Of course, there’s more to it than the anomaly of a market where those who chose are not those who pay. Profs not only don’t have to pay for student books, but get free copies for themselves, along with a variety of other benefits. Everybody knows about the various teaching aids—transparencies, software, websites, etc.—that sweeten the deal but an ever greater benefit is the way that textbooks serve as a low-energy solution to the political problem of how to manage the content of intro courses taught by multiple profs. For teachers who care to devote the time and effort, the ability to customize textbooks is a plus; but avoiding the need to make choices is a big part of the value added by traditional textbooks. Textbook publishers and authors hugely benefit from the Law of Least Hassles.

Indeed. He once said “One can write books like this on a desert island. In fact, I do.”

Introductory science textbooks are not bad — in fact quite the contrary. The issue is that they have been efficiently optimized for the market over the last 30 years in terms of format, layout, topic order, level of presentation, etc., to the degree that they are commoditized educational resources. Publishers have done a great job meeting the needs of the introductory science course. In fact, in general all of the textbooks are excellent references for students in STEM courses, supplementary to lectures and problem-solving practice. However, *which* textbook reference you choose to adopt for introductory level science courses simply doesn’t matter in terms of learning outcomes for your students. Therefore OpenStax books offer your students great value.

Textbook prices:
It is very common for an introductory science textbook to be $200 or more, the price of an inexpensive mountain bike. Publishers will offer “custom” books and “binder-ready-print” loose-leaf stacks of shrink-wrapped paper for what appears to be a decent discount, bundled with software, but these options just remove inexpensive textbook purchase options such as used textbooks, previous editions, sharing textbooks, and purchasing from other suppliers such as Amazon and Chegg and in the end cost students more money over an edition lifecyle. Many faculty fall for these gimmicks, however. The price inflation for textbooks is many-fold higher than normal consumer price index. The price typically paid by large publishers to print a quality introductory science textbook is $7-$8 at most for large printing volumes. OpenStax books cost more because they are doing print-on-demand, which is much more expensive to do, but also necessary if you want faculty to be able to customize the book.

Editors at publishing companies are talented individuals dedicated to working with authors to make textbooks approachable and clear to 18-year old science students who are increasingly less prepared coming out of high school. They are essential to producing good textbooks, and they don’t work for free. And yes, art and layout/production costs are incredibly high. Students and faculty demand high production value. For an introductory science textbook the costs of bringing it to publication are typically around $500K-$1M. Remember the market demands more than text material and art, and also insists upon PowerPoint slides, test banks, and multimedia. These ancillaries cost a great deal of money to produce. Don’t tell me that is unnecessary fluff – there are huge sales consequences if you don’t provide it. If you don’t need these ancillaries, that is even more reason to consider less expensive books offered by smaller publishers and OER textbooks.

Add to this the costs of online homework content to go into the online homework platform, which is valuable. This all adds up to huge publication costs to make the book ready for the sales push. On top of the costs to bring a textbook to publication, publishers spend huge amounts of money on large sales forces and well-oiled marketing engines, and a good portion of the cost of a textbook is going towards getting faculty to consider it and be convinced they should adopt it. Again, it is hard to judge this, because if publishers don’t invest in sales and marketing, their competition will, and faculty are just as susceptible to sales efforts as Joe Public, despite their education.

Without the “free ancillaries” and sales expenditures it is very difficult to recoup the costs required to bring the book to publication. Yes, the model is broken, but there it is. OER content coupled with digital learning platforms and an API-driven ecosystem can fix it, but faculty are slow to move.

Edition cycles:
It is absolutely not true that faculty or departments want 3-year edition cycles. For introductory science and math textbooks these cycles (now moving to 2-years in some cases) are designed to erode used textbook sales, period. New editions cause work for faculty and expense for students with no significant learning outcomes gain.

University business models:
I am not an expert here, but I do not believe that universities are not trying to keep students paying for classes by failing them. Universities are bursting at the seams, trying to accommodate ever-increasing enrollments in a time of 5-years of budget cuts. They want to graduate successful students as fast as possible so they don’t have to build new buildings and graduates have high earning potential and can donate back to the university quickly.

