The Dolan Foundation needs your help. We want you to spread the word, invite your friends and family to become a fan of ours on FaceBook (our fan page) or follow us on Twitter  (our twitter). Any visibility goes a long way at convincing instructors and college campuses that students are serious about using free alternatives to high cost textbooks.

Our goal is to have 500 followers on FaceBook and Twitter before the beginning of March, but that won’t happen without your support. Please help us make a difference in the affordability of higher education by telling people about us and how close we are to publishing a free college Algebra textbook!

Thank you, from all of us at the Dolan Foundation.

Without going into the technical details, the Supreme Court ruled on a case involving the boundaries of first sale doctrines for copyrighted material. In effect, the ruling in favor of Costco, allows retailers to purchase cheaper editions of textbooks from third parties, editions intended for distributions outside the US, which retailers can then sell domestically. Publishing companies will usually publish an edition of their texts for the US as a higher quality, more expensive version, and sell a cheaper international version, which the Supreme Court had previously barred domestic retailers from reselling. (Read more about the case)

Whether or not US editions are of a genuinely better quality or simply sold at inflated prices for nominal improved supplements is a contested issue. Suffice to say that foreign consumers are not frequently bringing the sale of poorer quality texts in their own countries to court, which would lend some weight to the opinion that publishers have unjustly inflated costs in American markets.

The Columbus Dispatch wrote a piece today on another alternative to buying college textbooks (article here). Renting textbooks has become an increasingly more viable option for many college courses, and certainly for those students at the threshold of affording an education, it is a more practical one.

The number of students who opt out of buying books at all is actually quite disconcerting: some 15% nation wide (unfortunately, the article does not cite the source). It is a trend which undermines the success of students and undoubtedly frustrates instructors, who can hardly have expected students to read texts which they do not possess.  So, considering how much of any academic course involves reading, it seems prudent to remind students that buying textbooks is not the only means to having them available in the short term. Many college campuses already have programs for renting out course textbooks, but here are a few sites which can further supplement your textbooks needs:

Service: Book Renter

At BookRenter, we strive to deliver the best value to our customers and ensure complete satisfaction for all our textbook rentals.

They also tout up 75% in savings compared to buying a textbook at full price, and free shipping both ways.

Service: Chegg

Rent your textbooks and save hundreds of dollars a year!

Chegg claims to be the #1 textbook rental service (#1 with an asterick, however), and boast a 33,000 member FaceBook following. Their inventory is extensive, perhaps because so many people have used or continue to use them, and their site is easy to navigate.

Service: Campus Book Rentals

Largest Selection in the Nation

Another very popular textbook rental service. They also offer free shipping both ways and 30 day risk free trail.

Giving Back

Our hope is that by mentioning these sites you may feel compelled to use them. Either for selling your old textbooks or, indeed, for renting from them. The more people involved, the larger the pool of textbooks available to everyone. If you want to suggest other sites, feel free to email me, mholleran@dolanfoundation.org, and I will post them as they come in.

The Association of American Publishers, the largest national trade organization for Publisher companies, reported this month that gross textbook sales had grown 2.2% in September (AAP report) . The report also indicated that gross sales for the whole industry had declined 12.1%.  Also of note, the AAP indicated University hard cover and paperback books are on a steep incline for the year when compared to the rate of inflation.

What does this mean for students? While gross sales are not necessarily a good measure of inflation, it does indicate a resistance in textbook and University publishing sales to woes in the economy. Publishing companies can rely on an ever increasing margin of profit from student materials because consumers of higher education books are a captive audience.

What is particularly telling about AAP reports is that textbook gross sales never fall. In fact, according the GAO, textbook prices have risen at twice the rate of inflation since 1986 (GAO report). Without some intervention in the market, cheap textbooks are not in the foreseeable future.