Campus Store Weights In on Rental Debate

In an opinion piece earlier this month in Inside Higher Ed, a University of North Dakota professor claimed that rental textbooks limited student access to course materials and stifled critical thinking and conversation. Jason Katzman, CCR, assistant director for academic resource support, CU Book Store, University of Colorado Boulder, says he understands the prof’s points but argues rentals are a symptom rather than a cause.

“Twenty years ago, a student bought a book, sold it back at the end of the semester, and maybe received something close to half (although probably not) of what they had paid if the book was being used again the next semester,” Katzman wrote in his Inside Higher Ed rebuttal. “Of course, professors complained then that the buyback process devalued the educational experience by encouraging students to part with important materials they might need for another class or later in life as a reference. Then, along came the Internet and Amazon, and the model that traditional collegiate textbook retailers had been using for years was upended. For many stores, renting textbooks is a way to compete while remaining financially viable.”

Market forces determine where students decide to get their course materials. Selling a textbook for $400 has become unthinkable, so rental has become a way for bookstores to remain relevant and viable. The current trend of providing students low-cost digital course materials as part of tuition or course fees is another solution that helps publishers and bookstores stay in business while driving prices down for students.

“If the higher-education community wants to spend large amounts of energy working on the high cost of course materials, they should. It’s important,” Katzman wrote. “However, we’re being shortsighted. In addition to course materials delivery, another model that’s broken is higher education itself. What happens when Amazon or somebody else finds a way to offer a bachelor’s degree for 75% of its current cost?”

Prof Vents about Textbook Rentals

Does renting textbooks save students money or cost them the real value of a college education? Sheila Liming, an assistant professor of English at the University of North Dakota, Grand Forks, makes a case for the latter in an opinion column for Inside Higher Education.

“A degree used to mean learning from texts and racking up a cumulative store of skills and reference materials along the way,” she wrote. “But with the rise of textbook rentals, the rules of learning are getting rewritten, and not by education professionals, and not in accordance with the needs of student consumers, either.”

Her issue with rentals is they’re promoted as a cost-savings option but there are limits to how students can access and use the materials. Those are roadblocks that inhibit critical thinking and conversation, according to Liming.

“Rental companies insist that a given book can only be ‘useful’ to a student for the duration of a single semester, and so encourage students to see their own learning as fated for expiration and uselessness,” she said. “Even worse, rental companies and vendors—including campus bookstores—actively discourage students’ efforts to use the text they have rented, since wear and tear threatens the longevity of a book that a vendor wants to re-rent over and over again.”

To Liming, rental is just the latest “scheme” to make a buck, and is doing so at the expense of students’ education, depriving them of the ability to look back at previous classes or assignments to gauge their progress.

“Students are paying more and being coerced into renting because they are told they must, and  because they have not been made aware of their options,” she concluded. “It is therefore up to education professionals to show them—and to fight for the expansion of—worthy, cost-friendly alternatives, including both OER (open educational resources) and affordable print editions. Those alternatives do exist, and anyone who says differently is, as the saying goes, probably selling something.”

Liming may have a point when it comes to affordable alternatives for her English classes, but what about required texts for introductory biology or chemistry classes? Do students with other majors actually want to keep them to reflect back on and will they ever consider those textbooks affordable?

A Different Look at Online Learning

There are plenty of consultants and management providers willing to advise institutions on the best ways to start an online learning program. Those experts are probably wrong, according to Joshua Kim, director of digital learning initiatives at the Dartmouth Center for the Advancement of Learning.

Kim offered some unconventional advice in his recent Insider Higher Ed blog, starting with the notion that online programs should not be considered a revenue source, but that the classes should be able to cover their costs.

He also suggested that online programs need to be created in areas that differentiate the institution from others rather than simply offering courses that are in demand. Small classes featuring personal attention and quality are the best way to begin.

