In July, the U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO) reported that textbook prices have increased at twice the rate of inflation since 1986. The federal study concluded that the average student pays nearly $900 a year for textbooks and supplies – almost triple the cost two decades ago. Publishers dispute the statistic, saying that it unfairly includes expensive supplies such as computers, and that textbook costs are actually in the $600 range. Moreover, they argue, and the GAO acknowledges, that the rising cost of the texts is driven in part by increased investments in new products to enhance learning.

But it's difficult to dispute that many students are feeling the financial crunch. In Virginia, a survey by the State Council of Higher Education found that more than 40 percent of undergraduates have passed up buying at least one textbook because they couldn't afford it. Closer to home, Lindsay Hopkins, a UC Irvine undergraduate majoring in political science, says she knows classmates who struggle academically because they are forced by economics to forego purchasing textbooks, instead seeking them out in the library or photocopying pages from them -- or, when that fails, passing up the required reading. "At a time when financial aid is being cut and our tuition fees are going up, these costs are on everyone's mind," Hopkins says. Legislation has been introduced in Washington, D.C. and Sacramento to address these concerns.

What's behind the high cost? Publishers argue that textbooks are expensive to produce, and have a relatively small market. But the government report was critical of the increasingly common practice of packaging CD-ROMs and other instructional supplements with the books, driving up the prices. A separate report by the California Public Interest Research Group (CALPIRG) concluded that half of all textbooks now come "bundled" with extras, in most cases without the option of purchasing the textbook without the additional materials. CALPIRG found that nearly two-thirds of the faculty it surveyed said they "rarely" or "never" used the bundled materials in their courses.

CALPIRG is also critical of what it believes to be too-frequent replacements of textbooks with new editions, particularly in subjects where there are few fresh developments and the new versions are only mildly different from the previous ones. The GAO report found that the average textbook is updated every 3-4 years, as opposed to the average of 4-5 two decades ago. By rendering the previous versions obsolete, the frequent updates diminish the used-book market -- an alternative that makes the books more affordable to students, both by enabling them to buy lower-cost used books and by allowing them to sell their books once the course is complete.

When they can't find used books at their campus bookstores or online, a growing number of students are either sharing or renting their textbooks. CALPIRG, which has student chapters on eight UC campuses, has encouraged textbook-rental programs, in which institutions lease the books to students for the term. So far, few of the nation's campuses have embraced the idea.

The CALPIRG survey found widespread faculty support for alternatives that lower students' costs while maintaining quality. Hopkins, who serves as the CALPIRG student coordinator at UC Irvine, says many of her professors now undertake cost-benefit analyses before deciding to assign expensive books.

Many are also looking at digital alternatives. According to the Association of American Publishers and National Association of College Stores, printing and editorial costs account for an average of 32.3 cents of every dollar in textbook costs, indicating that online textbooks could be sold for a substantially lower price. Companies such as Ebrary and NetLibrary offer online books, and Amazon.com recently announced an initiative to enable consumers to purchase electronic versions of parts of books sold on its site, as permitted by the publishers. The viability of the e-book option was tested this fall at 10 colleges and universities around the country whose bookstores began selling electronic versions of approximately 200 textbooks, downloaded directly into students' computers, at 33 percent below the price of the hard-cover books. Various restrictions on viewing and printing were designed to discourage mass piracy. The pilot program, coordinated by five academic publishers and a wholesale distributor, MBS Textbook Exchange, has yielded mixed results. MBS Textbook Exchange recently reported that e-books were accounting for 5.7 percent of the textbook sales at the participating institutions.

Those who run bookstores on the UC campuses are watching the e-book experiments with great interest. "It's still very early," says Neil Yamaguchi, academic support director for the UCLA Store. "There's so much up in the air right now in terms of the distribution and other logistics. We want to be part of this movement, but it's not clear how it's going to work and the migration to this format may be very slow."

So far, the traditional print textbook does not appear to be endangered by technology, says Lynne Withey, director of the UC Press. "We all experiment with digital books, but so far, they are not what most people want to buy," she notes.

Digitization offers publishers the potential for additional revenue, Withey says; in recent years, UC Press has licensed digital editions to vendors such as NetLibrary and Ebrary, without any resulting erosion in print sales. However, a trend toward increased availability of digital books raises many questions. "Libraries are certainly interested in buying books in digital form, but the question is, will they eventually stop buying print, as we're seeing with journals?" Withey says. "How will the digital books be packaged? If they are much easier to share, that could significantly erode the market." So far, these issues remain a concern, not a reality. "We aren't seeing diminishing text sales or diminishing revenue from income coming in through payments for permission to reuse material" Withey says. "But we're waiting to see if that changes."

