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Textbooks: A Value Proposition
11/13/2007
and the content is aligned with learning objectives. When the alignment isn’t there, students who prefer print represent 94 percent of the student body. Align the contents of a digital bookshelf with curricular goals, price it cheaper than its print counterpart, and the percentage of students who select digital doubles.Bookstores undividedly serve the student interests. Many universities supplement their operating budgets by defining the college bookstore as a profit center as well as a student service. Consequently, the university tries to balance increasing revenue at the bookstore with reducing textbook costs for the student. Roughly half of bookstores serving college markets now operate under revenue-generating licenses granted to national bookstore chains, with Follett (750 bookstores nationwide) and Barnes & Noble (more than 500 nationwide) leading the consolidation. College bookstores provide many value-added services in such areas as book exchange and return, distribution warehouse and point of purchase, faculty consultation, awareness and publicity, and financial aid accommodations. In exchange for offering those services plus a 4.9 percent pre-tax profit margin, the textbook price is marked up approximately 23 percent. To complete the picture, the National Association of College Stores data allocates the remainder of the textbook dollar to publisher cost centers (58.4 percent), author royalties (11.6 percent) and publisher income (7 percent) (see link). The bookstore’s important “point-of-presence” in the value added chain and current role in satisfying financial aid requirements can be preserved in a print-on-demand scenario we’ll visit later.
The textbook by itself is OK (a.k.a. the shift to multimedia and universal design for learning is misdirected). Zogby’s study supports the reasonable conclusion that faculty prefer up-to-date materials, which argues for currency and short revision cycles for textbooks. The Zogby research group also found that more than half of the faculty respondents assign supplementary materials when available, and to the extent the supplements are delivered in alternative modalities their benefits are validated by the work of Howard Gardner (multiple intelligences), Felder and Silverman (diverse learning styles), the Department of Justice (accommodations for Americans with Disabilities), and the Center for Applied Special Technology
(Universal Design for Learning). Succinctly stated, any concept to be learned can be enriched and extended through multiple means of representation, expression and engagement, arguing for supplemental materials that engage and inform in a variety of ways.
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