 Okay, so hi everybody. I see a lot of familiar faces, so you all know who I am and what I do. But for those of you who don't, I am the National Director of the Make Tech Supports Affordable Campaign for the Student Public Interest Research Groups, or student purgs. We're a national nonprofit organization that works in about 25 states on important issues to students as citizens. So the environment, consumer protection, government reform. And we've been working on these issues for about 35 years. And what makes this kind of unique is that we have chapters on 100 campuses across the country that have staff organizers that work with the students to train them on important campaign skills and to actually run campaigns that make an impact on important issues. So I've been the director of our campaign for textbook affordability for about four years now. And when I started working on this issue actually, OER and textbooks really wasn't considered a solution. And since then it's really become our top priority. And it's been a pleasure to be part of this community and I'm excited to tell you a little bit about our work on affordable textbooks. But first just a quick issue overview, looking at why we think open textbooks and OER are such a great solution. So I'm sure everybody in this room knows that textbooks are expensive. Some of you may not know what current prices are. So this is the most widely used calculus textbook in the country, 224.95. Economics, ironically. A lot of money. Chemistry. So major introductory subjects especially. Most textbooks will run at least $150 up to $250. And you know these are students who are already struggling to afford their education as we heard yesterday. The amount of student debt held by Americans is actually larger than quite like that. And students are spending a lot of that money that they're spending on education on textbooks. The college board estimates that on average students spend over $1,000 per year on their books. And when you look at that in the perspective of how much they're spending on tuition and other education expenses, it can be pretty significant especially at community colleges. In a lot of cases, I've talked to students who actually spend more on textbooks than they do to pay to take the class. In states like California, the state auditor has released figures that show that students actually spend more on average on textbooks than their education at the single largest cost of attendance. And then just even though we've started to see a lot of cost saving measures coming out of the market, and I'll talk about those in a second, we have continued to see prices skyrocket. Four times the rate of inflation over the past two decades. And actually this is random, but on Twitter there was a hashtag trending when I was 14. And I ran a quick calculation on that and found that textbooks, since I was 14 years old, textbooks have actually more than doubled the prices. So that is just crazy how fast prices are rising and it's only getting worse. So the organization I work for, the student parts, we've conducted some extensive research on this issue about close to a decade and released a number of reports that have just sort of exposed the underlying causes of high prices and why they're rising so quickly. And the main factors are these really, really expensive prices. New editions that come out unnecessarily every few years. I'm sure anybody who's taught a class or perhaps has kids in college knows that publishers often release new editions. Even in subjects like calculus where the subject matter just doesn't change that much. And the purpose of that is to white-use books off the market so students have to buy the new editions. Since publishers depend on selling new books in order to make money, they don't make money off of used copies. And it's a tragedy though because you can get the old editions online, dirt cheap. This is just one example of a calculus textbook. You can get it for $80. Sometimes you can get it even lower than that. And then another tactic we've observed is bundling. So publishers will package textbooks with expensive CDs and passcodes and other supplements that aren't always necessary for the class and often are just sort of pitched to faculty as free add-ons. But what it actually does is it does drive up the cost because of the cost of developing these items. And then also it makes the books harder to sell back at the end of the semester, especially when there's like a passcode that expires. So even though the book is exactly the same, the bookstore can't buy the book back because it needs that passcode. So students in the next semester are forced to buy new books. And then just a lot of other tactics we've observed. We found that publishers withhold information about textbook pricing from professors. We passed the legislation to address that. Overseas publishers will charge much lower prices coming up with different ways to sabotage. The used book market actually customization is becoming one of the leading ways they do that. Even sometimes they'll just pitch, you know, a custom cover book that's exactly the same but has a different cover and forces students to buy new books rather than getting used copies of the standard edition. And then the other thing is the e-books that are out there right now, publishers have started to expand their digital offerings pretty rapidly. And when I say publishers here, I'm talking about, you know, major publishers, the large companies that dominate the market. Conventional e-books are sold at a lower price but they actually end up costing more because students can't sell them back at the end of the semester and then they expire so they can't even keep them if they want. And then the reason that kind of the core cause of all these problems is that there's what's called a market failure in the textbook market. And, you know, the way a normal market works is that you have two parties, a consumer and a producer, and they're kind of about even footing because the consumers have the right to put pressure on the producer at lower costs and then the producer has to work hard to get the consumer's business but in textbooks it just doesn't work that way. You have three parties, the publishers who develop products for professors, choose them and assign them to the student. And then the student is stuck paying whatever the publisher is charging. And even though this is the way it should work because professors are the ones that know best what materials will help educate their students, it still creates a flawed economic