There have been many discussions in the last year, both on campus and online, about textbooks. We want to rent them, do away with them, reduce their price, donate them to charity. We are sick of new editions that are clearly to make money since the content hasn’t changed, and mad about our students not being willing to buy them.
Last week I was trying a cool exercise with my San Elijo class, the one we’ve done once before this semester with the few borrowed laptops and the few brought by students. (I took their photo with their permission, in an effort to convince the college to get us some netbooks for class.)
The first time, each group had to post a historical thesis and three images on their Group’s section of the Ning, then present to the class, showing the images, while we all peer evaluated their presentation.
This time, it was more extensive, because each thesis needed three topic sentences to support, and each of these needed three primary sources (some images, some text).
(It was a little odd to have them do this, knowing that soon the Ning will vanish, but what the heck, it was a transient exercise.)
Since they needed so many images, and had so few computers, I was happy to have them use their textbook images. They’d flip though their textbook, which was much easier than searching FOR images in a search engine, to get ideas for their thesis and support. They’d find an image they liked, and then tried to find a copy of the image online somewhere to post.
And here’s the kicker: they couldn’t. At first I thought it was just one image, by George Robertson, Nat-Y-Glo Iron Works (on the left — I had to scan it). The textbook says it’s from the National Museums & Galleries of Wales. They couldn’t find it online and neither could I. Then we gradually discovered we couldn’t find ANY of the images in their textbook online.
As I looked at who owned all these (museums, Corbis, Getty), I began to think it odd that there didn’t seem to be any images in the public domain. I began to suspect this was an additional reason for high textbook prices.
I went and researched one, an image of the Parthenon credited “William Katz/Photo Researchers”. I found their website of stock photography, and a similar image. I selected pricing for a similar-sized image in a published textbook, and the price was $280 (Editorial use on the inside of a single edition of a textbook.) I can see how this would add up. Why not use public domain images and make them available? Do students really need that particular photo of the Parthenon? No, I think they’d rather have it available online.
I don’t want to sound like a conspiracy theorist, but I’m thinking that the textbook companies, even with their ugly two-color editions, don’t really want to reduce the price of a text.
Because, y’know, public domain is the devil.
Image of the parthenon for you
http://www.morguefile.com/archive/display/587918
You are allowed to copy, distribute, transmit the work and to adapt the work. Attribution is not required. You are prohibited from using this work in a stand alone manner.
Free images can be hard to find, but how many hundreds of thousands of people have taken a photo of the parthenon? Some of them have to have photography skills or get in a lucky shot.
The way the publisher’s rep explained it to our economics colleague, after the first printing they don’t make any money off of textbooks because there are so many used ones out there (including desk copies with which they have saturated the market themselves). So, they build in the cost of six semesters of use into the initial price because they only get royalties off of the original sale. In that sense, the eBook might be a good thing for them because they avoid the cost of paper, and they can make them single use and spread out the profit over 6 semesters or more (no need for a new edition).
I am a member of the Getty images project at Flickr, in which they license photographs by individuals and amateurs found on Flickr. I was pretty astonished at the amount of paperwork involved – model releases are one thing, but you have to get signed permission to sell images of well-known buildings too. http://www.flickr.com/help/gettyimages/#402256
It may well be that they HAVE to pay for images of the Parthenon – a snapshot is ok in a family album, but not in a textbook.