The NYT editorialized against textbook companies charging outrageous prices for their texts, but it failed to get to the roots of the problem. Textbooks are expensive because of the way in which the government finances their production, it grants copyright monopolies. Copyrights were undoubtedly great policy for the 16th century when they when they first came into existence, but they are not very well suited for the Internet Age. Suppose that the government instead contracted with textbook publishers to produce textbooks, with the condition that everything they produce is in the public domain and can be freely copied or transmitted over the Internet. In this case, the cost of a textbook would be reduced to the printing cost. Professors could freely select chapters from different texts, where they felt it was appropriate, without requiring students to buy multiple texts. And, there would be no incentive to make pointless changes just to create a new edition. Of course publishers would still be free to operate under the current copyright system and charge $200 for their their textbooks, they just might find it a bit harder to compete with books that are as good or better that can be downloaded for free off the web. This would take some additional tax money, but we can just pull out of the subsidies that we give to college students to allow them to pay for textbooks. It's time for a little bit of serious economic thinking at the NYT. (Thanks to a BTP regular for calling this one to my attention.)
--Dean Baker
