What began as a follow-up comment to our recent discussion about textbooks at Williams got rather long. As I confessed in that thread, this is a topic near and dear to my heart: I was a student on hefty financial aid, and while my parents would have paid for books or I could have afforded them myself, the cost of books had I bought all new and all “required”
editions would have exceeded the sum of my spending on all other things over the same period of time. This includes travel, entertainment, restaurant meals, whatever. Once your room and board are paid, it is possible to live frugally at Williams, and I did.

That’s not some kind of crazy boast(?), it is just an effort to put this discussion into perspective. Knowledge is nearly priceless. A good, unduplicated reference in a subject you care about is worth its weight in gold, and it would be crass of me or others to argue that I and other students scrimp on books in order to, say, go snowboarding over Winter Study. But should we, as Uible suggested, regard buying the newest editions a “petty matter” to be “treated by the students as merely a surcharges on tuition”? I answer, emphatically, no.

Below the break are my thoughts on this matter, derived from an experience with the topic that is arguably as broad as a student could have, beginning literally before my first day of classes, when I went to the 1914 Library seeking my first textbook: Saul Kassin’s 3rd edition of Psychology.

Highly motivated readers may have already determined that I was that student who wrote the Willipedia post on the textbook issues of PSYC 101 (only the textbook part, not the whole post) that David quoted in his last post. I wrote that based on my own experience during my first trip to the wonderful 1914, when I found that they were out of every textbook I needed (I came late), the most expensive of which was Kassin’s 1-year-old 3rd edition. Glum at facing another few hundred dollars of purchases after those associated with moving in for the first time, I was about to walk out of the library when I noticed stacks of the textbook title I needed on the “discard” table.

Being a new student, I had no prior experience with the common practice of updating texts to generate revenue for publishers, but hell, I was an adult. I knew that encyclopedias, iPods, and cars come out in unnuecessary, high-priced new models every year, why should textbooks be different? I knew the prior edtion was 2 years “outdated,” and on the spot I grabbed one and compared it to a borrowed copy of the new one required for class. The figures and text were literally identical; as best as I could determine in a quick perusal, the only difference was pagination (by 2 pages). I had just saved nearly 100 bucks but I was furious at what seemed to be a dishonest practice.

I got wise fast, and after freshman year never spent more than $150 in a semester on books. It is important to note that this is mostly because I was an ENGL-PSYC major: the latter required few books and the former required many books, but most were cheap or public domain. No matter how many time the Norton re-anthologizes the classics, they are the same texts. Rarely do professors refer at all to (or, I suspect, read) the headnotes, forewords, etc. accompanying primary texts in the assigned edition. What cause is there to suspect that Professor X from 2007 is more edifying than Professor Y from 1997 on the main issues in, say, “Hamlet”? No one needs the “3rd edition” of “Hamlet.” Obvious exceptions are when you are taking something like “feminist literary theory” or anything else where a far narrower, criticism-heavy focus is taken.

But enough about English. Perhaps its story is less relevant to other departments? Certainly Division III (sciences) tends to have more expensive books, and one cannot as easily wing through substituting one author’s teaching of organic chemistry for another. But as in English, the key issue is introductory level vs. more specialized, higher level classes. If you are taking an intro class, you book is either fairly old, and has been bought or sold by hundreds of students before you: buy used. Or it is new, not available used, but a reality check is in order. Is it less than 5 years newer than the prior edition? Is it a substantial improvement over the old? Is your commitment to the field and material high enough to warrant the marginal benefit of new over the (now deeply discounted) old?

In Fall 2003 I took the intro Neuroscience class. Well wise to the game by this point, when I saw that the 2nd edition of the text was required, I set out to decide the issue for myself. Right away I got ahold of the first edition and compared it to the second, and found that the two were, again, substantially the same though with chapters reordered. It was my pleasure to re-key the class syllabus for use with the first edition and send my modified weekly reading list out to the class by email. I did so without asking the professor first and was a bit worried she’d be annoyed; on the contrary, she was appreciative. She did not know how similar the two were, she said.

Some misconceptions about book buying in Williamstown exist here at Ephblog. JG wrote:

While I want to support independent bookstores like the “official” one for Williams, it just isn’t feasible for most students.

WSB is not an independent bookstore, it is owned by Follett Books, as this page on their website and this Feb ‘05 Record article make apparent.

An article on this topic would be incomplete without a huge kudos to everyone involved in keeping the 1914 Library alive, from the visionaries who made and solicited its endowment, to the tireless and sweet woman who singlehandedly runs the place, to Ali Moiz ‘06 and others who worked to make the latest major improvement to the library that I am aware of, the expensive book voucher. Yes, Froshmom, if your froshling is on financial aid unaware of all of 1914’s benefits, it’s time for a heart-to-heart.

A proposed rationale for requiring a textbook:

I don’t dispute ’10’s opinions that his 136 and 101 textbooks were good. The right question is not, “is the 101 book good.” “Good,” in this context, is meaningless without context—remember, we are undergraduates just learning the field! We can do little to second-guess our professor’s call, but we can hope that our professors assign books on the following criteria:

1. Is the title the best teaching tool in this class for use at Williams? There are enough (for example) intro psyc titles out there to fill a volcano. Obviously the Williams class has to agree to use just one, but if they choose what that one is on grounds other than “which will allow us to teach our students best?” the decision is suspect.
2. Is this edition the marginal best teaching tool in this class for use at Williams? How much benefit to students’ education would be gained by requiring the latest edition as opposed to the previous? (For example again) PSYC 101 is taught by a rotating selection of 5 department profs. If they had to place a real value on the incremental benefit of edition-upgrading, I think few would find it worth upgrading every two years in a class where nearly all of your subjects are landmark PSYC studies and core understandings.

Point #2 does not hold for all classes, but in classes like intro PSYC, ECON, PHIL, cutting edge translations and rehashings are probably unjustifiable. I remember being asked to buy the current year’s translation Immanuel Kant’s 1788 Groundwork of the Metaphysic of Morals. Yeah, I only saved ~$15 by using the edition that was five years older, but who thinks there was $15 worth of value in a slightly newer translation of a 200-year-old classic text?

A proposed rationale for buying a textbook:

Caveat emptor. No professor can ever truly “require” you to buy a text; they can simply lay down a path of least resistance towards buying one. In cases where the marginal benefit of an old edition is small, a wise student can save money, even without a trip to the 1914. In cases where the marginal benefit is large, the new text is probably a justified requirement, provided it was assigned based on the criterion #1 I suggested. In buying, I think frugal students should consider:

1. How deep they intend to get into the book’s field, how current they want or need to be on the material.
2. How many years have elapsed between the required edition and the prior one.
3. How much work they are willing to put into figuring out where missing information in an old edition is and acquiring it, versus how much money they will save with this work.
4. How much of this book is actually being used in the class (many profs assign very little of a very large “required” book).
5. How likely the individual student is to actually do the reading (sigh).
6. How likely the student is to want the book for a reference/bedtime reading/collage material/cockroach squisher in the future.

Note that the book’s retail value is not on that list. Most textbooks hold their value as well as water holds its shape. Kassin’s 2000 edition of Psychology sells for 1¢ on Amazon.

I fully acknowledge that my suggestions seem to encourage what may seem depraved: scrimping on education so that one can spend more of mommy and daddy’s money for skiing, sushi, whatever. I suggest that this is a different argument. And let us remember, also, that the most precious knowledge in the world has, probably since Gutenberg, been far cheaper than its true value. Let’s not feel guilty about balking at spending over $120 on Norton’s latest rearrangement of the English canon: they are trading primarily on works that have been royalty-free for centuries.