TheStar.com | Opinion | Open Access would solve piracy issue

 TheStar.com | Opinion | Open Access would solve piracy issue

thestar.com LETTER TO THE EDITOR

Open Access would solve piracy issue

Jan 14, 2009 04:30 AM

Re:Textbook piracy thriving around

city's campuses, Jan. 10

During my engineering undergraduate years at U of T, I found the best textbooks were informal documents maintained by my own professors. We paid only in comments and corrections, which we knew would benefit our juniors in the same courses.

Using the numbers from your thorough article, the $150 provincial grant barely covers two years of 6 per cent price increases on a $1,000 set of books. The student saves nothing, and the grant is pure profit for publishers.

The same publishers receive hundreds of thousands of dollars annually from Canadian universities for subscriptions to academic journals – even when those journals contain the products of publicly funded science. These costs are passed on to students as tuition increases.

The Open Access movement recognizes that this impedes the spread of knowledge, and advocates for free academic materials. MIT's OpenCourseWare project is a laudable example. As in the arts, digital media are allowing creators and consumers to both gain through bypassing the large corporations that have, until now, fed at both ends of the trough.

I hope to see continued treatment of this important issue in the Star's pages in the future.

Paul Kishimoto, Toronto

Your reporter writes that students are now photocopying textbooks to save money due to rising costs of post-secondary education. But copying textbooks was rampant in several Ontario universities I attended in the 1980s.

Dr. Peter Rozanec, Toronto

University textbook prices always ticked me off. I often thought the real criminals were the schools and the publishers. The teacher would say that we needed the "new" edition and that the previous year's edition would not do. But the only difference was that a new index page was inserted with a different publishing year inside. It was a joke, especially when the year was done and you realized how little of the book was actually used for the class.

Many students buy old editions at used bookstores, but aren't the schools and publishers just double-dipping on the sales of the same product? Additionally, how many schools make textbooks available in the school libraries?

And to be fair, why are the books so expensive? I expect an autographed Harry Potter or a first edition of A Tale of Two Cities to be pricey, but Calculus?

I'm glad I don't have to be bullied like that anymore. We should be helping kids, not exploiting them.

David Syrie, Mississauga

As a co-author of a university science textbook, I sympathize completely with the student concerns about the cost of textbooks. They do indeed seem exorbitant. As an author, I am not in a position to justify the publisher's price. I can, however, comment on a few points.

Textbooks are generally a "small market" project. Textbooks are not published in anything close to the volumes of a popular novelist. Most textbooks are also illustrated, which requires the services of an independent art firm to translate author's sketches into final illustrations. Text illustrations also complicate the production process.

Few textbook publishers maintain in-house production teams but, again, rely on outside production and design firms that specialize in technical publications. No matter how you cut it, most textbooks require the input of a lot of people with specialized talents and that drives up the production expense. Those costs have to be recovered with a relatively small number of unit sales. Photocopy piracy serves only to drive down unit sales and drive up the price.

You can't beat the price with soft covers. I am told that there is very little difference in the production costs for hard covers vs. soft covers. And I am not aware of any texts that are "revised" on an annual basis – the costs would be prohibitive. Our own book is revised on a 4- to 5-year cycle and, yes, it is significantly updated each time to reflect new knowledge in the field.

Publishers are in the business of producing and selling a product. They know that in order to sell that product, it must be competitively priced. I know from personal experience that they try everything they can to keep that price down. I can also guarantee you that most textbook authors are first of all teachers and they don't do it for the money.

William G. Hopkins, Professor Emeritus, University of Western Ontario

 

TheStar.com | Opinion | Open Access would solve piracy issue