Explore Textbook Alternatives for IU Southeast Courses

Two economics professors explore the issue.
Carbaugh, R., & Ghosh, K. (2005). Are college textbooks priced fairly? Challenge,
48(5), 95-112.

Attack of the wallet killers: Students cannot afford exorbitantly-priced coursepacks, (February 18, 2005). Harvard Crimson. Retrieved from http://www.thecrimson.com/

Marini Davis, L. & Usry M. (2011). Faculty selling desk copies—the textbook industry, the law and the ethics, Journal of Academic Ethics, 9(1), 19-31.

Senack, E. & U.S.PIRG. (2014). Fixing the Broken Textbook Market: How Students Respond to High Textbook Costs and Demand Alternatives, Center for Public Interest Research. Retrieved from http://uspirg.org

Del Valle, G. (March 6, 2019). The high cost of college textbooks, explained, Vox

Grinberg, E. (April 18, 2014). How some colleges are offering free textbooks, CNN. Retrieved from http://www.cnn.com

Stone, J. (September 19, 2014) Pirate Bay goes to college: Free textbook torrent downloads soar amid rising costs, International Business Times. Retrieved from http://www.ibtimes.com

Cushing, T. (Sep 23 2014). Study Indicates College Textbook Piracy Is On The Rise, But Fails To Call Out Publishers For Skyrocketing Prices (blog post), TechDirt. Retrieved from https://www.techdirt.com/

D'Agostino, S. & Kosegarten, J. (September-October 2015) A textbook case of questionable ethics [Faculty Forum]. Academe, p. 47.

Electronic Frontier Foundation. (May 9, 2014). Textbook publisher in U.S. insists students cannot keep or resell books. Retrieved from http://www.ifex.org/united_states/2014/05/09/first_sale/

Weissmann, J. (3 Jan 2013). Why are college textbooks so absurdly expensive?, The Atlantic. Retrieved from http://www.theatlantic.com

Ward, D. (September 8, 2015). Why you ought to think twice before assigning a pricey textbook, The Chronicle of Higher Education. Retrieved from http://chronicle.com/

Douglas-Gabriel, D. (April 14, 2018). Battle over college course material is a textbook example of technological change, Washington Post. Retrieved from https://www.washingtonpost.com

Who is best suited to control textbooks: the faculty or the publishers? There are ways to make sure it is the faculty. Editorial in AAUP's Academe.
Moxley, J. (2013). Open textbook publishing. Academe, 99 (5). http://www.aaup.org/reports-and-publications/academe

American Mathematical Society Editorial Board. (2013). What we are doing about the high cost of textbooks, Notices of the AMS 60 (7). Retrieved from http://www.ams.org/

U.S. PIRG Education Fund and the Student PIRGs. (7 April 2014). Affordable Textbooks: A Policy Guide. http://uspirg.org/reports/usp/affordable-textbooks-policy-guide

Austin D., et al. (December 2013/January 2014). The AIM Open Textbook Initiative, MAA Focus, p. 35. Retrieved from http://www.maa.org/

Bolkon, J. (January 22, 2015). Amazon unveils Kindle Textbook Creator, Campus Technology. Retrieved from http://campustechnology.com/

U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO). (2013). College Textbooks: Students Have Greater Access to Textbook Information, Report to Congressional Committees GAO-13-368.

Student Public Interest Research Group (2010) presents findings related to student use of textbooks and open access textbook solutions.

Meyer, L. (July 15, 2015). Developing a $10 digital textbook, Campus Technology. Retrieved from http://campustechnology.com/

D. Nicholas, I. Rowlands, & H.R. Jamali. (2010). "E-textbook use, information seeking behaviour and
its impact: Case study business and management," Journal of Information Science, 36 (2), 263-280.

Morris-Babb, M. & Henderson, S. (2012). An experiment in open-access textbook publishing: changing the world one textbook at a time, Journal of Scholarly Publishing, 43(2), 148-155. doi: 10.3138/jsp.43.2.148
Link for non-EMU users: article at Project Muse

Gatti, R. & Mierowsky, M. (2016). Funding open access monographs: a coalition of libraries and publishers, College & Research Libraries News, 77 (9), 456-459.

