This legislation was created to stop textbook prices which have been climbing rather quickly for the past two decades. Currently, a full time student will spend over $1,000 for their textbooks each year. This is a huge burden, especially considering that most students will finance these costs with student loans - meaning that they could potentially pay back over $24,000 (including interest) for the $4,000 worth of loans they take out while receiving a four-year degree.
This exorbitant cost is something that legislators attempted to address this by requiring that universities post the ISBN and cost (that the bookstore would charge) associated with a textbook. This was supposed to be visible on the website when students registered for their classes and was supposed to accomplish two things. First, it was to give students an idea of what they were going to have to spend to pass the class. Second, it was designed to foster competition. Vendors and students could then use the ISBN number to compare prices, and vendors could provide students with a list of textbooks specifically for their classes, without the student having to look up the ISBN from the university bookstore’s website, and then enter it on a price comparison website, such as www.bookdefy.com.
The Universities found a loophole in this, and many currently have adopted a method that is anticompetitive and further injures the students. eFollett and Barnes and Noble (the largest two) entered into the campus bookstore management industry. What this means, is that they lease the bookstore space from the university, and then they sell the textbooks to the students. The university then provides the campus bookstore with the course information, and then professors are free to provide the bookstore with the ISBN numbers of the textbooks they request in whatever manner that the private bookstore owners request. In many instances this information is provided electronically and automatically entered into the bookstore owner’s database.
The problem lies here. These bookstores then post this information online, and they do list the ISBN number for the textbooks, which barely meets the requirements of the previously discussed legislation. However, they do this in a manner that creates substantial hurdles for any potential competitor of the bookstore, and because they are private companies, they fall outside of many of the regulations these acts put forth, and therefore the students suffer from the anticompetitive landscape these actions create and suffer as they are forced to pay much more for textbooks that they have to purchase.
When an outside competitor (i.e. a company that is trying to offer less expensive books or provide textbook price comparisons for students) wants to display to students of that university the textbook lists that the University has, they can request the course list (which is usually provided very quickly), but when they request the lists of ISBNs that are required for that course, they are told one of two things.
First, they can physically copy (at their own cost) a printed list from each class (potentially thousands of pieces of paper), or they can go and use the eFollett or Barnes and Noble website, and manually enter each course and copy the respective ISBNs for that course. This process is exceptionally anti-competitive because it forces competitors to expend a great deal of time, resources and money on something that would take seconds for these companies (Barnes and Noble and eFollett) to provide with a database dump. Second, the company can manually go, class by class, on the eFollett or Barnes and Noble website and log each textbook – again, a process that could take hundreds of hours for a large university. These companies are complying with federal law because they still have the ISBN posted on their website. Furthermore, since these companies (Barnes and Noble / eFollett) invest their own time, by entering the ISBN numbers into their own database (mostly automated now), they “own” this data, and it is outside, generally of a Freedom of Information Act request.
In short, these companies control the data and can make it as obscenely difficult as possible for a potential competitor to access it. In essence, they are retrenching their monopolistic ways and making it very difficult for potential competitors – that are working to reduce these high textbook costs – to provide a full solution to students looking to save money.
This hurts students because it prevents competitors from providing students with textbook lists for their courses. The student is forced to do the legwork, and because they have to go to the University bookstore’s website (many universities merely provide a dynamic link – so another company cannot simply extract an ISBN) that takes the student to the bookstore (and not to the course). Therefore, the student, despite the legislation, cannot easily determine what textbooks they need, and finding these books from a site like www.BookDefy.com that compares textbook prices across dozens of online sites, is left purchasing the book from either the bookstore, or the bookstores that can afford to invest the resources, manpower and money in cataloging, re-entering, and re-inventing the wheel so to speak that Barnes and Noble and eFollett require them to. These local bookstores have only one incentive, that is to provide a book price that is slightly below the college bookstore, but these savings are minimal, when a company like BookDefy could easily save a student 50% or more on the same book. In short, the student is left with few options, and is forced to buy books at a much higher price, simply because the University is working with a private company that keeps its textbook monopoly alive.
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