Drop (the Cost of) Knowledge

Many publishers, including the three major players in the collegiate textbook market—Pearson, McGraw Hill and Thomson—charge students in America twice as much for textbooks as they charge students in Europe or Asia. The publishers are price discriminating, charging Americans more than students in other nations because U.S. customers are willing and able to pay more. But such a policy is inherently unfair to poor American college students who would benefit greatly from the discounts offered to all students, rich and poor, in other countries.

Fortunately, the publishers may soon have to change their pricing schedules. The Supreme Court decided in the 1998 ruling of Quality King Distributors, Inc. v. L’Anza Research Int’l, Inc. that re-importation of American textbooks no longer violates federal copyright law. Since then, entrepreneurial students have garnered major savings by ordering their books from the European branches of major online distributors—www.amazon.co.uk is a prime example—and from other foreign distributors who are able to obtain the books at significantly lower prices. Many have also made profits by selling these discounted books to their fellow students at reduced cost.

Now that students have realized that less expensive books are available abroad, however, publishers are working to reintroduce their profitable international price controls by legally forbidding foreign wholesalers from selling books back to North American distributors.

Since some esoteric textbooks are printed in small quantities, the costs associated with producing each copy is higher—a cost that is passed onto customers. But while it may be reasonable for some textbooks to cost more than the trade books that are produced in much higher quantities, it is not fair for the same textbooks, produced at exactly the same cost, to be slapped with “International Student Edition” stickers and sold “across the pond” for half the North American price.

The costs of college tuition and fees have risen rapidly for over a decade, and paying for college has become increasingly more difficult for low- and middle-income students. Additionally, state budget crises have caused additional cuts in funding for higher education—cuts that affect many of America’s students each year. And as students are rendered increasingly vulnerable by today’s poor economy, textbook publishers should not leverage American textbook prices far above their costs.

At Harvard, enterprising students should take advantage of the tremendous arbitrage opportunities available and by purchasing popular books overseas and reselling them on campus at significantly reduced prices. With little additional effort, professors may also be able to find lower cost versions of specific texts for use in their courses. Professors can also help students avoid unnecessarily inflated prices by making a practice of planning and posting their course syllabi farther in advance of the start of class. If students know their book needs early enough, they can make overseas purchases and get the texts delivered on time.

In so far as it is student friendly and technologically feasible, professors should also pursue “e-textbooks.” Class readings stored on CDs or posted on the Internet are much easier for students to share and would come with far lower costs than coursepacks. The Harvard libraries already scan some course texts into e-reserves—a welcome cost-saving measure for students.

These measures may remove some burden from the wallets of Harvard students, but for the remaining Coop costs, and for the rest of the country, publishers have set prices without continents in mind.