The cost of e-books is hobbling university teaching

In an attempt to pick up the common rebuttals to this argument: - ‘Not all publishers...’: true, but when the problematic ones are OUP/Blackwell, SAGE, Springer et al it’s a significant issue. - ‘Our packages make our ebooks cost less than £2 each’: these packages are typically like buying a 24-pack of crisps with 20 bags of prawn cocktail to get the single bag of smoky bacon you wanted.

The problem, like many UK higher ed problems, is self-made. Tuition fees lead to a customer mentality and an expectation that the University provides free copies of all books. Universities then force lecturers to include only those textbooks the library holds or can afford. I was trained in a country without tuition fees and had to buy the books, sometimes used copies or old editions, or make copies or scans for private use of the printed versions of books. Marketisation is making our lives harder, once again.

The authors should be paid for their output too. Obviously there is a big gap in the market for some disrupter to offer authors a 50% share of e-book sales and make some of the better texts more widely available for Universities.

students and teachers alike plead with libraries for hard copies. E books are completely unusable for humanities study and research, and yet policies are quoted saying that e-books must be purchased where possible. Stop buying these e-books, nobody wants them except librarians (a repeated research finding, not just my opinion) and they teach bad habits - study as quickly scanning for superficial information.

This issue recently came so light at our institution where switching from a hard copy text that we had used for many years to an ebook incurred a £50,000 charge. Unsurprisingly, we decided to remove that text from the reading list entirely. In the current consumerist model of higher education, academics can have an impact by switching to more affordable, and ideally open access/free texts. There are many excellent alternatives to established, market dominating texts provide the same student experience.

Trying to explain how academic publishing works in simple terms I use this gardening/shopping analogy: I grow some carrots. I take the carrots to a supermarket and they put them on a shelf for me. A member of my family then goes into the supermarket, puts some of my carrots into a basket, and then goes to the till. The supermarket then charges my family member for the carrots. You're welcome!