More than 1,000 professors issued a statement Tuesday declaring their preference for high quality, affordable textbooks instead of expensive commercial textbooks.
The professors, who work at more than 300 U.S. universities, signed the Open Textbooks Petition in an effort to alleviate the high cost of textbooks for students.
"Textbook expenses boil down to the way the market works," Nicole Allen, a spokeswoman for the Student Public Interest Research Groups. "The people choosing them, professors, aren't the people who have to buy them, and that gives publishers a disproportionate amount of power, because they know students are required to buy whatever books are assigned to the class."
Publishers maintain high costs by bundling materials, making students buy things they do not need and issuing new copies of books every year, Allen said.
Textbooks cost students an average of $900 per year, according to a study conducted by the U.S. Government Accountability Office.
"Often, students have to buy a new book even if the only changes in it are that the workbook questions have been moved around," Allen said.
The professors advocate open textbooks, which are complete, reviewed textbooks written by academics that can be used online at no cost and printed for a small cost.
"Electronic textbooks would be much cheaper. I'm interested in more up-to-date possibilities such as electronic and library sources that would allow me to keep my materials up-to-date and cover the topics that I'm interested in covering," said Dick Richardson, a UT integrative biology professor.
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