Hard Copy or Electronic Textbooks? Professors Are More Concerned About Keeping Them Affordable

When students at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette went to purchase an online textbook for an introductory accounting class this week, they were sticker-shocked.

While the hard-copy version of the book and the access code for online materials would run about $250 in the university’s bookstore, the e-book version of the text, available through the online learning portal WileyPlus, was priced at $999.

As soon as students saw the price tag, they took to Twitter to express their outrage, in many cases using language not typically published in The Chronicle.

But the whole thing, the university said on Twitter, was simply a misunderstanding. A statement emailed to The Chronicle and attributed to Jaimie Hebert, the university’s provost, echoed the tweets.

The university and the publisher worked together to set the sky-high price for the online text in an effort to discourage students from purchasing it, the statement said. Many of the materials in the book were “needed for homework and in-class assignments,” and they wanted students to buy the print version. They’ve since lowered the online price to match the hard-copy cost, according to Inside Higher Ed.

Unlike UL-Lafayette, many professors are embracing, or at least allowing, e-texts in an effort to lower college costs — and some are ditching textbooks completely.

While the $300 price tag for the accounting textbook and online code might still make students blanch, it’s not unusual. The price of textbooks increased by 90 percent from 1998 to 2016, according to the American Enterprise Institute. It’s a significant barrier to access: Nearly 65 percent of students said they’d passed on buying a textbook because of its high price, according to a survey by U.S. PIRG, a consumer-advocacy group.

Online texts are often cheaper than hard-copy books but can come with other challenges: Formatting might be inconsistent across platforms, and highlighting or note-taking is sometimes more difficult than on paper.

But many professors are ambivalent on e-texts, essentially shrugging their shoulders and saying, Hey, whatever is cheapest.

Elizabeth Rambo, an associate professor of English at Campbell University, in North Carolina, said that for her, it depends. Sometimes when she refers to a specific page or passage from the required text in class, students who own a different edition or an e-book might have trouble finding it. For study-abroad and comp classes, Rambo said in a Twitter message, she doesn’t have a preference.

Andrew Robinson, a physics instructor at Carleton University, in Canada, said while he prefers paper copies of texts, he simply specifies the textbook and lets his students decide on the format. “Intro Physics textbooks are $200-350, so affordability is important,” he wrote in a direct message on Twitter. (That’s about $155 to $270 in U.S. dollars at current exchange rates.)

Numerous professors who responded to an inquiry on Twitter said they encourage students to get the cheapest option they can — e-book, rental, library book, photocopy, borrowed book, or older edition — as long as students have some version of the book.

That approach can pose challenges, said Cassandra Volpe Horii, director of the Center for Teaching, Learning, and Outreach at the California Institute of Technology. Those challenges, though, need to be weighed against the potential benefits.

“In a classroom where there are multiple kinds of texts, it is a little bit of thinking to work through all of those different permutations,” Horii said. But “if that is enhancing access for students who would otherwise struggle,” she added, “that’s something to consider.”

‘Use the Right Tool for the Task’

Even die-hard print fans are easing up. For Meredith Broussard, an assistant journalism professor at New York University, the most important thing is finding the medium that works best for her teaching goals. Broussard used to have a hard-and-fast rule against e-texts, but she’s gotten more flexible, a change she largely attributes to a shift in subject: She used to teach more creative-writing courses, but now she mostly teaches digital journalism.

Broussard now specifies when students need to bring a hard copy to class and when online viewing will work. If it’s a particularly complex text or if she wants students to dive into a discussion, she’ll require that students bring a hard copy.

“Over all, I think the best policy for teachers is to use the right tool for the task when we’re thinking about electronic versus paper,” Broussard said. “If my goal is to have people in a room together, having a meaningful interaction about a piece of writing, that works better if people read it in print and then bring the print copy to discuss, because that way the technology doesn’t get in the way of the interaction.”

Some individual professors, and even whole institutions, are trying to use open-source material or eliminate textbooks altogether to ease the financial burden of college, even in disciplines where textbooks are traditionally standard, such as in STEM classes, economics, or — as at UL-Lafayette — accounting.

Oded Gurantz, an assistant professor in the University of Missouri at Columbia’s Truman School of Public Affairs, is teaching an introductory statistics class this semester. He’s designed the class to be textbook-free, he said.

Gurantz said it’s a simple efficiency equation: maximizing learning while lowering cost. He makes his lecture slides available online and writes his own practice problems for his students, something that’s normally included in a textbook. While it’s more work for him, he says it’s worth it.

“It feels like a fairly easy trade-off to make,” Gurantz said, while also noting that for advanced classes, an approach like his may not be feasible.

As an assistant professor of economics at Weber State University, in Utah, Álvaro La Parra-Pérez is teaching an intermediate microeconomics class and an advanced economic-history course this semester. While he does require a textbook for microeconomics, he has no preference for either a digital version or a hard copy. For the advanced history course, he’s teaching it without a textbook for the first time in six years, he said, substituting papers and articles. Before, the two textbooks he assigned for the course ran students more than $200 combined.

“A motivated student will read the materials no matter the format,” Parra-Pérez said.

Regardless of what medium students read their texts on, the most important thing is that professors teach students how to read it effectively, whether that’s instructing a class on how to best read a scientific study or teaching students how to use features of an e-reader to engage with text, Horii said.

Whatever text students can both afford to buy and read effectively is good enough for most professors who responded to The Chronicle’s inquiry on Twitter.

The “cheapest option” is best, wrote Chris Jones, an assistant professor of religious studies at Washburn University, in Kansas. “I will die on this hill and take everybody else on it with me.”

Follow Claire Hansen on Twitter at @clairechansen, or email her at claire.hansen@chronicle.com.