Students Hit Wallets Before Books

Last week the Government Accountability Office made official what students have been saying for years: College textbook prices are skyrocketing. Or at least they are in the United States. Other countries, notably the United Kingdom, are getting a much sweeter deal.

Visit Amazon.com and check out the price of one new copy of Inorganic Chemistry: Principles of Structure and Reactivity, a college standard. It’s listed at $140. Then go to Amazon’s UK site. The list price magically drops to 46.99 British pounds, or about $82.50. You’ll find the same situation among Amazon’s best-selling textbooks.

Why are publishers charging one-and-a-half times more here?

Rampant merger activity has defined the educational publishing industry for the past decade. Three mega-publishers essentially control the market: Pearson PLC, a British conglomerate; Canada’s Thomson Learning; and the lone American, McGraw-Hill Companies. By its own accounting, Pearson alone produces a third of all college textbooks sold in America.

With that sort of market share, you can make your own rules such as selling textbooks in more expensive shrink-wrapped packages with DVDs and study guides. You can produce new “editions’’ every 18 months, changing little more than the page numbers – but enough so that earlier used copies will be hopelessly mismatched with the professor’s version. And you can pressure booksellers not to carry less expensive used books.

Or you can sell your books at an artificially high price when customers have nowhere else to turn. These are the perks of near-monopoly.

U.S. college students are strapped enough without subsidizing their British peers. They now pay nearly $900 per year for books and supplies, according to last week’s GAO report.

For those who attend community colleges, the cost of books effectively doubles the cost of their education.

A textbook also is one of those strange products that the buyer does not choose. Rather, a professor selects the text.

The publishing industry responds to concerns with a few standard lines: Consolidation has made them better able to create innovative learning tools; costs for texts come from expensive human resources such as writers; and the prices U.S. students are paying aren’t that high

There is truth to at least the first two assertions. Educational publishing is a business, not a charity. Nonetheless, evidence suggests that unfair practices are becoming common.

Last year, the House Subcommittee on 21st-Century Competitiveness held a hearing on the fairness of textbook prices. And from time to time the Justice Department has threatened antitrust action. But these moves have done little. Since that hearing Congress has been silent.

The global market is doing some correcting of its own. At one U.S. university, students got together and ordered pallets of cheap books from India.

Some colleges have organized programs where professors agree to use a particular book for three or more years.

But for now the publishers still call the shots. They lobby Congress for tighter import controls by insisting that booksellers overseas refuse to sell to U.S. customers.

Lawmakers should resist any calls to further restrict the free market for textbooks and instead should begin serious investigation into whether current consolidation merits an antitrust case.

Evan S. Dobelle is president and CEO of NEBHE.