensive than others, true, but some are better<\/I> than others. A Prof trying to base the decision of what text to use on cost<\/I> is up the proverbial, and if all he’s got for a paddle is the Executive Dean, well, good luck to him.\n

The truth is that the market has failed here. I know this comes as a shock, but markets can fail. In fact, markets, you know, evolve, and not with any sort of intelligence behind the design, either. The whole thing makes no sense, and the nice little graphic in the GAO report with arrows and percentages only clarifies the lack of sense. The system is built on textbooks being sold back as soon as the final is over, as if they are assumed to have no lasting value. It’s based on a bizarre farrago of retailers, wholesalers and publishers (not to mention libraries and copy shops), each of which have incentives that work counter to the market.\n

On the other hand, complaining about the cost of textbooks is kind of like Kembrew McLeod<\/a> complaining about how intellectual property law prevents law-abiding hip-hop artists from making recordings he likes at a price he can afford. Boo freaking hoo. I like monumental sculpture, but nobody’s making granite subsidies and cheap labor available so artists can make some in my price range. If the market for college textbooks is failing, well, too bad. Use the library. Share. Steal. Drop out.\n

Or, maybe, are we unwilling to just take what the market hands us? Is it possible that there’s a different way? I don’t know, but I suspect that the socialist tipping point for Americans just isn’t college textbooks.\n

chazak, chazak, v’nitchazek<\/I>,
-Vardibidian.\n<\/p>\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Well, and as long as Your Humble Blogger is going to blog all day, here\u2019s another little tidbit. The New York Times op-ed page hosted a column called Just What the Professor Ordered, by Ian Ayres. It\u2019s about textbook prices….<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":7,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[203],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3143","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-nytimes"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3143","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/7"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3143"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3143\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":17531,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3143\/revisions\/17531"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3143"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3143"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3143"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}