dynamic that allows publishers to really exploit students and charge such outrageous prices. And it's actually, there's another market out there that's kind of similar to this. Can anybody guess what it is? Healthcare prescription drugs really is the best example. So you have the doctor who's the decision maker but doesn't have to buy the product himself. But fortunately, we've gotten to a point where even though prices are rising, there are a lot of ways for students to save money. I mean, buying new books in the bookstore, usually you can get a 25% discount, even more online. And this has only expanded as social networking and the internet of large students across country and within their communities to find each other and trade books. Also renting, this is actually relatively new, not new idea but new rules out at campuses across the country. Just five years ago, there was only a handful of colleges that offered renting. But just recently, within the last year and a half, the major bookstore chains have rolled out rental programs on I think 2,000 campuses across the country, which is great. They don't rent all of the books, all of the titles, but students can also rent online, which gives them a lot more options. And students are used to buying a book and selling it back at the end of the semester. So renting makes a lot of sense for them. If they're not planning on taking a class in the future. E-books I mentioned, they give a discount for you to 50% off. But the unfortunate thing is most conventional e-books do expire, usually after 180 days. So you're not actually buying something, you're only renting it. And a lot of students don't realize that up front. And then also, there are just some really silly restrictions on it to prevent piracy. You can't be logged in on more than two computers at once. You can't download it and store it on your computer for a long time. And then just generally, if you look at the terms and conditions, there are some pretty scary threats then. Who knows, the publishers will actually act on them, but it can be scary to students. And then also, we're starting to see digital textbooks for e-meters taking off. And this is expanded pretty rapidly. And we're going to delve in a little bit more into this and the next question, and you're going to stick around. But yeah, with iPad and Kindle and all of the different devices that are out here, it creates a lot of potential. However, just like the e-books, the content is really expensive. And on top of that, you need to buy a special device. So there are some challenges there for reducing costs. And then, so we did kind of an analysis across all of these different options just to figure out if every student who, or I guess this is just comparing how much students can save money on each of them. But we did a survey of students to figure out kind of where they're at on their preferences of what they want to rent and how they feel about print and digital. Interestingly enough, we found that about three quarters of students, despite the fact that they're on Facebook and Twitter and do everything online, they still prefer print books. And I think the limits on e-books is one part of that. And then also, students just sort of grew up with print books. So I guess it's not too surprising that they would prefer that. And then also that most students actually still want to keep their books or at least have the option to keep their books. So renting can't be a complete solution. And then just putting those things together, we found that every student who could take advantage of each one of these options or every student who wanted to take advantage of one of these options actually did. This is the maximum amount of savings that each option could provide for the market. So the largest one renting is 33%. So it could reduce costs 33% of where we are now, which is still not affordable. That's taking a $200 textbook and reducing $166, which is not affordable. So we need a better solution. We know that we can do better than that. And that's where open textbooks come in. So we all know what open textbooks are. They're just like a traditional textbook except they have an open license. And they're better. They're free, online, affordable. You can get hard copies at a low cost. And they have all the benefits of an open license, responsibility, the ability to share, and the ability of instructors to actually adapt the text to better fit their class. And open textbooks have been adopted. Actually, it's up over 3,000 classes now across the country, which is really great progress. And they're used at some really top-notch institutions, Harvard, Caltech, Berkeley, like the top colleges in the country are already using open textbooks. And then we've seen just new models developing. And many people in this room are part of that, coming up with ways that open textbooks can be sustainable in the long run. So here are just two examples of what open textbooks are. This is a linear algebra textbook. It comes HTML, PDF, EPUB, black and white book. You can print it yourself. And then there are all those varying costs. And then this is one of the books published by Flatwell Knowledge, the leading commercial publisher of open textbooks, which also gives students a variety of options that they can take advantage of. And then the thing about open textbooks that we really believe is the key is that it actually solves this problem. So this e-books and rentals and all those other solutions, they still perpetuate this old broken market because they're not actually changing the way that students buy their products and the way they dynamic between publishers and students. But open textbooks actually do that. It splits the textbook up essentially into content and products. So the publisher is going to market the content to the professor, because that's what matters to the professor. And then it's going to market the different products around the open textbook to the student, because that's what matters to the student. By splitting those two things up, it actually fixes the broken dynamic because it opens up a two-way street between publishers and students. And that's why I'm sure any of you who are familiar with our campaign, we give a lot of publicity to Flatwell Knowledge. And as a consumer advocacy organization, we very rarely give for-profit companies that kind of credit, we feel comfortable doing that with Flatwell Knowledge because we know because those books have an open license, there's always going to be the ability students have to keep them in check. They