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Textbooks
"I doubt whether we are sufficiently attentive to the importance
of elementary textbooks."
-- C. S. Lewis
The Abolition of Man
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Textbooks are a source of instruction on concepts, relationships and factual knowledge.
That much, we expect. But textbooks address less obvious needs:
- they can be a de facto curriculum standard if a school fails to define its own,
- they serve as a reference for parents to know what their children should be learning,
- they can provide guidance and helpful tips to teachers,
- they can provide coordinated work assignments.
That's what can happen if a textbook is conscientiously actually used,
and if the textbook is competently written, developed and packaged. Now we
are learning that often, very often, that is not the case.
Overview
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Textbook Troubles
by Rebecca Jones,
American School Board Journal,
December 2000.
Subhead: "Today's textbooks have a lot of razzle-dazzle, but where's the content?
'Open your textbooks, boys and girls, to page 1,276.'"
Excerpt: "[Yesterday's] textbooks are long gone, replaced by 20-pound packages
of glitz that lure many school officials and state textbook administrators into
thinking they're providing students with the best and latest in curriculum materials.
But several recent reports criticize these coffee-table textbooks as shallow,
dumbed-down products that waste both taxpayers' money and students' learning potential."
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American Textbook Council reviews history textbooks and other educational materials.
Its stated purpose is to "improve the social studies curriculum and civic education in the
nation's elementary and high schools." They provide an outline of the problems
with many modeern social studies texts in their
Report 2000: History Textbooks at the New Century.
The organization also provides a
list of the major social studies texts.
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The Textbook League: an organization dedicated to the problems of school textbooks.
Some of their reports carry a particular spin themselves, and in some cases a strong
anti-religious bias colors their reviews.
But with that noted, the TTL reviews can be an interesting source of comments on many popular texts.
For details, see this
list of TTL reviews.
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Library Textbooks Leave Few Homework Excuses
By Lisa Black, Chicago Tribune, October 17, 2006.
By the time Mesa Schmidt realized she had left her weekend algebra
homework at school, it was Sunday afternoon and impossible to enter
the building. This time, though, the 13-year-old was able to find the pages she
needed on intercepts and linear equations at Lake Villa District
Library, which recently stocked three shelves with textbooks supplied
by the local school district. ...
The school district has lent one copy of each book to the library.
The books are held as reference materials only and cannot be checked
out. Public libraries in Arlington Heights, Barrington, Park Forest and
Skokie have a similar setup with area schools, which librarians say
is rare."
- Find sales reps of textbook companies:
Northern Illinois' Educational Representatives Association
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EMR Research Corner Archives: Articles and popularity rankings
of textbooks and supplemental materials, by subject and grade level.
Evaluating Textbooks:
Subjects and Specific Titles
Information on specific textbooks and curricula can be found in the instructional subject areas
of this website, including:
Dumbing-Down
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Dumb Students? Or Dumb Textbooks? by Diane Ravitch,
Forbes Magazine, December 16, 1996.
"... Poor verbal scores are the result not of the students' racial,
ethnic or gender composition, but of the schools' de-emphasis on careful
reading and writing, the near abandonment of basic literacy skills like
grammar, syntax and spelling and the saturation of popular culture by television.
... A recent study ... supports the idea that schools have contributed
to the lower verbal scores and that ... the biggest decline in the test scores
... was due not to a change in the composition of the test-takers but to a
progressive simplification of the language in schoolbooks."
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How Schools Are Destroying The Joy Of Reading: Heavy Tomes That Are Light Intellectually
by Patrick Welsh, USA Today, August 3, 2005
"...The problems with these two tomes are similar to the problems with high school textbooks in most subjects.
First, there's the well-documented weight problem. ...
Worse is the fact that for all their bulk, the textbooks are feather-weight intellectually. ...
Both books are full of obtrusive directions, comments, questions and pictures that would hinder
even the attentive readers from becoming absorbed in the readings. Both also are not reader-friendly.
