Man bites dog? I can top that. Just sink your teeth into my headline for some real news. For the moment, I’m not talking about a story you may have already heard: the growing inability of college students to read full books, or even lengthy scholarly articles. I’ll return to that problem below. I’m focusing here on a different story, one that’s barely been reported: Colleges are increasingly forcing students to swap out physical books for digital texts.
There’s a whole bunch of problems with digital textbooks. For starters, there’s a solid consensus among researchers that physical books are superior to digital texts for learning, particularly when it comes to long-form exposition and argument — exactly what’s needed in college. For another thing, in the new dispensation, students lose access to their digital textbooks when the course is over. Imagine an economics major who can’t refer back to his Econ 101 tome, or an English major who loses notes and markings she’s made in her sophomore copy of Shakespeare — not to mention the copy itself. Meanwhile, those with less interest in retaining their textbooks — or of greater financial need — can’t sell their digital texts on the secondary market, like they can their physical books. Then there are the privacy issues. Professors and publishing companies can tell whether you’ve cracked your digital textbooks, for how long, and even what passages you’ve highlighted. There’s also evidence that publishers are collecting personal information, even when they say they’re not.
So, why are America’s colleges and universities leading the charge away from physical books? And what can be done to stop what I and a great many students and professors think is a bad idea? Let’s see.
Our story begins in the early 2000s when publishers encountered growing competition from an expanding secondary marketplace for textbooks. Increasingly, students were buying, selling, and renting textbooks — at both online sites and traditional storefront sellers — for prices dramatically lower than new versions. And although campus bookstores did sell used, as well as new, textbooks, they too faced stiff competition in the used-textbook market from off-campus and online sellers.
Beginning around 2013 through 2015, publishers responded with a “digital first strategy” aimed at reducing the secondary market by squeezing out physical textbooks. This led to a program called “Inclusive Access,” in which professor-designated textbooks were offered to students in digital format, yet only for the duration of the course.
It’s true that digital textbooks are significantly cheaper than physical textbooks. Yet they are decidedly less effective for coursework than hardcopy books. And this is not to mention the problems of temporary access and privacy. Importantly, digital textbooks are by no means necessarily cheaper than the used hardcopy books sold on the secondary market. In any case, for whatever combination of reasons, early experiments in Inclusive Access saw few takers.
All that changed in early 2016, however, when the Obama Department of Education (DOE) promulgated what is commonly known as Rule 164. While the Obama DOE said that it had “initially considered prohibiting institutions from including books and supplies as part of tuition and fees,” it eventually changed its mind and devised a rule that would allow colleges and universities to effectively impose Inclusive Access on the vast majority of their students.
According to the new rule, universities could charge students for books and supplies as part of tuition, under a system in which the campus bookstore, in partnership with a major publisher, would provide access to digital textbooks for the duration of a given course. The rule even insisted that the books and supplies in such a program be offered at below competitive market rates. Overall, this allowed students to pay less than they would have paid for physical books, while giving them convenient access from the very beginning of the term to all required learning materials.
Sensitive to this arrangement’s exclusion of students from the secondary textbook market, however, Obama’s DOE required Inclusive Access institutions to allow students to opt out. In practice, however, opt outs are exceedingly rare, especially as Inclusive Access has evolved.
In many schools, “Inclusive Access” has now developed into “Equitable Access.” Equitable Access programs impose a flat tuition fee on all students for all courses. That means students in the humanities, whose textbooks are relatively cheap, end up subsidizing students in the hard sciences, who often pay hundreds of dollars for textbooks. Equitable Access programs also tend to bundle assignments, quizzes, and other essential course materials with texts, meaning that opting out of the program makes it effectively impossible to take the course.
Both Inclusive and Equitable Access, moreover, restrict a professor’s choice of textbooks. If a professor wants to assign a specific hardcopy book, he may be reluctant to do so for fear of forcing his students to opt out of the digital system or, alternatively, for fear that he’ll face pressure from the university for selecting a book not readily available in digital form.
You’ve likely not heard of either Inclusive or Equitable Access before. That may be because, with some exceptions, these programs are generally found at “non-elite” institutions of the kind that don’t make national news. More than two years ago, however, the Association of American Publishers estimated that nearly half of all degree-granting institutions had adopted a version of Inclusive or Equitable Access. A year ago, one survey found that up to 80 percent of schools surveyed were using some form of either Inclusive or Equitable Access.
The issues surrounding Inclusive and Equitable Access textbook programs came to a head in June 2021, when Judge Denise Cote handed down decisions in the federal court for the Southern District of New York in two antitrust cases, one brought on behalf of online and off-campus booksellers, and the other by college and graduate school students. The cases were brought against three large publishers who among them control 80 to 90 percent of the market for new textbooks, and also against two on-campus bookstore chains who between them operate a majority of on-campus bookstores.
Judge Cote dismissed both antitrust suits. Rather than forming a conspiracy to restrain trade, Judge Cote said, the defendants were largely responding to “conditions that would have independently suggested to any publisher of textbooks that digital innovations such as Inclusive Access might help their bottom line.” And what were those market conditions? Chiefly, according to Judge Cote, they stemmed from the DOE’s adoption of Rule 164.