For now print still appears to hold inherent advantages for both users and authors. In its usage studies, UC Press has found that the average number of pages consumers visit when they go to one of the publisher's books online is five. "People don't want to read huge numbers of pages on their screen, and they don't want to print out piles and piles of paper," Withey says. "If it's a book that they really want and would like to keep, they opt for print." Authors, too, have been resistant to making the transition to e-books, perceiving that print versions are more prestigious, Withey adds.

While the electronic textbook market struggles to gain a foothold, other alternatives are being explored. MIT's OpenCourseWare, in which the university makes all of its course materials available online for free use, is now several years old and has been emulated by other campuses. Along similar lines, Rice University has developed a model with the potential to at least partly replace textbooks. Rice's Connexions, like OpenCourseWare, can be accessed by anyone with an Internet connection. But unlike the MIT program, Connexions assembles materials from instructors everywhere to create a repository of course content, and offers free software that facilitates interactive systems and graphics to help students grasp concepts, as well as the flexibility to constantly update content.

"This has the potential to reshape both academic peer review and publishing by putting the material out there for people and letting them decide what's worth using," says Jeff Wright, dean of engineering at UC Merced. More than 350,000 individuals are using the Connexions site each month, roughly half on return visits. Wright has introduced Connexions to UC Merced colleagues in the hopes of creating an open-source culture at the campus.

Creative Commons

Connexions uses an open-source licensing framework, Creative Commons, that enables authors to dictate the terms of usage for their materials. A non-profit organization founded in 2001 with the goal of providing a flexible alternative to traditional copyright laws, Creative Commons grants copyright licenses that say, in effect, "some rights reserved" -- preventing use of the material for commercial ventures, for example, while allowing it to be freely distributed, with proper attribution, for educational purposes.

At UC Irvine, Hopkins and other members of the campus' CALPIRG chapter are promoting digital "Creative Commons Textbooks." "The Creative Commons license grants all baseline license rights to the material, including the right to freely distribute the work," says Hopkins. "A Creative Commons textbook would have the Creative Commons license source code embedded in it. This would be perfect for an academic setting, where the electronic material could easily be printed by the school publisher, and distributed at the cost of printing. A solution such as this would provide an efficient way for both professors and students to access academic material, and could be the most cost effective. The bottom line is that base knowledge in any academic field should not be economically exploited to the detriment of college students."

Hopkins and her fellow UCI students aren't alone in pushing for a Creative Commons textbook initiative. Fred Beshears, a senior strategist for UC Berkeley's Educational Technology Services, argues that universities could significantly reduce textbook costs by creating a coalition that would acquire and distribute electronic textbooks under a Creative Commons licensing arrangement. Beshears says he was inspired by a vision advanced by Ira Fuchs, vice president for research at the Mellon Foundation, for the creation of Educore, which would be dedicated to the development of open-source educational software, funded by members of a worldwide consortium of 1,000 colleges and universities. Beshears envisions an approach he calls OpenTextbook in which such a consortium would acquire and distribute high-quality Creative Commons content for use either as online courses, electronic textbooks, or customized printed textbooks.

Beshears explains that content for large introductory courses would be purchased in bulk from an institution such as the British Open University (UKOU), which spends an average of $3 million per online course on content development, with more than 200 undergraduate courses in its inventory and regular updates that mean replacing each course after eight years. Given the UKOU's annual investment of approximately $75 million in content development, Beshears notes, members of an OpenTextbook coalition of 1,000 members could fund such an investment for an average of $75,000 a year per campus -- or just a few dollars per enrolled student.

"I did some quick mental arithmetic and realized there is a huge discrepancy between how much students are paying for textbooks and the amount they would have to pay to fund the development of high-level content such as that provided by the British Open University," Beshears says. "And I thought, there's a business model in here somewhere."

OpenTextbook remains in the exploratory phase, with Beshears gauging interest. Beshears says his discussions with faculty indicate that many who teach large introductory courses would be willing to replace commercial textbooks with quality open-source content, particularly if the university supported their efforts to customize the content. "A Creative Commons textbook initiative may not only save students money, it could also give faculty more freedom to customize the content of their courses," Beshears says.

While the extent to which digital textbooks or courses based on open-source material will take hold remains in question, UC's Hopkins is among those who is convinced that instructors, who play a key role in driving the market by selecting the material for their courses, are open to the idea of new models. "A lot of them say they're fed up," she says. "They're looking for alternatives."