There is no narrative coherence that a student can follow and get excited about. ...
Such texts bastardize literature and history ...
Students are jerked from one excerpt of literature to another, given no chance for the kind
of sustained reading that stimulates the imagination."
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Glorifying Ignorance
by William J. Bennetta, The Textbook Letter, September-October 2000.
"Dumb teachers demand dumb schoolbooks, and all of the major
educational publishers have produced books that such teachers will
buy -- books in which factoids substitute for concepts, slogans
substitute for explanations, and pedagogy is often reduced to inane
gimmicks which look like didactic devices but which, in fact, don't
require teachers or students to know anything or learn anything.
These pseudopedagogic gimmicks include questions and exercises which
impel students to bray opinions about matters that they don't
understand, to specify 'solutions' to problems that lie far beyond
their comprehension, or to vent their juvenile emotions as if
emotions were equivalent to knowledge."
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Caution: Textbooks Are Hazardous to Your Child's Mind by Gary Hull.
"Modern textbooks are one more symptom of our culture's growing rejection
of the central role of reason in human life. Unless we start to grasp the
urgent need to develop the individual child's conceptual ability, our schools
will be turning out an ever-increasing number of students who simply do
not know how to think."
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"Schoolbook Simplification and Its Relation to the Decline in SAT-Verbal Scores"
August 2001 (web page, also available as a
PDF document).
Asks this question: "Are schoolbooks easier and has education been affected?"
and concludes: "Yes".
Bulk and Glitz
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Textbook Size Expands to Include Extras by Mark Clayton,
Christian Science Monitor, December 1, 1997. One of the
quotes in this article:
"There is incredible demand for watered-down, dumbed-down, fluffy
textbooks that can be comprehended by the dullest student."
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Study: School Textbooks Offer 'National Curriculum'
by Christine Hall, May 22, 2001.
"The school textbooks put out by the 'big four' publishers offer a one-size-fits-all
approach to education, according to a new study by the Center for Education
Reform (CER). ... 'The result is an increasing trend towards texts that are
long on visual gimmicks, short on factual information and homogenized in content,'
said CER president Jeanne Allen."
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Poor textbooks add to schools' slide
by Roger Arnold, Dallas News, January 21, 2002.
"The fact is, many textbook publishers care very little about the content of
the books they publish. Many of the editors at those companies spend most of
their days thinking up and designing catchy logos and labels for their books.
Much more time is devoted to how the book looks than to what the book says."
Huge textbooks
can stop a bullet?
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- In 2006, Bill Crozier, a candidate for Oklahoma state superintendent of education, suggested
that students might be able to defend themselves from armed school intruders by using their massive textbooks
as shields. In his own home video demonstration, he demonstrated how a 9mm bullet fired from a Glock handgun
penetrated only about two-thirds of the way through a typical modern textbook.
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Jumbo Textbooks by C.F. Navarro, Ph.D:
"Students today don't have it that easy. Their textbooks are so large that they have trouble
getting them into their lockers, and so heavy that they need sturdy backpacks to lug them around.
The average textbook used in city public schools today is about twice the volume and thrice the
weight of the ones we had when I was in high school. ...
So ponderous are textbooks today that they can cause serious injury.
Jan Richardson, president of the American Physical Therapy Association warns parents
that when kids sling their heavy backpacks over one shoulder
'they can strain shoulder and neck muscles and cause a temporary curvature of the spine.'
Now, one would think that modern textbooks are so much larger because they contain a lot
more information than did those in the past. But they don't.
Many any of them, in fact, don't cover their subject as well as the old books did.
The sole reason for their jumbo size is that they are overloaded with extraneous material.
... Another problem with this and other modern textbooks is their exorbitant cost.
... Public school officials are ever looking for ways to improve education and cut costs.
They could do both at the same time by adopting textbooks with fewer frills and more substance."
