Textbook-Exchange Programs Are Saving Students Money. Will They Soon Be Obsolete?

Philip Miller learned early on that buying textbooks directly from his university bookstore was not an affordable option.

“I spent way too much on textbooks my freshman year, and then I realized, seeing what my classmates went through, that textbook prices can be a barrier to learning,” said Miller, a senior at Tufts University. “That is ridiculous when we have this $70,000 education, that textbook prices are preventing us from taking advantage of that.”

So, after getting involved in student government, he started pursuing his passion project: a textbook-exchange program that would facilitate student-to-student used-textbook sales. Student sellers contact the program’s organizers to list their used books and asking prices on a public spreadsheet, which student buyers peruse. Volunteers from the student government set up a physical location during the first few weeks of classes, and students flock to seal the deals.

The program has proved popular. Since it began, in September 2017, the program has facilitated the sale of more than 2,000 textbooks; saved students $177,000, Miller estimates; and inspired similar programs at other universities.

Cameron Barrett, a business graduate student at the University of Houston, last year created a textbook-exchange program as president of the Student Government Association. His program is different from Miller’s: Instead of facilitating the sale of used textbooks from student to student, the program collects textbooks as donations, amassing a stockpile of books for a wide array of courses. Students can then use the university library’s course-reserve system to check the books out, free, for the semester they’re enrolled in a given course.

But the success of such programs — which have their roots in the online student-to-student textbook market that’s been around for decades — may be short-lived. With textbook publishers like Pearson pivoting toward digital-first models, student textbook exchanges may run out of print books and courses that use them, leaving students with fewer options for affordable course materials.

Excitement and Expansion

Miller expected Tufts students to be excited about the program, and about their potential savings. What he didn’t expect was the flurry of emails and messages he received in the year that followed from students at other colleges who wanted his help in setting up programs of their own. Miller has helped student governments at Wesleyan, Ohio State, and Brandeis Universities build textbook-exchange programs.

Those programs’ popularity speaks to the growing recognition that high textbook prices place a heavy burden on students. According to a study by the U.S. Government Accountability Office, textbook prices rose by more than three times the rate of inflation from 2002 to 2013.

So students have been turning toward alternative markets to rent or buy used textbooks. Sometimes that means going to Amazon Marketplace, taking to Facebook to troll for deals, or hawking their tomes on student-group pages and “buy/sell” groups.

Ariel Deutsch, a junior at Wesleyan University, was one of the first students to reach out to Miller. For her, the textbook-exchange program was merely a way to institutionalize that informal online market.

“What we’re doing is essentially facilitating exchanges that would already happen on Facebook, but streamlining it in a way that it makes these exchanges happen more quickly,” said Deutsch, who runs Wesleyan’s exchange program.

She added that apart from providing an accessible, physical location for the exchanges to happen, creating the programs is a way for student governments to call attention to the problems that necessitate such secondary-market transactions in the first place.

“Part of it is just like the idea of showing the responsibility to make student resources … accessible to as many people as possible,” she said. “The first step is really acknowledging that it’s a huge issue.”

‘Digital-First’ Puts Programs at Risk

But changes in publishing may render textbook exchanges less viable in the near future. Kaitlyn Vitez, director of the U.S. Public Interest Research Group’s higher-education campaign, said that publishers’ shift to digital textbooks, and the expiring access codes that may accompany them, are bad news for student textbook exchanges, which rely on the circulation of large volumes of print textbooks to remain feasible.

“The increased use of digital, expiring products … is explicitly designed to work around the ways that students have figured out how to work around the broken marketplace,” Vitez said. “It’s really exciting that student-government leaders want to make formal exchanges on their campuses, but in today’s broken textbook marketplace, those workarounds are going to be less effective.”

“Inclusive access programs,” in which students are automatically subscribed to digital textbooks upon enrolling in a course that requires them, are also increasingly popular. Colleges that use inclusive access are required to offer materials at discounted prices, and students are allowed to opt out. But automatic enrollment will almost certainly take a bite out of resale markets like student exchanges.

Student-run textbook-exchange programs, Vitez said, are a short-term solution to a long-term problem.

“It’s really trying to fix the problem that students have right now, and that’s: We need books for next semester. But students have a lot of power to ask for bigger commitments from their schools toward affordability,” she said.

An Institutional Alternative

Access to course materials can be made affordable even in a digitally dominated publishing field, but students can’t do it themselves.

Robert Butterfield runs a program at the University of Wisconsin-Stout that has been operating for more than 100 years. Through the program, students can gain access to all course materials, which Butterfield said amounts to an average of $1,500 in value, for $45 per class. He also said that next year students can probably expect a 12-percent drop in price.

“We do it through negotiation with publishers, we do it by buying used books, we do it by investing in things like inclusive access,” he said. “Our unofficial model here in my department is ‘finding affordability wherever it lives.’”

Student fees pay for the entire program, which purchases textbooks and lends them out like a library system. For digital titles or access codes, Butterfield said, the program negotiates with companies to gain longer-term access to materials so they can be recycled from one year to the next.

Butterfield thinks cutting textbook costs is a good place for universities to start focusing on affordability problems.

“The likelihood that we’re going to reduce the high cost of tuition is low,” he said. “The ability for us to move the price of room and board is much more difficult, much more involved. But content is a way for us to address the high cost of education.”

Despite the daunting prospect of digitization, Miller, of Tufts, isn’t slowing down. He said he plans to form the Textbook Exchange Network, an umbrella organization unaffiliated with the university to host the software he wrote for his program. He’ll coordinate with interested student governments around the country.

“Our goal,” he said, “is to make textbooks as accessible as possible to as many students as possible.”

Liam Knox is an editorial intern at The Chronicle. Follow him on Twitter @liamhknox, or email him at liam.knox@chronicle.com.