“The reasons that small online programs have a good chance of achieving economic sustainability have to do with the cost structure of online learning,” Kim wrote. “Colleges and universities can add more (tuition-paying) students without large fixed-cost investments. No need to build new classrooms or dorms. Almost all the costs will be variable costs—and therefore can rise with enrollment.”

Finally, Kim said online courses should be about learning for everyone involved.

“Thinking of a new online learning program as a disciplined experiment will open everyone up to a growth and learning mindset,” he wrote. “Failures (and there will be many) will be opportunities to learn and improve.”

Reviving the Original Intent of MOOCs

Almost overnight, massive open online courses (MOOCs) went from idea stage to being the next big thing in higher education. While Sebastian Thrun’s first MOOC attracted an impressive 160,000 students in 2011, interest grew to 35 million individuals who signed up for at least one of the free online courses in 2015.

The blemish on the success story has always been completion rates, but MOOC providers also have had to show they are worth the investment. That pressure has led MOOC platforms to shift emphasis to job training and charging students for credentials.

That’s troubling to author Jonathon Keats, who suggested in a column for Wired that the real goal of MOOCs should be to interest people in everything.

“The technology underlying MOOCs—as well as their reach—provides a solid platform for broadening people’s interests,” Keats wrote. “MOOCs need to be linked across disciplines, with recommendation engines like those employed by Netflix and YouTube to entice students to compulsively take up new interests. Completion rates need to be de-emphasized in favor of curiosity quotients.

“Vocation training is just one thin layer of education,” he added. “For edutech to be worthy of its name—and for everything to truly change—MOOC platforms need to make every mind as expansive as the World Wide Web.”

Should Apple Buy a University?

Rumor has it that the next big thing from Apple could be an electric car. Economist Alex Tabarrok would rather see the computer giant sink its cash into a university.

To Tabarrok, an Apple University could serve as the proving ground for educational technologies. He envisions an institution of higher education that could become a leader in online technologies, artificial-intelligence tutors, and virtual-reality experimentation.

In addition, Apple’s worldwide reputation would help attract the best students, which would create a greater demand for Apple educational products. The firm has already started the process with iTunes U and training courses in business and design, according to Tabarrok.

“More than a century ago, Stanford, Carnegie, and Rockefeller used their industrial-age fortunes to build some of our best universities,” Tabarrok wrote in Marginal Revolution. “Isn’t it time for another great university built for the information age?”

Consequences of the MOOC Movement

As with almost everything, there are two sides to the massive open online course (MOOC) debate. Proponents see MOOCs as a revolution providing high-quality education to more people at less cost, while opponents are concerned about the quality since classroom instruction is lost.

Michael A. Cusumano, a professor at the Sloan School of Management at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, sees a future where elite schools weather the disruption of MOOCs because they are well off financially while a larger group of colleges and universities won’t survive.

“My fear is that we’re plunging forward with these massively free online education resources and we’re not thinking much about the economics,” Cusumano said in an interview with The New York Times.

Cusumano sees similarities between the strategic mistakes of giving away content made by media companies between 1998 and 2006 with the giveaway pricing of education by MOOCs. He wrote in an article that appeared in the monthly magazine of the Association for Computing Machinery that free online education could become the norm if enough colleges and universities join the movement.

“Stanford, MIT, Harvard, et al. have already opened a kind of Pandora’s box, and there may be no easy way to go back and charge students even a moderately high tuition rate for open online courses,” he wrote. “Free learning via the Internet seems here to stay. It is probably most valuable in moderation and as a complement to traditional university education and degrees, not as a substitute. It also will probably force educational institutions to bring down the rising cost of education, as well as the rising prices of tuitions. This seems positive, but may lead to potentially negative effects and unintended consequences: Elite universities need to ensure the true costs of their MOOCs do not become too high for society as a whole by destroying the economic foundations of less-prominent educational institutions—or of themselves.”

In Defense of Publishers and Digital

Brian Kibby, president of McGraw-Hill Education, threw down the gauntlet in a recent essay for Inside Higher Education, asserting that there needs to be a complete shift to digital in higher education, and it needs to be done within the next 36 months. He claims lagging grades and student graduation rates, along with graduates not leaving schools with the skills employers need, as the reasons the digital shift is so important.