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Should We Be Alarmed by the Results of the Latest U.S. History Test? Yes!
By Diane Ravitch. Excerpt:
"The dullness of history textbooks is legendary.
I am involved right now in a study of history textbooks, and I
must say that I have trouble reading them because of their jumbled,
jangly quality. I also have trouble lifting them because they are
so heavy and overstuffed with trivia and pedagogical aids.
With one or maybe two exceptions, most textbooks put more
emphasis on visual glitz than on the quality of their text. By the time that
these books emerge from the political process that is called state adoption,
they lack voice and narrative power. They lack the very qualities that
make historical writing exciting. Our history textbooks are distracting,
and I don't know how students learn anything from them"
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What Harry Potter Can Teach The Textbook Industry
by Diane Ravitch. Excerpt:
"Whereas [children] hunger to get a Harry Potter book of nearly 900 pages,
they can barely tolerate the equally large books that are assigned in school.
What does Harry Potter have that the textbooks don't? ...
In contrast to the gripping tales told by Rowling and Tolkien,
our history textbooks skim lightly above the surface of events,
ignoring the fact that history is first of all a story. ...
The drama of history and biography is sacrificed ...
Clashes of good and evil have been banished, replaced by pedestrian
prose and thumbnail sketches."
- Here is one teacher's comments about having served on his school's science textbook
committee:
Every textbook submitted for consideration (including those of the "big
3") was bloated, padded with useless flashy graphics, and constructed in
a flimsy fashion.
They seem to be designed to appeal to the casual viewer, such as those
that inhabit selection committees. There was much oohing and aahing
over the attractive graphics and flashy layout, but little attention
paid to the actual content of the book. We ended up choosing the least
of the evils, ... and since then I have waded through factual
errors, muddy text, useless illustrations, etc. Then I get to watch my
students lugging these monsters around. Anyone notice that textbooks
have nearly doubled in size over the past few years?
Unfortunately, there seems to be little impetus to publish better books.
If a publisher were to produce a concise, well-written, and
reasonably-sized text it would fail, as it isn't flashy enough to
compete with the "Tokyo by Night" variety of textbooks.
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"They look like no other book in the world."
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- A letter titled
Students' Writing Skills in the Los Angeles Times (May 24, 2003) is from a teacher
who blames textbooks in part for the poor ability of students to read and write:
"The textbooks themselves are part of the problem.
They are filled with color and graphical content,
icons and discontinuous text boxes. They look like no other book in the world.
They mimic Web pages. Open them and take a look.
Ask your teenage sons and daughters, or your neighbors' children,
how much reading they are doing in their content-area texts.
Be prepared for the troubling answers."
Errors in Textbooks
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Earth Daydreams, Textbook Fantasies
by Malcolm A. Kline, February 07, 2005. Excerpts:
"To get an idea of just how factually inaccurate classroom lectures
can be, just take a look at the books that accompany them. Textbook
reviewers in California and Texas, the largest markets for this
product, did just that and found widely-used texts desperately in
need of fact-checkers. ... Simi Valley Unified, which was required to
use the Houghton-Mifflin offering Oh, California!, a purported state
history. The book ... contains some real gems:
* Columbus started off from Portugal. [No, he sailed from Spain.]
* The Pony Express started at Fort Kearney, Nebraska. [The real starting point: St. Joseph, Missouri.]
* Malibu and Santa Monica are somehow in the San Fernando Valley. [This would make surfing difficult.]
* The transcontinental railroad went south of Lake Tahoe. [Actually, it went north of it.]
Not to be outdone, Holt, Rinehart & Winston (HRW) managed to cram
enough inaccuracies in science and history textbooks to give critics
in two states writing cramps correcting the publishing house's
errors. Start with the California edition of Earth Science, a high
school textbook. ... Over 40 teachers along with their schools' names appeared in
[book,] however, they all
missed the date of discovery of the Rosetta Stone by a century, they
thought that gold dissolves in hot water, they believed there was a
dinosaur walking around ancient New Mexico weighing 200 thousand
pounds, and they stated that magnetic compasses point to geographic
north."