can't rip students off because if they start charging too much for their textbooks, students are just going to use the free version. So it creates the healthy dynamic that we want to perpetuate in the textbook market. And we want to expand the market to include more options like this. Then the other part of open textbooks that we really believe is the key is the overall savings. I mean, it's obviously dramatic. So just come here to the other options that I was talking about before. Open textbooks will reduce costs of 80% on average. Some people have asked, well, why isn't it 100%? But the other 20% is actually spent on the optional products. So not all students are going to want to use it free online. In fact, our research shows that given the option between a free online version and a low-cost print version, 60% of students would want to buy the print version and Flatwell Knowledge's sales statistics are somewhat back that up. So just to put that in perspective, so it works out to save students about $100 if their professor switches from a traditional textbook to an open textbook. The amount they'd be spending on a traditional textbook versus the open textbook. So $100 in savings per student. That means in the 100-student class, it would be, oh, got an extra zero in there. Okay, so $10,000 for 100-student class. Five classes at a university, that's $50,000. And two semesters a year, that's $100,000. So one professor or one department switching one class to an open textbook yields $100,000 per year in savings for students, which is tremendous. How did you check that's $100 per student, per class? Yeah. Yeah, it's like 107, but for this time, probably not off. So just the potential savings are huge. There are, what, 5,000 educational institutions in the United States? Multiply that by, well, what is that? $500,000? Yeah. $500 million, is that possible? That's a lot of money. So that kind of concludes the issue background portion of this presentation. Now I want to tell you guys a little bit about the campaign that we've been running for the past eight years. So the campaign is called Make Textbooks Affordable. And it's important to point out that it's not make textbooks free. So while we believe that textbooks have the potential to be free, we want to embrace all the solutions that are out there. So we started out, our first main strategy was exposing the problem. So publishers, obviously, the root of the problem, they are publicly traded companies. Their public image actually matters. And we've gotten a lot of mileage out of just exposing them to international media and just educating the public about the kind of just tactics they're using to rip off students. And our research has generated a lot of media attention and then also sparked a congressional investigation back in 2004 that resulted in a GAO report released in 2005. We've also worked to organize professors across the country to implement ways to reduce costs. I mean, professors are the ones that use textbooks. So they're in the best position to reduce costs. So even just adopting guidelines for adoption that limit the high prices and negotiating with publishers. And it can actually have a really, really big impact. And we've also organized about 3,000 professors to sign on to a statement saying they'd be willing to consider using open textbooks. What appropriate for that class. And that's really helped build credibility for the entire open textbook movement. I alluded to before, we've also passed a law through Congress that requires textbook publishers to disclose the price of textbooks when they're marketing books to professors. And it went into effect on July 1st of last year. So far, implementation hasn't been as strong as we would like. And we're planning on taking action this year to investigate just how much they're disclosing their prices and suggest some better practices for doing that. But it at least provided some sunshine and exposed one of the worst publisher practices our research has found. And then also just working to promote open textbooks we've been using our students on our 100 campus chapters across the country to just get the word out to faculty, let them know that these options are out there, presenting to departments and actually just going person to person. Students can reach professors in a way that really nobody else can because they're the effective party. And any professor in the room knows that your students are complaining a lot and taking that to the next level and actually providing information about the solutions can be really powerful. And then the most recent effort that we've been involved with is the textbook rebellion. And I think many of you have heard about our national tour and our math gods. And the textbook rebellion is actually a national coalition. What we've realized is that this problem is actually gone beyond just students. We've been running this campaign for close to a decade, but really it's not just about students anymore. Faculty are being affected. They're forced to teach more and more students who haven't purchased their textbooks because the cost is too high. Parents are having to spend extra money to buy books for their students. And even taxpayers, I mean, we heard this morning we spend millions of dollars through our taxes paying for textbooks. So really what we need is to organize a united front across all constituencies affected by this issue. And that's kind of the idea behind the textbook rebellion. And so far the coalition includes us, a number of student organizations and student governments. Flatwell Knowledge is part of it and a couple of other open textbooks and affordable textbook publishers are part of it too. So we're hoping to build that out in the coming months and I hope that I can start conversations with a lot of you here about being part of that too. And then I just quickly want to show you, oh my goodness, I can go with this, our national tour. These are our mascots. We went on a tour across the country stopping at 40 campuses starting in August. We're gonna go, there we go. Those are the types of rebellion mascots. Literally we had a van and we put those mascots in a van and we drove them to 40 campuses across the country over the course of six weeks. We gathered 10,000 petition signatures. We generated over 100 unique media hits, so articles, TV stations that were syndicated. We estimate to about 300 different outlets but we're still just tallying that all up. So it was just a huge success. So let's see, I think that, oh yeah. Make sure that we have a couple of