Students spend an average of $900 a year on textbooks, which is 20% of tuition at an average university and half of tuition at a community college! And the prices keep going up.

We think that textbooks should be reasonably priced, students should be able to easily sell their books and used books should be easy to find.

Around the country, students and professors are fighting back. They're refusing to buy books from publishers unless they're cheaper, unbundled and on the market for longer. They're ordering cheaper books from British websites. They're trading books with each other at online book swaps like CampusBookswap.com. And publishers are feeling the heat: they're putting out lower priced books and negotiating deals with faculty who push.

California's College Textbook Affordability Act

To come up with effective, reasonable solutions to the problem of rising textbook costs, PIRG students surveyed 287 professors. The resulting report of our findings, Exposing the Textbook Industry, found that textbook publishers are not disclosing price information clearly to faculty.

77 percent of faculty said that textbook marketing representatives rarely or never volunteer the price of their books. Even when professors asked directly for the price in a sales meeting, only 38 percent of the professors said they always got an answer. As a result, only 63 percent of faculty surveyed told us that they usually know the price of the books they assign.

The College Textbook Affordability Act (SB 832) would require publishers to disclose the price of their products in their marketing materials and on their website so that faculty can make informed decisions about the books they assign to students. Specifically, publishers would be required to provide:

• The wholesale price of the product.
• The estimated length of time the publisher intends to keep the product on the market.
• A complete list of all differences or changes made between the current edition and previous editions of the textbook.
  

CALPIRG worked with State Senator Ellen Corbett to develop this bill. Supporters of the bill include the California Association of College Stores, California State Student Association, UC Student Association, California Teachers Association, and individual faculty members throughout the state.

The bill passed through the state legislature, but unfortunately Governor Schwarzenegger vetoed it. By vetoing the bill, the Governor failed to heed the research and recommendations of the academic community and missed a simple and important opportunity to lower textbook prices. We hope that over time, the Governor rethinks his position and reconsiders similar efforts in the future.