The problem with this challenge is those paying for the course materials aren’t buying it, according to Daniel Luzer, web editor of the Washington Monthly.

“That’s because students don’t actually like the digital model,” Luzer wrote. “While electronic might work well enough for some forms of reading: novels (particularly the trash sort where you don’t want people to see what you’re reading on the subway or whatever) and magazine articles, it’s not actually all that good for studying, where underlining and marking up the text is part of what enables people to learn. It’s just hard to study using anything other than print.”

He then suggests the possibility of an ulterior motive to Kibby’s challenge.

“What students really want are used or rental textbooks,” Luzer said. “Textbook rentals are very popular on college campuses. But then, McGraw-Hill doesn’t make any money off textbook rentals or used books.”

Making publishers out to be the bad guys may be good reading on a blog, but Luzer seems to fail to understand where digital course materials and education are headed, which is part of Kibby's point. Digital course materials of the future will be not be the “PDF-equivalent” that they are today, and it will not be about “reading” text like we may have in the pre- and early-digital dark ages.

While Kibby’s forecast may be aggressively optimistic, the future of course materials will be more digital, and more value-adding in terms of contributing to student success. What will replace textbooks are products that are interactive, incorporate assessments, and which are tied to improving learning outcomes. Most major publishers, like McGraw, are making substantive investments in higher education gaming solutions, assessment of content mastery, re-envisioned LMS and learning environments, adaptive learning materials, and a range of other digital products that we would hardly recognize as “textbooks.”

Regarding the ulterior motive ascribed to Kibby’s challenge, publishers like McGraw are publicly traded commercial enterprises, and thus have a distinct incentive to maximize financial returns. If current business practices (e.g., used and rental) do not allow them to generate revenue off of products they originally created, then we should expect they will explore and promote products and business models that do.

What students want is value at a reasonable price. That does not necessarily mean “used or rental” textbooks. They are just the perceived best option at the current time.

Our mission should be to improve educational affordability and student success. We should learn to stop bashing the publishers like an autoimmune response to change.

Do I like every publisher business practice?  No.  Are course material prices too high (generally speaking)?  Yes.  Are arguments like this productive or lead to better solutions?  Not likely.

We would be much better served by finding ways to be part of the new technologies and delivery models, and helping find ways to improve them, rather than giving the long-term suppliers and partners for our core product reasons to work against and around us. Let us take some accountability and help create options that address both affordability and student success, recognizing that many of these options will be substantively digital in the possibly not-to-distant future.

Store question: What will digital mean to you?

I recently received the following message from a college store manager:

What would the top 3 titles going to digital on any campus look like? For us 5 out 2500 titles could have have a profound affect on our operations. Our top 10 titles represent close to 10 percent of our total textbook activity in September. We learned last week that there is a strong likelihood we will lose our largest adoption to an online only approach 2012-2013. 1500 -1700 copies gone to the ether ..... where will the staff and physical plant go ?

I have heard a number of stores argue that, "Digital sales are only 2.8%, why should I care?" And another store manager recently asked if I constantly beat my head against the wall. (Another store colleague answered ahead of me that I have probably beaten my head against the wall so much that my brains are now probably mush.) Humor aside, stores that do not think digital matters, even at 2.8%, could be in for a surprise awakening -- and sooner rather than later.

Back in 2007 I projected that digital would start having real impacts within the textbook industry beginning in the 2010-2012 school years. It looks like those predictions were close to accurate.

What would your store do if you lost the top 10 best selling titles in your store in the next 2 years? What if you lost the top 10% of best selling titles? This is the thing about digital -- it is like the old Gibson quote -- "The future is here, it is just not evenly distributed yet." Large adoptions are likely to move to digital first, and when that happens, if your store cannot provide digital products what are you going to do? You could see a substantive loss of sales in a very short order -- which will then lead to more difficult managerial questions than those before stores today. The question is not, "Should I do digital?" or "Why should I do digital?" The question is, "How do I best provide digital so that I continue to provide a value proposition for my customers in the future."

