Cost of some textbooks gets trimming
Deirdre Newman
Students will soon have a cheaper option when purchasing college
textbooks.
Thomson Higher Education launched a series of textbooks at a lower
price Monday.
The company is characterizing the launch as a response to students
and professors’ calling for less expensive books. But a spokeswoman
denies the launch is directly related to a report issued in late
January that was highly critical of textbooks companies, including
Thomson, for gouging students.
“How could we fill an entire series of books in two weeks even if
we wanted to?” said Thomson spokeswoman Jessica Rohm. “We felt we
should do the right thing for our business.”
Thomson has been working on the launch of the cheaper textbooks
for more than a year, Rohm said. The lower-priced series, called
Advantage, contains 25 titles that will cost at least 25% less than
typical textbooks for the courses. The books cover subjects like
music, speech and history.
Thomson was able to lower the price through measures like printing
color photographs in black and white and not binding the books. They
were launched Monday so they can be on campus bookstore shelves for
the summer and fall sessions, Rohm said.
In January, the California Student Public Interest Research Group,
issued a report that found students are paying up to 20% of their
fees on their textbooks -- about $1,000 a year at UC Irvine,
according to one official.
David Puzey, organizer of UCI’s branch of the student group, said
the launch was movement in the right direction.
“It’s encouraging if they’re making good faith efforts to make
their [prices] fairer, but we have yet to see what the end result of
that is going to be,” Puzey said.
The students’ group is still waiting for Thomson to respond to
some of its recommendations, such as the company only issuing new
additions that have academically enhanced value, Puzey said.
Every four years, the publishing company offers college professors
the choice of keeping their older editions, but the professors
usually opt for the new ones, Rohm said.
“They want new problems at the end of the chapters [for
calculus],” Rohm said. “I have a multi-page spread sheet that’s the
revision page for that book and it would knock anybody’s socks off.”
All the latest on Orange County from Orange County.
Get our free TimesOC newsletter.
You may occasionally receive promotional content from the Daily Pilot.