OpenStax and OER textbooks:
OER textbooks might be free to your students, but they certainly aren’t free to produce. I waited a long time to find an organization such as OpenStax to partner with because they understand what it takes: they take considerable resources from the Gates, Hewlett, 20 Million Minds, and Maxfield Foundations, put it in the hands of David Harris, a former Publisher at Cengage and Editorial Director at Wiley, and let him run a well-thought-out and fairly standard textbook publication and production process involving paid editors, artists, design and production (using professional outfits like Words and Numbers), do market validation, etc. Finally: an open textbook that doesn’t look like one. OpenStax knows that a Physics textbook would be DOA, free or not, without online homework, which is why they looked for partnerships to fulfill this. The foundations supporting OpenStax cover the $millions in “plant” costs for a high production value book so students can afford to stay in school, with the end result that we might graduate more scientists and engineers and have better-educated problem solvers to solve the challenges facing our society (net gain, $billions). This is the calculus behind well-funded OER.

The textbook price/value disparity:
We are a textbook-independent online homework provider for the problem-solving disciplines (chemistry, physics, engineering, economics, etc.). We also have a science eBooks platform that is integrated with our online learning system and homework-style problem-solving activities. One problem Sapling is trying to solve is providing educational value in terms of learning outcomes compared with cost. Students value online homework as the most valuable element of an introductory science course. When asked to rank and rate 20 elements of a general chemistry course in terms of “contribution towards success in the class” students ranked online homework #1, compared with the textbook being rated #8 (Butler University study, presented at ACS conference 2010). Studies at Purdue show 1.3 letter grades higher when using online homework (organic chemistry study), and studies at the Colorado School of Mines show that using online homework for Mass and Energy Balances doubles the As, increased the number of Bs by 50%, and dramatically increased retention of chemical engineering students as they made their way past this difficult “weeder” course (Liberatore, Journal of Chemical Engineering Education April 2012). OpenStax appreciates the value of online homework to learning outcomes, so has partnered with companies to offer it with their book. Contrast this with studies from the Utah Open Textbook Project and experiments at the University of Detroit which show no grade or performance benefit with students using a publisher-created science textbook vs. an OER textbook or collection of links to open Web resources, respectively. Yet the textbook costs $200, and the online homework $50. There is a significant disparity in terms of price/value ratio, for the thing that students value most costs 4-5X less than the commodity resource they do not value.

Saving students money:
Sapling Learning publishes a couple introductory science textbooks of our own within our eBook platform, but we don’t think our textbooks will fundamentally change your student’s outcomes for the class. We acquired the rights to excellent books and revised them to meet the changing needs of a market moving digital, and they are more engaging. We also reset the price/efficacy value equation by charging $20 for our eBooks and more than that for the homework. Sapling also works with universities publishing their own books at little cost to their students (popular in Canada), and Open Education Resource textbooks such as those OpenStax provides to facilitate free and low-cost textbook alternatives for students.

In the case of OpenStax, you can use their Physics book for free with Sapling Learning’s homework as independent resources. However, we do allow faculty to choose to adopt the OpenStax Physics textbook completely integrated with online homework and media using our platform. In this case, we do charge $5 for the OpenStax content, and give revenue back to OpenStax as a way to sustain their efforts financially. We also serve as the sales force that puts feet on the street to sells the OpenStax book in direct competition with Pearson’s sales force. We support university faculty as they switch to OER books with dedicated PhD Physicist-Educators. Sales, implementation and support services, and digital ecosystem — in a sense, we hope to become the RedHat to OpenStax’s Linux.

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“I’m the editor in chief for Connexions and we are the publisher for the OpenStax College texts. There have been a few comments in these posts that warrant a response.

The OpenStax College texts carry a CC-BY license meaning that they are open to adopt, use, and adapt. The pdf and ePubs can be downloaded for free and never expire. The open license is important because we envision a future that is analogous to the Red Hat/Linux model. We hope that the community takes and improves this content over time. The beauty of an open license is that a user can adapt the content to meet her own needs. In fact, our platform allows a user to add his own content and then a new version will be dynamically generated in which the new content is seamlessly integrated. Furthermore, we expect commercial entities; including publishers, to provide services around this content. The best service providers (on line homework, high stakes assessment, and tutoring) should do well in this new ecosystem.

I agree wholeheartedly with the publishers who state that producing a high quality work that meets scope and sequence requirements is a tremendous effort for both the author(s) and the publisher. We believe that there is room in the market for both publishers and open source providers. For example, At OpenStax College we are not the solution for faculty looking for transparencies or simulation CDs or in need of dozens of desk copies (though we do offer print versions of our projects).

At OpenStax College our projects are peer reviewed, authored by professors, and professionally developed. They meet the scope and sequence requirements of courses; therefore, matriculation should not be an issue whatsoever. One of our goals is to enhance academic freedom by providing more choices to faculty and students.

In the final analysis the quality of our content will drive usage. We believe that learning, rather than free, is the priority.