Wexler, E. (February 9, 2017). A growing (but controversial) idea in open-access textbooks: let students help write them, EdSurge News. Retrieved from https://www.edsurge.com/

Schaffhauser, Dian (March 9, 2016). How to go textbook free, Campus Technology. Retrieved from https://campustechnology.com

Administrators at CUNY and SUNY look to seize an $8 million opportunity to drastically expand the use of open educational resources at their campuses.

‘A Mean Amount of Money’ (April 14, 2017). Inside Higher Ed. Retrieved from https://www.insidehighered.com

Fischer, L., Hilton, J., Robinson, J. & Wiley, D.A. (2015). A multi-institutional study of the impact of open textbook adoption on the learning outcomes of post-secondary students.” Journal of Computing in Higher Education 27(3), 159–172.

Carey, K. (20 Dec 2012). Never pay sticker price for a textbook again: The open educational resources movement that’s terrifying publishers. Slate.com. Retrieved from http://www.slate.com

A national survey of faculty.

Petrides, L., Jimes, C., Middleton‐Detzner, C., Walling, J. & Weiss, S. (2011). Open textbook adoption and use: implications for teachers and learners. Open Learning: The Journal of Open, Distance and e-Learning, 2 (1). doi: /10.1080/02680513.2011.538563

Senack, E. (2015). Open textbooks: the billion dollar solution. Washington, DC: Center for Public Interest Research. Retrieved from http://www.studentpirgs.org/

American Council on Education Center for Education Attainment and Innovation. (2015) Open Textbooks: The Current State of Play. Quick Hit Paper. Available at http://www.acenet.edu

Azevedo, A. (2013, January 27). Pay nothing? Easier said than done. Chronicle of Higher Education.
The long trail of comments on this article is quite interesting!

A textbook case in physics (June 16, 2014). Chronicle of Higher Education. Short interview with a prof who had grad students create a WIKI textbook.

Cavanagh, S. (March 28, 2017). Open educational resources movement scales up, Education Week. Retrieved from http://www.edweek.org

Sawchuk, S. (August 24, 2017). Can an 'Open' Math Curriculum Compete With Commercial Publishers?,
About OER in K-12 education:
.EdWeek. Retrieved from http://blogs.edweek.org.

Survey on adoption of OER in higher ed.

Gose, B. (2017, April 14). Growing pains begin to emerge in open-textbook movement. The Chronicle of Higher Education, 63(32), B12+.

Silagadze, M. (Dec 28, 2017). OER had its breakthrough in 2017. Next year, Ii will become an essential teaching tool, EdSurge News. Retrieved from https://www.edsurge.com/

Anderson, R. (July 7, 2016). Academic libraries and the textbook taboo: time to get over it?, The Scholarly Kitchen, [web log post]. Retrieved from https://scholarlykitchen.sspnet.org/

K. Pittsley (2014). The EMU Library tackles the textbook problem, FacultyConnections@EMULibrary, 2 (1). Retrieved from https://guides.emich.edu/facconnect

Ratto, B. G., & Lynch, A. (2012). The embedded textbook: Collaborating with faculty to employ library subscription E-books as core course text. Journal of Electronic Resources Librarianship, 24(1), 1-16.

Werner, R. (2014). Let’s burn them all: a librarian’s view, Journal of Management Education, 38(5), 759-763. doi: 10.1177/1052562914522233

Chant, I. (April 2014). OSU Libraries offer open access e-textboooks to students, Library Journal. Retrieved from http://lj.libraryjournal.com/

Massis, B. E. (2013). Textbook affordability: The library's role. New Library World, 114(3), 179-183. doi:http://dx.doi.org/10.1108/03074801311304087

Raschke, G. & Shanks, S. (2011) Water on a hot skillet: textbooks, open educational resources, and the role of the library. Library Technology Reports 47(8), 52+.

Yano, B. (2017). Connect OER Annual Report, 2016-2017. Washington, DC: SPARC.

Young, J.R. (Jan 4, 2018). As campuses move to embrace OER, college libraries become key players,
EdSurge News. Retrieved from https://www.edsurge.com/

Hilton, J. L. III, Robinson, T.J., Wiley, D. & Ackerman, J. D. (2014). Cost-savings achieved in two semesters through the adoption of open educational resources, The International Review of Research in Open and Distance Learning, 15(2), 67-84. Retrieved from http://www.irrodl.org/

Colvard, N., Watson, E., and Park, H. (2018). “The Impact of Open Educational Resources on Various Student Success Metrics.” International Journal of Teaching and Learning in Higher Education.

