Skip to content

Buy the Book

For course materials, it's a brave new world  For course materials, it's a brave new world This fall, a new copy of the alternate edition of Fundamentals of Corporate Finance, the 992-page required textbook for the Hotel school's sophomore finance course, cost $245 at the Cornell Store. Comparison shoppers could also find it online from […]

Share

For course materials, it's a brave new world
 

For course materials, it's a brave new world

This fall, a new copy of the alternate edition of Fundamentals of Corporate Finance, the 992-page required textbook for the Hotel school's sophomore finance course, cost $245 at the Cornell Store. Comparison shoppers could also find it online from Amazon for $190.93—with free two-day shipping—or take their chances with even more affordable, less familiar Internet purveyors. In Collegetown, the independent textbook and clothing shop Kraftees had a used copy in stock—a different edition than the one assistant professor Pamela Moulton requires—for $145. A gently used copy of the required edition cost just $45 at the Cornell Store.

And then there was the free option. This semester, Moulton signed up her course for the University's ongoing pilot program investigating the logistics and performance of e-textbooks. Its 1,200 guinea pigs include undergraduate and grad students in fourteen courses spanning Arts and Sciences, Human Ecology, the Johnson School, and the Vet college, as well as Moulton's two sections of HADM 2220. Based on the Courseload software platform and accessible with a student NetID through the University's page on Blackboard.com, Cornell's electronic textbooks are essentially the better-off cousins to your favorite novel on Kindle, Nook, or iPad. Users can scroll page by page but can also highlight text, electronically annotate it, and even share comments and queries with classmates and instructors.

The price didn't hurt, says Moulton—but ultimately, it was the pedagogical possibilities that convinced her the project could be a boon to students. "They can access the book any time, anywhere, without having to carry it with them," says the professor, who walks from home to her Statler Hall office and buys copies for each location to spare her back. "A student might be able to look it over in the fifteen minutes between classes, for example. I hope that by making it more accessible, students will find new ways to study more effectively."

For nineteen-year-old Francesco Jimenez '15, the e-textbook has made it a little easier to be prepared for the 8:40 a.m. session of Moulton's class. "Sometimes that early I forget things," says the Hotel school student. "If I forget my textbook, I can use any computer on campus to access the e-textbook." Yet for Jimenez—whose freshman finance course also had an e-textbook offering—nothing beats good, old-fashioned paper. While he took advantage of online chapter quizzes to prepare for prelims last semester, this fall he happily spent the extra money to buy a used textbook as a counterpart to the electronic version. Says the Los Angeles native: "When I'm using the e-textbook, there's the temptation to check e-mail, check my grades, check Facebook."

A similar ambivalence permeated the feedback from the 600 students enrolled in four pilot courses last spring, organizers say. "They reported that when they get back to the dorm, they open the physical book because they can snuggle with it and they're not distracted by the Internet," says instructional technologist Eric Machan Howd, one of the coordinators of the pilot program. "But on campus, they don't bring the print version because they have access to the content online. They loved the collaboration with their peers, the portability, and the convenience." By early October, Jimenez had yet to familiarize himself with the online edition's interactive features, but the automatic bookmarking had already made an impression. "If you quit the browser, the computer automatically saves where you are," he says. "If my friend comes over and I close my laptop, it will automatically go back to page 300 the next time I log in."

This year, students nationwide can expect to spend some $1,200 on textbooks and supplies, according to the latest College Board survey on the subject. Costs have risen steadily for more than a decade; in 2005, the federal Government Accounting Office even launched an investigation into rising prices. But a sense of frustration with the cost and quality of textbooks stretches back to the University's earliest days. The Cornell Store traces its beginnings to 1886, when a pair of students founded the Co-op to provide more affordable books, among other items. A century later, faculty frustrated with high prices and outdated textbooks began crafting elaborate "course packs," collections of photocopied journal articles, newspaper clippings, and book chapters.

In the early days of the Internet, Cornell's tactics for combining textbooks with technology simply meant making reading lists available to students online before the semester started, so they could comparison shop at home. Back in Ithaca, they could buy course materials at the Cornell Store or the now-defunct Triangle Bookstore on College Avenue. Then Amazon entered the scene. "Amazon is everybody's competitor right now," says Cornell Store director Pat Wynn, a former vice president for sales promotion at Borders.

With a business model that derives a shrinking percentage of its income from textbook sales—just 31.2 percent in the fiscal year that ended in June 2011, representing only 16 percent of all transactions—the Cornell Store has gotten creative about meeting the need for affordable course materials. In recent years, that has meant collaborating with CIT's academic technologies unit to promote the e-textbook pilot, offering online book sales with orders pre-packed to speed in-store pickup, and even buying inexpensive used textbooks from Amazon, then renting them to students for a fraction of the cost of outright purchase. Says Wynn: "Students deserve the best price we can give them."

— Sharon Tregaskis '95

Share
Share