What does digital mean to you?

Quote of the week...

On the transitional role of GenX in higher education:

My free advice to colleges that hope to survive over the long term: bring in the X’ers, and bring them in now. Reform while it’s still a matter of choice. By the time it’s not optional, it will be too late. Disruptive changes are remarkably unforgiving; you can bend now, or break later. This group offers your last, best chance to bend.

- Dean Dad, Inside Higher Ed

As a member of GenX, of course this appealed to me. The other quote piece I thought was relevant here is the following:

[X'ers are] notoriously pragmatic, and far less likely to get caught up in the futile chase for Next Big Things. In the best case, the X’ers could change colleges to fit the realities of people’s lives as they’re lived now. That would be a real contribution, worthy of celebration.

And isn't that part of the change our industry needs? Changing our operating models to meet the realities of people's lives (i.e., the students and faculty we serve) as they are lived now?

I take a bit of heat or jibes on occasion for being something of the messenger of "doom and gloom" -- despite my own perceived sense of optimism for what we could do. It reminds me of a cartoon I once saw with a small man walking next to a sand castle carrying a sign "Repent, the tide is coming in." The first step in solving a problem or taking advantage of an opportunity is recognizing it is there.

Moving stores toward digital (or not)

Recently I had the pleasure to exchange thoughts with some of our industry leaders, including Stacy Waymire from ICBA. The move to digital course materials is a topic on many of our minds these days. In our opinion, while a number of college stores are engaging with digital change, and addressing the necessary evolution of the traditional business model, there are many stores that are not. My remarks below will seem controversial to some, but as a former faculty member I cannot on occasion help but to try to push those around me to think about what is happening in our environment from another perspective.

The college store market is reflective of higher education and publishing, the two mature industries which we intersect. As Stacy noted, “Resistance, denial, fear, withdrawal - we have it all. Our channel includes a high frequency of hostility to the reality of the shifting market, and to anyone who points out just how radical a shift is required by us to survive -- IF we can.” It reminds me of one of my current favorite quotes from Clay Shirky:

And so it is today. When someone demands to know how we are going to replace newspapers, they are really demanding to be told that we are not living through a revolution. [...] They are demanding to be lied to. There are fwer and fewer people who can convincingly tell such a lie.

We could just as easily replace "newspapers" with "bookstores" in the above quote and have it be just as relevent. Stacy remembered observing the deer-in-headlights looks in the room at a recent meeting of college stores when he said "it may be too late" for stores to make the changes required to survive. I had a similar reaction at another recent presentation where I thought some people in the room looked like they might need a stretcher by the time I finished. Particularly when I commented that in a NACS survey from earlier this year 3% of stores believed that digital would not impact their stores... EVER. I, of course, followed this by a remark that if one of those stores were in the room they should leave immediately because they cannot be saved. In that same survey nearly 31% of responding stores believed digital would not impact their sales for at least 4 years or more. I worry about that group's survival as well. Better perhaps to focus on the remaining two-thirds of the industry that is at least aware that their world is changing.

A topic that came up in our conversation about this point is the concept of asymmetrical competition. Asymmetrical competition is when your competitor refuses to compete in the traditional way, causing traditional organizations or industries to react to disruptive change. Frank Hecker has a nice paraphrasing of this concept which comes from the innovation theory literature (see also Clay Christensen’s Seeing What’s Next). He writes:

[A] classic disruptive scenario is when a market entrant introduces a disruptive innovation of some sort and incumbents are motivated to ignore the innovation, for whatever reason: For example, the innovation does not meet the needs of incumbents’ existing customers, or the incumbents’ cost structures or business models are such that they would be unlikely to make money in the initial market for the innovation. [In] this scenario the market entrant is protected by the shield of asymmetric motivation and has time to develop the sword of asymmetric skills that enables it to threaten and (in some cases) displace the incumbent.

