October 1, 2007

School Bookstores Raising the Price of Education - Time to Organize!

Posted by Larisa Mann at 12:00AM

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Recently, student, book and public interest blogs have been murmuring over the latest antics of the Harvard/MIT Co-operative Society bookstore ("The Coop), who has been arguing for a vague kind of property right in the ISBN numbers on its textbooks.

The Coop displays the slogan "Students Still Come First with Us" on its website. Apparently this depends on what the student is doing. Students have been coming into The Coop and writing down ISBN numbers (an identification number) for textbooks, to facilitate ordering those books from a cheaper venue, but last week students writing down ISBNs were forced to leave by the cops, on The Coop's insistence.

The Coop's representatives have argued that

1. ISBN numbers are a lot of work to "get," so they are "almost intellectual property"

2. Those making notes are part of an organized act, or by implication a rival business (which the Coop has a right to fight against)

About #1: Intellectual property rights are not based on the amount of work going in (ISBN numbers are not even created by The Coop!), and owning an arrangement of ISBNs is implausible too, since the arrangement itself has to to be non-obvious. The cops themselves made a public statement that no crime was committed, as have numerous IP law experts.

What's funny about #2 is that while some individual students have been writing down ISBNs, there has been an organized effort, but that organization (or rival business) is run by Harvard's own Undergraduate Council - seeking to get cheaper textbooks for students at Harvard, also raising money for building a school in Zambia, and funding other UC projects. Funny, it almost sounds like a student cooperative!

Although a sadly familiar argument in the music industry, the argument that you get to use the law to restrict access to legally available goods is not sound, legally or otherwise. ISBNs are not property, and competition in retail is a fact of life. In this case, the 'competition' is also on the side of increasing access to education, so they should be praised.

College bookstores (increasingly managed by large corporations) are making it harder to comparison-shop, and in this case even trying to use the law to do so. Meanwhile, publishers even try to stop professors from finding out the prices - to prevent them from considering students' ability to pay for course readings! A Massachusetts-based Public Interest Research Group recently released a report describing the difficulty in discovering textbooks prices: "77% of the [287] professors surveyed found that publisher sales representatives rarely or never volunteer the price, and even when professors directly asked for the price during a sales meeting, only 38% reported that the sales representative would always disclose the price."

If publishers try to prevent comparison-shopping, and bookstores also try to make it harder to do it, academia becomes still more expensive and exclusive --even now students spend around $900 per semester on course materials.

To fight this, students have to organize! In 2004, UCLA math students worked with their department to pressure the publisher to get a 20% reduction in their calculus books, while others, like Crimsonreading, take matters into their own hands --much like the founding circumstances (seemingly forgotten) of the Harvard Coop itself. As Jonathan Zittrain (of Harvard's own Berkman Center for Internet and Society) pointed out, trying to arrest or ban students who organize to make education cheaper and better "sort of takes the 'co' out of 'Coop'"

More public pursuit of students right to education can be seen at at MakeTextbooksAffordable.Org. You can get involved at the state or federal level.

In California, SB 82, The College Textbook Affordability Act is making its way through the Senate.

In Washington state, Governor Christine Gregoire recently signed SHB 2300, the Textbook Transparency Act that requires textbook publishers to disclose prices and change-of-edition information when marketing course materials to Washington faculty.