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The Great American Textbook Scandal
by David McClintick, Forbes Magazine, October 30, 2000.
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History as She is Wrote
by Terry Graves, August 23, 2004.
"...Here are some more textbook stunners: ...
Napoleon won the Battle of Waterloo. ...
In the 7th century, Cordoba, Spain was an Islamic city, the Grand Mosque was already built,
and the Crusades were in progress -- all incorrect by one to four centuries. ...
A picture of a compass shows east and west reversed. ...
Six orders of birds are listed, all of them fictitious ...
Memorizing the value of pi is an example of deductive reasoning. ...
All [these] are from textbooks that major publishers like Prentice-Hall and Glencoe/McGraw-Hill
have been selling by the tens of millions to public elementary, middle, and high schools throughout the United States. ...
These professionals have their own organization: NASTA, which stands for, one of its
web pages tells us, National Association of School Textbook Administrattors [sic].
... NASTA's level of concern over textbook errors is almost below sea level -- the agenda for
its summer meeting includes that topic as one of eleven to be covered in one three-hour session,
and only one of the respective state reports from the last two years mentions it, and that only
in boilerplate as something it would be nice to avoid. ...
Why are public school textbooks so bad? ... 'Publishers now employ more people to censor books
for content that might offend any organized lobbying group, than they do to check the correctness of facts.'"
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2002 Social Studies Textbook Review from the
Texas Public Policy Foundation, July 2002: detailed reviews
and rankings for a number of major social stidies textbooks
for middle schools through high schools. Includes listings
of factual errors, and responses from textbooks publishers.
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States Setting Strategies To Reduce Mistakes in Textbooks
by Kathleen Kennedy Manzo, Education Week, June 2, 1999.
Excerpt: "In a recent review of textbooks proposed for adoption in
California, a panel of mathematicians found hundreds of errors.
... It was their pervasiveness that surprised state officials most.
'It was shocking,' said Cathy Barkett, the administrator of the
curriculum-frameworks and instructional-resources office. 'In one 200-page text,
50 of the pages had errors.'"
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Economics Texts Misleading, Too
School Reform News,
September 2001
- "Book Report", a segment of the ABC magazine show, "20/20", aired April 2, 1999.
"Sam Donaldson reports that there are a number of mistakes found in some of
the most widely read textbooks in America."
- Errors in science textbooks:
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Middle-School Texts Don't Make the Grade by John Hubisz (a professor of physics),
Physics Today, May 2003.
This important article starts out,
"Thousands of teachers are saddled with error-filled physical science
textbooks that fail to present what science is all about."
A
number of letters in a later issue of Physics Today
confirmed the points made by Dr. Hubisz.
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Middle School Physical Science Resource Center
- a website developed by Dr. John Hubisz to offer positive solutions
for some of the problems that his research uncovered in science textbooks.
Dr. Hubisz says,
"This web site is for anyone with an interest in Middle School physical science
textbooks, resource materials, teaching, training, and so on."
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A Textbook Case of Junk Science
by Pamela R. Winnick, Weekly Standard, May 9, 2005.
"But then there's lots that's puzzling about the science textbooks
used in American classrooms. A sloppy way with facts, a preference for
the politically correct over the scientifically sound, and sheer faddism
characterize their content."
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Review of Middle School Physical Science Texts,
Physical Sciences Resource Center, American Association of Physics Teachers.
"This review of middle school physical science texts ... reviews and critiques
the physical science in Middle School
(grades 6, 7, and 8, although some schools called Junior High designate grades 7, 8, and 9)
science textbooks with regard to the scientific accuracy,
adherence to an accurate portrayal of the scientific approach,
and the appropriateness and pedagogic effectiveness of the material
presented for the particular grade level.