An open access, double-blind peer-reviewed journal publishing articles on the impact of OER.

Open Oregon discusses ways to measure savings to students from use of free resources.

Pittsley, K. (2016) Making a Dent in the Textbook Problem: Library E-Books for Course Readings: A Collaboration Between Department Faculty and the EMU Library, Final Report EMU Women in Philanthropy Grant.

Fischer, L., Hilton III, J., Robinson, T. J., & Wiley, D. A. (2015). A multi-institutional study of the impact of open textbook adoption on the learning outcomes of post-secondary students. Journal of Computing in Higher Education. doi:10.1007/s12528-015-9101-x

Staben, C. (February 13, 2019). A new way to motivate faculty adoption of OER, Inside Higher Ed. Retrieved from https://www.insidehighered.com

This large scale project showed that students earned more credits when a college offered many courses using OER. All students benefit, and it makes the biggest difference for Pell Grant students. The financial benefit to the College from increased credits was expected to exceed costs of the program.

Hilton, J. & Laman, C. (2012). One college’s use of an open psychology textbook. Open Learning: The Journal of Open, Distance and eLearning, 27(3). doi: 10.1080/02680513.2012.716657

Hilton, J. (2016). Open educational resources and college textbook choices: A review of research on efficacy and perceptions. Educational Technology Research and Development, 64(4), 573-590.

Profs at the University of British Columbia describe how and why they use open textbooks--saving students money isn't the only benefit.

Rosen, J. (Nov 25, 2016). The college bookstore, disrupted, Publisher's Weekly. Retrieved from http://www.publishersweekly.com

Berry, T., Cook, L., Hill, N. & Stevens, K. (2010). An exploratory analysis of textbook usage and study habits: misperceptions and barriers to success, College Teaching, 59(1), 31-39. doi: 10.1080/87567555.2010.509376

Karaganis, J. (FEBRUARY 18, 2016). How a ‘Syllabus Commons’ could change higher education. The Chronicle of Higher Education. Retrieved from http://chronicle.com/

Snyder, R. (2014). Let's burn them all: reflections on the learning-inhibitory nature of Introduction to Management and Introduction to Organizational Behavior textbooks, Journal of Management Education, 38(5), 733-758. doi: 10.1177/1052562913502481

More interesting reading than you might expect from government paperwork.

Williams, C. (January 21, 2017) Pearson fights for its future as investors consider a break-up, The Telegraph. Retrieved from http://www.telegraph.co.uk/

And Follet responds.

Koenig, R. (September 5, 2014). Rise of online booksellers brings complaints from campus bookstores, Chronicle of Higher Education.

Vassallo, N. (April 28, 2015). Student attitudes toward content in higher education (slides), BISG's Higher Ed Conference, New York, NY.

Czerniewicz, L. (2016). Student practices in copyright culture: accessing learning resources, Learning, Media And Technology. doi: 10.1080/17439884.2016.1160928

McMahan, C. (2013). Theory and evidence of switching costs in the market for college textbooks (Doctoral dissertation). Retrieved from http://scholar.colorado.edu

Feldstein, M. (November 19, 2014). Blog post on eLiterate. http://mfeldstein.com/

Hurley, P. M. (2011). Book vouchers: an exploratory analysis of their use and effectiveness," Journal of Student Financial Aid, 41 (3). Retrieved from http://publications.nasfaa.org/jsfa/

O'Malley, S. (August 16, 2017). Which is better reading in print or on screen? ‘There’s no easy answer.’ Inside Higher Ed. Retrieved from https://www.insidehighered.com

Publisher's Weekly

Johnson, S. (April 12, 2018). Can a for-profit, venture-backed company keep OER free—and be financially sustainable?, EdSurge News. Retrieved from https://www.edsurge.com/

Johnson, Steven. (April 21, 2019) The fall, and rise, of reading, The Chronicle of Higher Education. Retrieved from https://www.chronicle.com

SPARC’s Automatic Textbook Billing Contract Library can be used to compare, contrast and download the full text of legal agreements with major vendors including Cengage, McGraw-Hill, Pearson, Follett, Barnes & Noble, and VitalSource. The spreadsheet breaks down each contract based on data points such as price caps, resale rates, and discount structures. Contracts can also be filtered and sorted by state, vendor, and institution.