Wow, do we sound like those incumbents at all? In the case of the textbook market, the example might be where competitors start by making some of our fundamental products free. I agree with Stacy’s observation that stores “need to consider the primary shift they are driving toward being less about preventing channel collapse, and more about abandoning the channel By which I mean, it is more about management needing to abandon their existing thinking and business model, and adopt a new approach in a market that may not even exist in total yet, and in fact may not gel for the next few years.” Wayne Gretsky might have described this as “skating to where the puck will be, not where it is.” In innovation theory we would describe this as “pursuing future profit pools.” We need to focus on where the future business will be, not where today’s business is. That may require abandoning some of our traditional practices and foci in order to survive the change to our industry.

About a year or so ago, when asked if publishing would move from print to computer, Bill Gates replied that it will leapfrog the computer and go directly to mobile. Cloud computing facilitates this. It is important to see digital course materials within the context that all of higher ed (indeed all education) is transforming. Look at Wiley Plus Wiley Plus, and the new Houghton announcement of their Learning Village deal with the Detroit public schools. Houghton will be providing a computer-based teaching system it developed with Microsoft Corp. that will connect teachers, students, and administrators. It's a radical shift away from the classic textbook publishing model and represents an industry transformation, as technology supplants books. "The textbook is no longer the center of the educational universe,'' said Wendy Colby, a senior vice president at Houghton, which is based in Boston. Wait until we hit reverse site licensing, where a university press gives all of its content away for free because the new revenue stream is a partnership with a learning system that will incorporate their content into a delivery and custom commons with a percentage going to the up. Or who knows what else?

For stores today, we must take on as part of our education and marketing the issue of "Why Free?", which allows us, as Stacy puts it so eloquently, to raise the idea that "our free has to be better than their free." We are challenged to design new business models that abandon our traditional legacy infrastructure, even while that infrastructure continues to support the existing channel. The textbook manager of the future will be as much reference librarian, helping faculty and students find the right content for the course, as a course materials expert who knows what products are available in what formats and with which associated rights. In making this shift, along with others, the college store can continue to add value, stake a claim and build market share in the new or emerging digital course materials channel.

I know -- heavy thoughts for the middle of the week. These are questions and ideas we must think about and address as an industry if we do not want to end up like record stores (and perhaps newspapers) before us.

Seth Godin's Textbook Rant

Well known and widely respected marketing guru Seth Godin published an entry on his blog this week entitled “Textbook Rant." He notes that he received more comments on this post than any other he has ever made. Since he got such a reaction, we can probably expect him to start publishing more on the topic, or being more vocal on it elsewhere. Here are a few of the “quotable quotes” from the piece:

• This industry deserves to die. It has extracted too much time and too much money and wasted too much potential. We can do better. A lot better.
• As far as I can tell, assigning a textbook to your college class is academic malpractice.
• Any professor of intro marketing who is assigning a basic old-school textbook is guilty of theft or laziness.
• The solution seems simple to me. Professors should be spending their time devising pages or chapterettes or even entire chapters on topics that matter to them, then publishing them for free online. (it's part of their job, remember?) When you have a class to teach, assemble 100 of the best pieces, put them in a pdf or on a kindle or a website (or even in a looseleaf notebook) and there, you're done. You just saved your intro marketing class about $15,000. Every semester.

Among the responses, I thought this comment related to stores was interesting: The textbook industry does need to die. Especially the privatization of textbook and textbook resale stores...

Rants like these are not uncommon. It would be pretty difficult for anyone involved with the textbook industry to deny that as an industry we have problems. Like health care, autos, or banking. As a colleague of mine observed in response to Seth's "simple solution":

While in theory this all sounds great, but do all professors (or adjunct professors) really have the expertise, time, desire, etc... to "devise" pages or chaperettes and for that matter, who ensures the validity and accuracy of the content? While technology will certainly allow for "anything goes" it would seem like there still needs to be some "control and validation" of content to be taught and that a college or university would not want to create an environment of the "wild wild west".

