Textbook surcharges drive high costs

All imported textbooks sold in Canada are subject to surcharges, which makes the already-high cost of textbooks even higher for university students

When it comes to textbook prices, the right knowledge is the power to change things. Students already know well how much textbooks cost.

“Absurd,” said Katie Varsava about textbook prices. Varsava is a fifth-year marine biology student. The most she ever spent on textbooks was $800 in one semester.

Adam Harris, Vice President of academic affairs for the Saint Mary’s University Student Association, feels the students aren’t aware of the issues that influence textbook prices.

“The underlying issues of why (prices are high), most students are very uninformed about,” said Harris. “Once most students realize why textbooks are so expensive, they can help effect change to make them cheaper.”

Harris is a member of CRAM, the Canadian Round Table on Academic Materials. The group comprises students, faculty and university bookstores and its goal is to reduce the cost of university textbooks.

A key demand of CRAM is for the Canadian government to remove the 10 to 15 per cent surcharge on imported books.

Under current book importation regulations, a foreign book publisher chooses a Canadian distributor to market a given textbook in Canada. These are exclusive agreements, meaning any company that tries to import the same book into Canada can be prosecuted under the copyright law.

The same clause also allows the Canadian distributor to add 10 per cent to the book’s price if the book is from the U.S, 15 per cent for European books. Most textbooks sold in Canada are imported from elsewhere.

This clause incensed some students who hadn’t heard of it.

“I think its ridiculous,” said Varsava, when told of the clause. “I’m extra pissed off to hear about this because I have a textbook that still hasn’t come in to the King’s library or the King’s bookstore or the Dal bookstore.”

“This is the first I’m hearing of it now. That doesn’t seem very fair,” said fourth-year history student Ben Mahar when he heard of the clause. “It’s not fair to give certain corporations advantages so that we have to pay outrageous prices for books we need for our education.”

Harris added that before he took up his position with CRAM, he had no idea why textbooks were so expensive.  

During the recent federal election campaign CRAM hosted a website called cheapertextbooks.ca. The website had a form people could sign and send to politicians, demanding they remove the import surcharge clause.

Harris said that because there was no tracking on the website, there was no way of knowing how successful the campaign was.

“It was created in a rush,” said Harris. 

CRAM raises other reasons why textbooks are so expensive.

The Canadian market is smaller than the American one. This means the books published here are Canadian editions printed in a limited run.

Publishers are also turning out new editions more than they used to.

“Instead of every five or eight years, it’s now every two or three years you have a new edition of a textbook,” said Harris.

CRAM also says the textbook marketing process is to blame. Publishers market textbooks to the professors, not to the students who pay for them.

The publishers themselves say it’s just the cost of doing business that makes textbooks expensive.

Carolyn Wood is the executive director of the Canadian Publishers Federation. Wood’s group represents Canadian-owned publishers, most of whom don’t publish textbooks.

“It’s expensive to produce textbooks and it’s getting increasingly expensive to produce textbooks in environmentally acceptable ways,” said Wood.

Wood added that used textbooks are shrinking the market, making the remaining textbooks more expensive.

“Used textbooks are just a way of ripping off authors and publishers. Students buy them without any thought whatsoever to the consequences,” she said.

Wood also said she finds the students’ approach to textbook prices “interesting.”

“I’m not sure why students are willing to pay so much for entertainment value and complain about the educational value of textbooks,” she said. “It seems self-evident to me that student’s expenditures on non-educational items are often very much greater than on textbooks.”

Wood said she did not have any figures to support her claim. 

Wood also said that publishing is one of the lowest-margin industries around.

“The profit margin in book publishing for our members is between three and four per cent,” she said. “It is not a very lucrative industry.”

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