By Anthony Lippa-Hardy
Due to high production costs and increased inflation on school resources, university students are now faced with an added financial burden as textbook prices continue to soar.
According to the Toronto Metropolitan University (TMU) tuition and fees webpage, depending on the program of study, students can expect to pay anywhere from $1,400 to $9,400 for textbooks and school supplies in addition to their tuition and housing fees.
Alessandro Balsamo, a fifth-year business management student at TMU, said the heightened cost of textbooks acts as an added financial hardship.
“I live alone downtown, so it affects me a great deal,” he said.
Balsamo spends roughly $400 per semester on required textbooks for his program. He said this money could be better spent on other, more essential life expenses.
“If you think about it, one person living alone—$400 worth of groceries could probably last me two months,” said Balsamo.
He said providing more access to open educational resources would be beneficial for students since there have been times when he hasn’t purchased textbooks due to the high prices.
One of the major factors contributing to high textbook prices is the production cost of the book itself.
Art Seto, a professor of graphic communications management at TMU, said the process of printing and binding books are “a quarter of the cost,” to create them.
He specializes in bookbinding and explained that there are four main types of bookbinding processes: saddle stitching, perfect binding, mechanical binding and case binding. These processes range in price and production complexity, with saddle stitching being the least expensive and case binding being the most.
Each process has its own set of pros and cons but out of these four, Seto said only case binding has the durability required for a textbook.
“Glue adhesive spines don’t last forever, whereas [case-bound] books can last 500 to 600 years,” said Seto. He explained that sewing the pages together in the case-bound process as opposed to gluing them makes the book considerably more durable.
Seto emphasized the importance of durability in reusable academic resources. Hardcover case-bound books are the only viable option for textbooks seeking longevity and maintaining market value, he added.
However, this added robustness also increases costs for case-bound textbooks, mainly due to the additional steps involved in creating the hardcover books.
“You’re going to use 10 or 15 different machines to make a hardcover book”
He explained the extra steps don’t just mean more man power—they also require more real estate and utility charges, all of which add to higher overhead costs for
printing companies.
Inflation has also played a significant role in higher textbook prices. According to Ana Ferrer, an economics professor and associate dean at the University of Waterloo, “a lot of the increase [people have] seen in prices recently has to do with inflation.”
Since this February, the recreation, education and reading category of Canada’s Consumer Price Index has increased by 2.6 percentage points, according to Statistics Canada, indicating inflation on academic resources has risen over the past seven months.
According to Ferrer, rising labour and material costs also impact the final cost of textbooks.
“Labour is more expensive, a lot of materials are more expensive and technology is more expensive. Everything is going to hike up those prices,” she said.
Along with rising prices, McGraw Hill, one of the leading publishing companies behind Canadian textbooks, saw an increase in profit amidst high inflation rates.
This past quarter, McGraw Hill reported billing their customers $85 million while also hitting a record share increase of 27.6 per cent.
This comes with a 25 per cent year-over-year increase in inclusive access sales to over 1,800 campuses. Inclusive access sales are textbook sales that are pre-built into students’ tuition. This means students who are forced to pay for this service can’t experiment with cheaper online or pre-owned textbook options as they have already paid for the material.
Given the high textbook fees, some students have turned to pirated websites to access copy righted class material.
“This past semester, there was a textbook that was like $300 [so] I just got one off a pirated website,” said Balsamo.
Sites like PDF Drive and Libgen.is offer free textbook downloads without copyright permission from the original owners of the work.
Kwame Ansong, a third-year computer science student at TMU, said he uses online resources for classes outside of his major that are not specific to his degree.
“For the art courses, I don’t always find it necessary to buy a physical textbook,” he said.
Ansong doesn’t see anything wrong with using online books if they weren’t written by the professor teaching the material. However, half of the challenge for him is finding the right online resources.
“There are already so many tools available online. I just think knowledge about them can be improved”
Ansong uses tools like Google Scholar and a variety of PDF download websites to find online textbooks for his courses.
He would like to see more professors promote free online textbook services since students are already using them and it would provide additional financial support.
Ansong and Balsamo aren’t the only ones who see online textbooks as the future. Ferrer also agrees there may be a shift from traditional tangible textbooks to alternative services.
“What we may see—and I don’t know how fast this will come about—is a switch from traditional textbooks to other sources,” she said.
The Government of Ontario is also striving to make university textbooks more affordable through the Ontario Open Textbooks Initiative. In 2017, the province invested $1 million into the program designed to get copyrighted online textbooks into the hands of university students across Ontario.
In a 2017 press release, the Minister of Advanced Education and Skills Development, Deb Matthews said, “by supporting a movement of free online textbooks and other open educational resources, we are removing yet another financial barrier to accessing post-secondary education in Ontario.” Currently, the program provides access to over 180 open source textbooks, which are available on the eCampusOntario website.
A similar initiative has been established in British Columbia and has saved learners over $4 million, according to the province.
Unfortunately, for university students across Canada, the high costs of tangible textbooks shows no signs of decreasing. Statistics Canada continues to report higher-than-average inflation on these academic resources spanning over the last three decades.
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