Going to the U of T Bookstore is a trying ordeal at best. The lines are long, the aisles crowded, and the books are often difficult to find. By far, the most aggravating part of getting your books for the new school year is the price. I try to do my purchasing over the course of several days, the main reason being that if I try to buy all my books at once, I exceed the weekly amount my debit card lets me withdraw. For example, last week, I bought six books — not even half of what I require — and it cost $250. The cheapest came in at just over $20 and the most expensive was $85. The typical cost of a book over my years here at U of T has probably been $40 to $60. By no means do I have it harder than many on campus — many students probably pay much more than I do. But the strain that book purchases put on all of our resources is immense. You can save money by eating cheap ramen noodles, but it is difficult to cut your costs when it comes to books since you require them to perform well in your classes. Surely, in the age of the Internet, smartphones, and polio vaccines, we can find a way to reduce the cost of books.
Luckily for us, such a revolution is taking place in the publishing world. With the advent of the tablet and the e-reader, book prices are plummeting — if you read them in a specific format. The iPad, Kindle, Kobo and other devices allow individuals to store massive libraries in the palm of their hand, and organizations such as Amazon.com and Barnes & Noble are using this to slash the prices of books.
It has been estimated that 50 per cent of the price of books is in the paper. That’s one of the reasons why paperbacks are cheaper than hardcovers and why slim manifestos are cheaper than multi-volume epics. With e-books, the cost of paper completely disappears. An initial investment is made, sure, but a basic e-reader comes in at around $120, equivalent to just one or two books, and will last you the full academic career. Beyond that, the cost of e-books tends to be at least half the cost of a physical book, with many titles priced even lower.
With this brave new world, you may be wondering why U of T has not already made the change to an e-book curriculum. Arguments against e-books contend that you do not in fact “own” your e-book, since you cannot re-sell or loan it. However, an e-reader purchase keeps a book in your personal online library indefinitely. E-readers like Kobo allow you to both “borrow” books from a “library,” wherein you can access them for a limited amount of time, and “lend” your books to friends, so that they can, for a limited amount of time, read the books themselves. Clearly, fears that we lose control by going digital are as outdated as fears about the mp3s you listen to. Society has adapted to the digital world. Furthermore, the need to re-sell books at the end of a semester will decrease as the initial investment made diminishes. If a rental model were created, allowing students to pay for e-books for a limited amount of time (say the length of a semester or school year) the cost to the student could be even further reduced.
Cynics have claimed that universities would not be able to make such a change even if they wanted to. The vast majority of publishers’ profits come from textbooks. Students are held captive if publishers refuse to make their titles available digitally. However, this works to the university’s advantage. Because so much of publishers’ profits come from students, the companies are the ones held hostage. If Scribner refused to make their works readily available in e-book form, U of T would simply tell its professors that they could no longer assign Scribner-published works, not to mention that our very own University of Toronto Press — one of the largest university presses in North America — could start offering all of its publications as e-books, causing a massive influx of options to the market.
If the University of Toronto is truly concerned about the well-being of its students, then it must begin to make the transition to an e-book curriculum. The reduction of this cost alone would make student life massively more affordable for everyone on campus.