The author noted such things as readability, attractiveness, quality of illustrations,
and whether material such as laboratory activities, suggested home activities,
exercises to test understanding, and resource suggestions where considered appropriate."
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Judging Books by Their Covers, a chapter from
Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!: Adventures of a Curious Character
by Richard Feynman
In the linked chapter
of one of his books, the Nobel laureate and extraordinarily interesting
Feynman recalls his experiences serving on California's textbook adoption
agency. It's greatly worth reading the
this chapter online for both its insight and humor! (Or get the whole fascinating
book!) Excerpt:
"... What finally clinched it, and made me ultimately resign
[from the California State Curriculum Commission], was that the following year
we were going to discuss science books. I thought maybe the science [books] would be
different, so I looked at a few of them.
The same thing happened: something would look good at first and then turn out to be horrifying. ...
But that's the way all their books were: They said things that were useless,
mixed-up, ambiguous, confusing, and partially incorrect. How anybody can learn
science from these books, I don't know, because it's not science."
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Avoid Misconceptions When Teaching about Plants
by David R. Hershey. The author, who holds a Ph.D. in plant physiology,
illustrates in one subject area how textbooks and teaching materials can introduce
misconceptions through oversimplifications, overgeneralizations, or misidentifications.
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"Science Myths" in K-6 Textbooks
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Warning to Middle-School Teachers: Science Texts Unreliable
by George A. Clowes,
School Reform News,
September 2001. Subhead: "Study finds popular science textbooks riddled with errors"
- "Biology Textbooks Get A Failing Grade" by David L. Chandler, The Boston Globe:
Excerpt: "Confused about the exact meaning behind this week's reports on the
human genome project? Don't bother consulting a biology textbook to
clear things up. It won't help. According to a new study of
10 widely-used current high school
biology textbooks, not a single one is acceptable overall."
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Textbooks Flunk Out
by David L. Chandler, Boston Globe, May 17, 1999.
Subhead: "When science books are put to the test, it's hard to
decipher fact from fiction."
Excerpt: "When electrical engineer William Beaty was working on the design of
an electricity exhibit for the Boston Museum of Science, he decided
to check out some elementary school science textbooks in search of
good ways to communicate fundamental concepts on the subject.
Bad idea.
What he found was a morass of misconceptions, mistakes and misinformation
in one text after another."
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Science Textbooks Fail Students by Kate Wong, Scientific American.
"Year after year, standardized tests indicate that American students
fall behind their peers in other countries when it comes to science and math.
If the results of a new study are any indication, part of the problem
may be their textbooks. According to the report, examinations of
some of the nation's most widely used middle school physical science
textbooks revealed numerous errors and inappropriate lessons."
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Know much about science books? Many are rife with errors, says new study
by Mary Lord, U. S. News, January 22, 2001.
- As a sidebar to an article about textbook errors, Science News published
(March 24, 2001)
this article about Introductory Physical Science,
a "middle-school science book [that] is one of the few that win widespread praise."
Political Correctness and Bias
How Textbooks are Chosen
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Overcoming Structural Barriers to Good Textbooks
by Harriet Tyson, National Education Goals Panel (NEGP).
A solid introduction to the business of textbook publishing and adoption.
State Adoptions
In 22 states, notably not including Illinois, textbooks are adopted on the
state level rather than by individual districts. This adds a whole new layer
of bureaucracy imposing its own notions of dumbing down, fluff and glitz,
and political correctness.
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The Textbook Adoption Mess -- And What Reformers Are Doing To Fix It
By Melissa Ezarik, District Administration, March 1, 2005.
This meaty article uncovers all manner of problems in state-level adoptions.
In a nutshell summary, one one veteran of textbook adoption battles is quoted,
"That's when I really began to realize that
the adoption process is not about results. ... I don't think any of [the committee
members] asked if the program actually works in the
classroom or not. ... [Instead, it's about] playing the
game, playing the politics, kissing the right rear end."
