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.”