minutes for questions. So just quickly to run through what you guys can do to be part of the movement for affordable textbooks and the textbook rebellion. I mean faculty obviously adopt open textbooks when you can and just consider the options and let your colleagues know. Students, we provide a ton of resources on our website to help you run campaigns, educate your professors and pressure your decision makers. Colleges can help support their faculty to both write and adopt open textbooks and authors can put pressure on their publishers to allow them to publish open textbooks and start adopting business models that make more sense. So I'm going to stop there and see if anybody has any questions. I think we have four minutes left. Bye. Can you share the major publishers who are publishing open textbooks that are helping in this movement? So Flatwood Knowledge is by far away the largest. But there are also a couple of smaller efforts. We work with one company out of Cambridge, Massachusetts called the Worldwide Center of Math they're offering. I think their goal is to get to 10 open textbooks in math. They're using a no derivatives license though, so they're not as open as some of the other open textbooks out there, but as far as students are concerned, they're just as affordable. And then a lot of the efforts that we've heard about here, so CK12 offers a lot of open textbooks that are geared more towards high schools, but there's a lot of overlap with community colleges. And then, yeah, the Steyler Foundation, the Next Generation Learning Challenge is creating a bunch. There are a lot of different organizations. But they're currently being used right now in classrooms far away from the world? Yeah. But others that are currently being used in college classrooms? By, like, what organizations? Correct. Okay, so yeah, the Worldwide Center of Mathematics offers textbooks that are being used. CK12, obviously, has been adopted. In fact, I think we have an adopter of that in the room, Ted. Yeah. There you are. And there also are a variety of open textbooks that actually aren't published by a traditional publisher or, like, publishing company. They're just offered by individual authors or sponsored by departments that have gained a lot of visibility. There's a huge effort out of Virginia Commonwealth University. And then a professor at the University of Puget Sound who's published two books. We can look at that. Yeah, there's information there. There's a lot of information on our website. We offer a catalog of open textbooks that are most widely used. Yeah, all the way back. Well, I kind of want to make a comment. I've developed an open textbook called Writing Composition. So I'm clearly behind this movement. I also direct a large writing program from up in that 10,000 kids at the time in two or eight years old. And I just want to say that I have developed over the years a great deal of respect for the publishers. Yeah, I mean, I am doing an open and open OER project. But I think the system is a little broken. I agree. But it's really complicated. I've also written textbooks. And the deal is, you know, I want to say that the production of textbooks written by faculty is not part of the faculty members' job, typically. Because you're not going to get tenure, you're not going to get any kind of reward because that's not the reward structure that you'll be able to achieve. So, you know, I don't necessarily think it's, you know, fair to say that, you know, all the faculty should, I mean, I'm in support of this movement. I mean, so I'm kind of in a contrary position, but I just want to say that I don't think that the publishers are necessarily our enemies. I think they're looking for a new business model. But they are helping develop new resources. And their problem is, you know, after three years, it goes through the, well, I have to say, first year, they must have their money because it's going through the bookstore that's getting a 30% and the book market is 50%. Right. So it's just, it is a broken system, but I don't know that they publish this year. I've got a long respect for the publishers. Okay, so publishers, publishers offer a valuable contribution. They, nobody's arguing that. But there's no excuse. There's, we shouldn't tolerate the high prices. Like it doesn't make it okay. But also you have a short window of covering your development costs. But it doesn't have to be that way. They're using a business model that fundamentally doesn't make sense. And it's costing students money. That's why we're all out of this. Yeah, but I think we can all agree that this is a complicated issue. I think that's right. And I'm glad that you brought this up because it is true. We do tend to demonize the publishers because our role in all of this is to build pressure on them to actually make that leap and start using business models that make a lot more sense. So, I mean, I appreciate the comment. For sure. Brad, do we need this up? Yeah? One more. Okay. Well, I think if anyone knows like it's a lot of work published and how much a professor makes from their fees. Come with the next session. Okay. Your question. I'm just going to say that I think what might end up happening is rather than seeing a change to an open model, the pressure that's being applied to publishers might be that they're making incremental changes. So, they start paying people by journal articles, for example, or by refereeing journal papers. So, they might move a bit. I think if they move a bit, they could get a lot of people on board who are not currently on board. So, it seems to me that's the sort of danger for you because if publishers do shift the bit, the sort of leverage that you've got changes because they can get academics on-site because all of a sudden, they've got more self-interest. Well, if the model shifts in a direction that makes sense, what's more affordable? That's by progress. Well, even not. That's what I'm saying. Because it could be just that rather than the profit going to the publishers, they get spread around to the academics and produce the materials as well. Or, for example, academics on-site. I see. Well, it's always going to be a smaller portion of authors to, or unless everybody offers their own. Certainly, there are ways it could go that would be disadvantageous for students. But I think that right now, Bill Wakings, we're looking at, we just keep on the publishers to come up with business models that are better for everybody. Okay, so I think that concludes the first session and we're now transitioning to the next session.