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Textbook Adoption: A 'Mad, Mad World' that Hurts Schools and Students
by Robert Holland, School Reform News, December 1, 2004. Excerpt:
"A major school reform organization has condemned government-run
textbook adoption for generating dumbed-down texts that harm students
and schools across the nation, even though the process is used in
only 21 of the 50 states. The report recommends devolving decisions
about textbook purchases to individual schools, districts, and
teachers.
In 'adoption' states, a central textbook committee designated by the
state education bureaucracy selects the textbooks schools may
purchase with public money. The reviewers often enforce so-called
sensitivity guidelines by demanding publishers change wording and
content.
Because of the size of their combined market, the adoption states
effectively dictate textbook content nationwide, given the vested
interests of the publishers in selling their wares as widely as
possible."
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The Mad, Mad World of Textbook Adoption (full report, as PDF),
Thomas B. Fordham Foundation, September 2004.
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Judging Books by Their Covers, a chapter from
Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!: Adventures of a Curious Character
by Richard Feynman.
Feynman was a scientific superstar, the truest embodiment of a "modern Renaissance man", and
a sensational, powerful and colloquial lecturer. Considered to be the second greatest
physicist of the 20th century (after Einstein), tapes and books of this Nobel laureate's works
and lectures are still extremely popular. In the linked chapter
of one of his books, Feynman recalls his experiences serving on California's textbook adoption
agency. It's greatly worth reading the
Judging Books by Their Covers
for both its insight and humor! Excerpt:
"... What finally clinched it, and made me ultimately resign
[from the California State Curriculum Commission], was that the following year
we were going to discuss science books. I thought maybe the science [books] would be
different, so I looked at a few of them.
The same thing happened: something would look good at first and then turn out to be horrifying. ...
But that's the way all their books were: They said things that were useless,
mixed-up, ambiguous, confusing, and partially incorrect. How anybody can learn
science from these books, I don't know, because it's not science."
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"The Textbook Conundrum: What are the Children Learning and Who Decides?" (PDF)
This important report from the Center for Education Reform tackles the question
of statewide reform head-on. "Major findings note that,
while each state has specific academic standards, textbooks tend to
be geared to the needs of only three specific states -- California, Texas, and Florida --
because these states engage in a statewide adoption and account for 30 percent of
the K-12 market. Because of these long-standing practices, new or smaller textbook
companies have little chance against the 'Big Four' publishers who control
70 percent of the industry. The result is an increasing trend toward texts
that are long on visual gimmicks, short on factual information, and
homogenized in content, and this result is having a 'trickle down' effect,
weakening the classroom instruction by teachers who are more often than not
iant upon these books for a de facto lesson plan."
- In her masterful book on political correctness in textbooks,
The Language Police,
Diane Ravitch argues for the elimination of state textbook adoptions as the single most needed
remedy for the problem.
Escalating Costs
Those heavy, bulky, glitzy books are also expensive to produce and distribute. Whereas it's relatively
inexpensive to stocl a school with direct and effective programs in math from Saxon or Singapore,
for example, the much bulkier books from Scott Foresman Addison Wesley are far more expensive
and have less evidence of effectiveness.
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Why Do Textbooks Cost So Much?
by Charlotte Allen, April 4, 2008
"You've just started your freshman year in college, so one of your
first stops is the campus bookstore to pick up your textbooks. ...
Your textbook-bill total for the semester is now $475.60 for just
four books ... -- and that doesn't include
optional study guides, the lab manual you might need for chem class,
or the photocopied handout packet your English teacher says she'll be
passing out at your expense. Why the sky-high prices for basic
textbooks? ...