My opinion is similar to this articulation. I believe Seth's comment is a fairly over-simplified interpretation of what faculty are “paid to do” as part of their jobs. Many faculty do not have the expertise to write a textbook in the style he is asking for – or even if they do, there is little or no reward for most faculty to spend their time in the way he asks. The example of the faculty member who made over $20M – I am pretty sure that is the very rare exception. If they want tenure or promotion, or recognition within their field, that time is better spent on research related publication, or grant work, or even working directly with students in the class.

I always viewed the textbook more as a reference supplement. I typically made it optional. I then usually picked a set of more up-to-date articles or a professional book (depending on the course) which were the required readings. Some students really like having the reference textbook – and it can often cover topics I do not have time to cover in class, or provide additional examples or an alternative perspective. If I did have time to work on improving a course, I much preferred to spend that time finding better ways to use in-class time to maximum benefit, such as creating new active-learning approaches and exercises that would reinforce core concepts.

Writing chapterettes or entire chapters well takes time and research and is a very different skill set that many of us do not have. And frankly, that is not part of the faculty member’s job per se (and certainly not before one is tenured). The accrediting process also typically looks at what books or readings faculty assign in different courses as one means of ensuring that the curriculum is delivering on what is expected. If 20 of us are teaching different sections of the same course, it also helps to ensure some standardization among courses. Or, if I am teaching a course that builds on a prior course, or have to approve a course a student took at another institution, knowing what textbook was used in the prior course gives me some understanding of the approach and content the faculty member in the course was likely to have followed.

I also share the concern about the control and validation process. Faculty already get in trouble for inserting their biases into classes. Without the editorial checks and balances, or review process, how are standards of quality monitored? “Free” does not necessarily mean “equal” or “better.” I think there are some good approaches emerging out there, but worry that we might “throw the baby out with the bathwater” in an over-fixation on price.

As a former student (with 11 years of college education), a former faculty member, a former administrator, and now as someone in the textbook industry more directly, I think we would all agree that the textbook industry has some significant problems when it comes to price, and perhaps some additional issues related to value. It is a tough challenge. Yes, many textbooks are out of date because fields are developing far more rapidly today and the old processes do not work so well. Yes, there are faculty who do not do their job, or their students, justice when it comes to selecting course materials. Yes, the industry needs to change – die? I don’t think so. But change? Yes. There are a number of creative ways in which educational publishing could reinvent itself to continue to produce relevant and current texts, and perhaps at lower cost – but such change will not come quickly or easily. It may be outside organizations and influencers who drive a new generation of course material content. That will likely start with open educational resources (OER), and eventually evolve into new revenue-based models as products mature and the value of having enterprises to assist with the process resurfaces – since there are limitations to true OER as well. Organizations like Flat World Knowledge, Connexions, MERLOT, and others are examples of how such organizations are needed if OER is to be successful. As such organizations emerge there is an eventual need to support the organization, which means revenue. That could come directly or indirectly, but eventually it must come or the organizations are unlikely to be sustainable for the long term.

Okay – I will stop my textbook rebuttal rant there.
-M

A question...

I had a conversation recently which bothered me on several levels. One of those levels will be the punchline to a talk I am giving later this week for ICBA. But at the moment, I am thinking about another question that has been rolling around in that apparently empty head of mine... I was recently asked if ebooks are a marketing solution to a problem for which there is no demand?

After giving this quite a bit of thought, I think this is in fact the wrong question. I think the question should be more something along the lines of "are current e-book solutions a poor substitute for what is really wanted?" After Henry Ford created the automobile, he reportedly quipped that if he had asked people what they really wanted, they would have said faster horses. There is another quote, who's author I do not know, that goes something like, lightbulbs did not result from the continuous improvement of candles. In other words, sometimes breakthrough advances or radical changes in a space result in new technologies that are so different from what we remember, that they are hard to predict. But, when the right technology comes onto the scene, there can be a more or less rapid transition from the old technology to the new.

