The Case for Textbooks

 I think I speak for many when I say that budgetary issues are a chief concern regarding this issue, one that the 5 laws overlook. Perhaps Ranganathan should have had a sixth law, one that stated "for every book, its budget"?

Library theory aside,  occasionally dipping into the funding stream to buy textbooks is not a wise option, however popular it may seem or how guaranteed the circulation statistics. Why?

Simply put, I cannot afford to buy adequate copies of textbooks for all the courses offered at my campus in addition to monographs with the budget alloted to me. Choosing some courses to support but not others would be more unethical than choosing no courses.  Faculty do talk across disciplinary lines (especially at small campuses). If you buy for one, you should buy for all, and you presumably should have a budget to support that. So either find permanent, alternative funding or faculty donations to make it possible, or don’t flirt with the idea at all.

Of course, one thing I can hope we all agree on is that it is not a student’s responsibility to purchase all of the books that their textbooks cite, and it is our responsibility to procure these items (and others) to create a depth of resources that is our trademark as academic libraries. It should not be an either/or game, and if it comes that, we should seriously consider what types of collections we are building for posterity.

As a student and future librarian, I just want to say thank you for your article! Library books in academic institutions should include textbooks. I would not have made it through school without ILL and library collections that have a copy of the class textbook that I can share with classmates. I am an active library user at my University and a student reference assistant. I love helping students find the books they need in the stacks. Especially when you get a crowd of students all asking for the same book! It’s great to have the opportunity to teach my peers how to use the catalog for searching and explain the Textbook on Reserve policies. I think textbooks in academic libraries are essential to the collection for students, because they definately get the most use and provide access to students who can’t afford to buy them.  

Our library system already makes many books available as Overdrive e-books.  If textbooks became widely available under that format, I’m sure we would re-evaluate our stand on not purchasing textbooks, when one file can supply the needs of a near-infinite number of downloaders.  As it is, we already have trouble keeping up with popular classics assigned for high school reading, which don’t need to be changed out anywhere near as frequently, and are commonly available for much less than a standard required textbook.

I am also a library director and I think it is absolutely imperative for a university library to be an important link in a university’s mission: i.e. to help the students succeed in their studies. While I may not agree with the choices of faculty on the texts they assign their students—many of them are far to expensive and nightmarish to read—the instructors still have the freedom to choose the books they want to use in their courses. They should show more caring toward their students by assigning interesting, affordable readings. Nevertheless, it should be the library’s primary mission to provide texts that are needed and demanded by their communities. If a library refuses to do this for whatever reason, I feel it borders on the unethical.

My library has a copy of every text assigned to the students. It’s a lot of work and is very expensive, but otherwise (especially today) many students could not afford the texts, they would flunk their classes, and therefore would not be able to finish their educations. Yes, some books go lost but then they have to pay to replace the copy plus library expensess, so it costs them more than the actual book.

When I was a student I didn’t have much money, and if it had not been for library reserves, I would probably be working in a grocery store right now. Now that I am a library director, I cannot in all good conscience consign others to a similar fate.

It’s nice that you can live in the theoretical clouds here, but at our institution to supply one copy of every required text would cost us approximately $600,000 a semester, which is currently more than we spend on all monographs in a whole fiscal year. Also, that one copy would quickly be snatched up by the quickest student and it would take them long to realize that it was cheaper to pay the fine than to purchase they’re own copy. Reserves is also not the answer because we are quickly moving away from any physical reserves and simply do not have the space or staff to store and facilitate access to the material.

The real question should be why textbooks on campus at all. They are cash cows for publishers and faculty authors alike, but do they really serve the needs of students? I don’t know what your experience with textbooks have been, but I was lucky in my education to mostly avoid them until graduate school where I found them to be universally uninspiring and poorly written (not to mention expensive). The response I would like to see is faculty getting out of the lazy habit (and I will admit there are some subjects where a textbook is almost a necessity) of assigning a textbook and instead create their own course reader. Plenty of our faculty do this with great success.

Lastly, I’ve been amazed that publishers have move so slowly towards creating e-textbooks that could actually bring the price down. But then again their motives aren’t altruistic, but rather guided by profit at the expense of students. Hopefully some publisher will see that profit and altruism can coexist in moving from the old paradigm of hard copy and into the realm of electronic texts, which honestly is exactly what our students want.