A New York Times article, ?$200 Textbook vs Free. You do the Math,? brings up a very interesting topic today: the textbook oligopoly. The $4.3 billion textbook market has been dominated by four multinational publishers, but now David is taking a shot at Goliath using a new age tool, open source software. Non-profits are working with retired teachers to bring the power of the internet to bear on this all-powerful industry in the hopes of lowering exorbitant textbook costs from upwards of $200 down towards the much more manageable price of free. Our 2004 report, ?The Mad, Mad World of Textbook Adoption? takes a serious look at the power politics that dominate the textbook industry.
[Textbooks] are not bought and sold in a free market. Rather, in twenty-one states, they are ?procured? via a government-run purchasing system called ?adoption? that seems irretrievably entangled with the screeching identity politics of both left and right?a whole panoply of ethnic, religious, gender, and political pressure groups who have designs on textbook content. This dysfunctional system constrains the textbook options available to schools and teachers, constrains what authors and publishers can put in their books, constrains the normal functioning of supply and demand, and contributes to the educational mediocrity enshrined in so many of the books that survive this archaic and bizarre process.
- Saul Spady, Fordham Intern