At the start of every quarter, students brave long lines to spend hundreds of dollars on their course packets and textbooks.
This might change soon if Associated Student Government Academic Vice President Mike McGee can persuade the administration to place course materials online for a reduced cost.
“It’s always a major sore point with students that every quarter we have to buy books that cost $200 to $800,” the Communication junior said.
The Academic Committee, which McGee heads, has been working on ways to reduce prices for course materials since the fall.
McGee presented a bill to the ASG Senate Wednesday that would authorize the organization to officially lobby the university to encourage its professors to place more materials online. The bill came in response to an NULink survey, which found that 52 percent of students either preferred electronic materials to printed materials or had no preference.
Mac Lebuhn, who estimated he spends roughly $150 to $300 for textbooks each quarter, said the conversion to electronic materials would not be an issue for him.
“Given we already have the ability to put materials online, it’s a smart move to try and save paper and resources by moving them onto the Internet,” the Weinberg junior said.
McGee said the bill, which will be voted on next Wednesday, was received positively by ASG.
“It was fun to debate with Senate on this bill,” he said. “All the questions were constructive – ‘How are we going to do this?'”
In the bill, ASG says it will urge the administration and professors to make better use of two kinds of electronic resources. The first is the library’s own electronic resources, including posting copyrighted materials to the Blackboard course management system for classroom use. The second is the use of e-books made available by textbook publishing companies.
The second option would be easier to implement, said Beth Clausen, head of the Library Resource Sharing and Reserve Collections.
“We could take on more work than we could have currently,” Clausen said. “Staffing would be an issue if every single faculty member used this.”
The main cost involved in increasing the amount of material posted on Blackboard electronically would be acquiring the copyrights for that material. Clausen said that depending on the number of students in a course and the amount of pages excerpted from a copyrighted work, the price per student can range anywhere from 20 cents to $20 per quarter.
Quartet Copies co-owner Chris Linster said the advent of the fully electronic course packet would not have a major effect on his revenue, adding that businesses have to adapt to survive technological advances.
“We didn’t even have the capacity for color copies 10 years ago,” Linster said. “Now it makes up most of our business.”
As for the use of e-books as textbooks, those contacted said the only concern is how fast publishers make them available. Economics Prof. Robert Gordon said he gave students the option of using the electronic version of Paul Krugman’s macroeconomics textbook as soon as the publisher made it possible. He added that half the students in the class currently use it.
Gordon said the electronic versions of the book provide a lower cost and more features, such as continuously updating content and multimedia while allowing the publisher to save on printing costs.
However, Gordon warned that not all the issues with textbook publishers would vanish along with paper, citing the recent decision of the Krugman textbook’s publisher to raise the price of its e-book by $20.
“It was just a money grab,” he said. “They raised the price for both versions.”