People may be skeptical of e-books, arguing that there is no market demand for such content or devices, yet look at the success of Stanza -- an e-reader application for the iPhone. At the TOC conference last week they reported that in less than seven months after their creation they had over 1.3 million downloads of their reader across 60 countries and had downloaded more than 5 million books in twelve languages. Not bad for a platform where the CEO of the company said not long ago that no one reads anymore. Maybe reading the "old way" has become like using candles before the lightbulb.

Any thoughts?

Competing with Free -- again...

Wikipedia co-founder Larry Sanger recently issued a request for philanthropists to make textbooks free online. The Chronicle's blog, The Wired Campus, recently posted an article about this, which generated a range of interesting feedback.

This is an intesting concept -- and one that has both pros and cons. Originally, I wrote a lengthy response to this plea. I decided in the end that going through all of the pros and cons might only stir up the advocates of one side of the equation or the other. Do we need to find a way to reduce the cost of course materials for students? Yes, and it seems pretty clear that mechanisms will step in to help make that happen in the near-to-midterm future. Open-source or open-access content will be one of those mechanisms.

If I have learned anything, though, in this position over the past three years is that the textbook market is far more complex than a simple list of pros and cons could capture. There are many stakeholders (students, faculty, stores, institutions, wholesalers, publishers, authors, parents, online retailers, editors, software developers, etc., etc., etc.) -- it is a sizeable industry. While I am often among the first to argue that old mature industries have a lot of room for improvement and have many opportunities to create improved efficiency and effectiveness, we must also be careful not to sacrifice quality or value at the sake of cost or in a rush to find a quick fix.

A fomer professor of mine used to say, "You can have things better, faster, or cheaper -- pick any two." I believe digital solutions are moving toward some options that are better and cheaper, but we are still learning how to do that, which will take time. We have many complex dynamics to work out. For example, for many institutions, part of the revenue from textbooks directly contributes to financial aid scholarships or supporting student activities on campus. Thus, when students buy through their college store, they are helping support other services for students on their campus. [Note: Is this universally true, no. I am referring to the majority of cases here, not the exceptions.] If stores went to a break-even model tomorrow, covering only costs and generating no profits, some other mechanism would need to step in to cover the revenue shortfall. Because most US academic institutions are heavily tuition-driven or tuition-dependent, either services would need to be cut, or tuition and fees would have to be increased. Again, that does NOT mean that we cannot or should not find ways to reduce the cost of course materials. Philanthropy could be part of that solution. Digital could be part of that solution. Faculty could be part of that solution. Other stakeholders and new entrants to the market could also be part of that solution.

For stores, one way we can help is to provide students options or choices. Digital gives us more opportunities to provide more options. For example, we find that students prefer to read the print, but study from the digital. Faculty contribute greatly to the cost of textbooks -- something I never knew or understood as a faculty member, but now have greater appreciation for having seen more of the economic models embedded in current industry business models. There are ways through the stores that we can still support our institutions, while providing better value at lower costs for students. Many of us are working on those solutions--but that will take some time.

In the interim, philanthropists could help by creating textbook scholarships at institutions, or supporting initiatives that help make quality textbooks more affordable to those who are socio-economically disadvantaged. And to put my money where my mouth is -- I did create an endowed scholarship at my undergraduate alma mater to help defray educational costs for students as they approach their junior and senior years. What would be ideal is to help every institution have fully-endowed financial aid, like we see at Princeton U -- so that no student should be denied a quality education because of the cost. Fully endowed education would make textbooks, and in fact education, appear to be more free for those who need financial assistance most. A daunting goal -- but one equally worth pursuing.

Okay, okay -- so I still wrote a lengthy response to Larry's plea. I probably still managed to stir up advocates on different sides of the equation. I will endeavor to stay off my soapbox going forward. :)