According to the National Association of College Students, in the US the average annual spending on course materials fell by 14 per cent between 2007 and 2016. It’s a similar story in the UK. Although the National Union of Students (NUS) recommends that students put aside over £1,000 a year for books, interviews taken from many university prospectuses suggest that the average spend is nowhere near that. For Lucy, an engineering student at the University of Oxford, “all the books I need are in the college or faculty libraries”.
A spiral of destruction
It’s easy to point fingers at the ‘digital age’ swooping in to steal market share from traditional print publishers. But the textbook conundrum started long before the influence of Amazon, Google or Wikipedia.
The textbook market is unusual as the person who chooses the book (the professor) is not the person who has to pay for it (the student). That means that publishers historically showed little concern for textbook prices in the knowledge that the person selecting the book would care little about the price and the person spending the money would have no choice but to pay it. Economists call this the ‘principle agent’ problem and in the early noughties, it drove the price of textbooks up to extortionate levels. By late 2014, The Principles of Economics – the world’s best-selling textbook – retailed on Amazon at $350 (£281).
There is also a whole new industry opening up thanks to the growth in demand for virtual or personalised schools. Aim-traded Wey Education PLC operates the UK’s only online fee-paying secondary schools. “We’ve harnessed new technology for an old business,” said chairman David Massie when I spoke to him last year, “so there is a place for us in today’s society”. He might be right. The group’s first school, InterHigh, saw student numbers rise 52 per cent to 647 in the 2015-16 academic year.