In September 2006 an advisory committee to the U.S. Education
Department issued a lengthy analysis of the economic forces that
possibly lead to high textbook prices. They included
- inelastic demand
(student who want to pass their courses have to buy the books);
- an oligopolistic supply market in which only a handful of publishers
(including Thomson, McGraw-Hill, Prentice Hall, and Houghton-Mifflin)
dominate,
- high production costs that create barriers to entry by
possible competitors with the Big Four;
- the fact that college
bookstores, which typically charge some of the highest retail prices,
tend to be profit centers for their universities;
- the fact that
professors typically receive free comp copies of the books they
assign their classes and thus often don't know how much the books
cost;
- and the further fact that the professors who author textbooks
have a financial stake via royalties in assigning the books to their
captive classes."
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Textbook Publishers' Pumped Up Pricing Exposed
by Jim Brown, February 7, 2005.
"A national student activist organization says college textbook
publishers continue to rip off students by using all kinds of
gimmicks to inflate the costs of textbooks artificially.
A new report released by the National State Public Interest Research
Groups, or PIRGs, accuses the college textbook publishing industry of
using several ploys to drive up prices.
PIRGs spokesman David Rosenfeld says the most common gimmick used by
the publishers is to produce new editions of the same textbook with
little or no significant difference in the content. ... Rosenfeld
says many textbook publishers also 'bundle' textbooks with CD-ROMs,
workbooks, and supplemental materials, which serves to drive up the
cost of the textbooks and make them harder to resell."
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Study: Textbook Prices Soar for Students, Extras, new editions drive college students' textbook costs to $900 a year
(also available
here)
by Rukmini Callimachi, Associated Press, April 8, 2004.
"College freshman Amy Connolly ... judges the newest Calculus 101 text by what's
inside: a CD-ROM, flashy color photographs and a bubble-wrapped study
manual. All those extras bring the price tag to $126, she says.
'The textbook companies are adding bells and whistles that students
don't need -- it's making the cost of education unaffordable,' said
Connolly...
Fifteen members of Congress have asked for an investigation into the
pricing policies of U.S textbook publishers. The Government
Accounting Office, which is the investigative arm of Congress, has
given the request high priority..."
- Wildly escalating textbook costs have already become a major issue in California:
Two Bills Take On Textbook Prices: Investigation Showed High Costs
By Jessica Portner, Mercury News, Feb. 22, 2003. This article points to examples of textbook costs
doubling or even tripling, much faster than "teacher salaries, computers and other costs." In another example,
a price increase on a single book (a sicth grade English text) cost the state of California an additional
$2 million.
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School board officials' ties to lobbyists draw criticism by Jessica Portner, San Jose Mercury News, December 16, 2002:
"Two California school board officials who have helped steer the state's
textbook selection process established personal financial relationships
with lobbyists for the publishing industry, raising questions about
whether they lacked the objectivity to control escalating textbook costs."
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Campaign for Affordable Textbooks: a student and faculty organization pressing for
solutions to spiraling textbook costs.
- SwapSimple.com:
From a story in the Chicago Tribune, June 11, 2006,
"Elliot Hirsch, 28, and two of his childhood buddies from Wilmette,
Ill., Eric Haszlakiewicz and David Goldblatt, got sick of paying high
prices for their college textbooks and then selling them back to the
bookstore at rock-bottom prices. Once they graduated, they decided to
do something about it.
It's taken a few years, but they created a business,
SwapSimple, with a Web site (swapsimple.com)
that not only cuts out the middleman but
also lets you trade texts virtually free."
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eBay Prohibits Textbooks for Homeschool Teachers:
Lumps them with illegal drugs, bootleg recordings, prompting avalanche of complaints from customers
World Net Daily, August 27, 2006.
"eBay did offer a recourse for further concerns:
'We appreciate the fact that you may disagree with eBay's decision to
establish this policy. If you would like to see these policies
change ... you may want to submit your feelings by completing the form at the
following URL.'
But there also are other auctions that do allow the sale of homeschool texts.
One location, which does require purchasers to be 18, is
Schoolbookauction.com.
Another one is
Homeschoolbid.com and observers said there are many more available through an Internet search."
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