The University of British Columbia just released a report on how their open access materials for Mathematics have saved students up to $1 million this year.
While we agree that publishers often make bad decisions, including sometimes unreasonably increasing the costs of textbooks, we generally object to the attitudes expressed in this report. Post secondary education costs thousands of dollars very year. Why do people generally accept this and not accept several hundred dollars for their textbooks. Professors seem to love to be the champions of students, helping them find ways to avoid paying textbooks…. so why don’t they give up their pay as well so that students can save on the much larger expense of tuition?
Textbooks and educational publishers are whipping boys, it would seem, and it is hardly fair. No publisher is rolling in money these days while everything they publish is an investment (or a gamble). The publishers have real costs: authors, editors, printers, paper, warehouses, shipping, returns, damaged stock, unsold stock, desk copies for instructors and so forth. It is ridiculous to focus on the cost of books; education is expensive and it is very convenient diversion for those in post-secondary instituions to point fingers at publishers.