Now it may well be that the intervention of the federal government, supposedly acting upon the assumption that digital textbooks will inevitably become “more ubiquitous,” takes this case out of the realm of antitrust law. Government entities cannot be parties to an illegal anti-competitive conspiracy, even when government regulations do in fact stifle competition.
Nonetheless, it’s troubling to see a thriving competitive environment quashed by a federal regulation that just happens to favor the largest players in an industry. That’s closer to crony capitalism than free enterprise. It’s evident from the Obama DOE’s own account that it was reluctantly talked into promulgating Rule 164. Moreover, the plaintiffs in the 2021 antitrust cases asserted that the publisher defendants embarked on a coordinated campaign to convince the Obama administration to promulgate Rule 164. Are we looking here at a classic case of heavy-hitting industry leaders prevailing upon government to regulate their competition out of business? I think so.
This pattern appears to have been at work again in 2024, when the Biden DOE, clearly concerned that Rule 164 was unduly restricting student autonomy and financial savings, proposed a crucial modification to the rule. Biden’s DOE wanted students to have to opt into Inclusive or Equitable Access programs, rather than have all students automatically enrolled unless they opted out.
Student and consumer advocates favored this change, arguing that the current system was opaque, and certainly benefited publishers and institutions at the expense of students. In some cases, schools get up-front signing bonuses of $1 million or more when they sign an on-campus bookstore contract with one of the big Inclusive Access retailers. In other cases, colleges take a direct share of Inclusive Access profits. Publishers and campus bookstores, moreover, see huge savings in labor and time when they don’t have to manage used textbooks.
Against the Biden DOE’s proposed shift from forced-in to opt-in, however, publishers and schools argued that Inclusive and Equitable Access would effectively collapse unless the vast majority of students were induced to enroll, and that “underserved” students would suffer most should Equitable Access weaken or disappear.
In the end, the Biden administration relented in the face of vigorous opposition from publishers and universities, and withdrew the proposed rule change. It seems reasonable to infer that the Biden administration was reluctant to alienate higher education — a major Democratic constituency — by giving students greater freedom of choice.
That said, the textbook trade cannot and should not be a pure free market in the traditional sense. While student options should certainly be maximized, those options are rightly constrained by a professor’s determination of a course’s required reading. Students don’t know what they don’t know. That’s why they’re in school to begin with.
Here, too, Inclusive and Equitable Access — and the shift to digital textbooks they promote — have a troubling record.
A 2024 national survey by Bay View Analytics found that 41 percent of faculty believe that physical textbooks are better for learning, while only 14 percent disagree (the rest have no opinion). This is consistent with a great deal of research, much of it summarized by a widely referenced survey of the field called, “Don’t Discard Your Print Books,” which found that reading comprehension is significantly better with print, as opposed to digital, especially for informational texts covering complex issues.
The Daily Beacon, the student newspaper at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville (whose “Total Access” program is a variation on “Equitable Access”) ran an interesting faculty survey on the issue. About 71 percent of faculty surveyed preferred print books, or print books with some merely supplementary digital material, in their courses, while about 29 percent of faculty surveyed preferred digital books. When faculty were asked how they preferred to do their own academic work, 58 percent indicated a preference for print books, while 17 percent preferred print with some supplementary digital material. Only 25 percent of faculty surveyed preferred digital books.
Tellingly, about 40 percent of faculty believed that the original Inclusive Access policy inhibited their freedom to select high-quality course material for their students, while an overwhelming 77 percent believed that the new “Total Access” (i.e., Equitable Access) program hampered their freedom to select high-quality course materials for students. Surprisingly, given the claims of publishers and institutions about affordability, 42 percent of professors said that Total Access had actually made course materials less affordable, whereas only 33 percent said Total Access had made course materials more affordable (the rest said it had no impact). That may be because survey respondents were skewed toward the humanities, and as I stated earlier, programs like Total Access essentially have humanities students subsidizing STEM students.
Earlier this year, the University of Virginia suspended an attempt to convert its existing Inclusive Access program into an Equitable Access program (called “One Access” at UVa). The collapse of “One Access” at UVa was, in significant part, a response to a letter signed by 54 English professors who objected not only to costs of One Access, but also to the loss of student privacy. Unlike the original Inclusive Access program, the proposed One Access program aimed to collect data on how, when, and for how long students read or used learning material. (For a truly scary look at digital textbook privacy problems see “The Textbook That Reads You.”) There were also faculty objections to the loss of student access to texts after the conclusion of a course.
Humanities professors at UC Davis, another Equitable Access school, have also objected to the program. The UC Davis student paper, the California Aggie, has reported this in illuminating detail. UC Davis English Department chair Tobias Menely, for example, explains that, “The methods of critical and interpretive reading we teach — including annotation, scanning, passage analysis and comparison — cannot always be practiced effectively with digital texts.” An Italian professor recalls that even when she ordered a specific translation of Boccaccio’s Decameron for a course solely devoted to a deep reading and translation of that text, Equitable Access ordered an older translation that was free online and in the public domain. The problem is that this professor had carefully evaluated all options and specifically wanted the edition with high-quality notes and commentary. The free online edition had no notes at all.
No doubt, most of the humanities professors who object to digital textbooks are on the political left. Well, I know a conservative humanities professor who feels exactly the same way. He says that with digital texts, it’s literally tough to get his students on the same page. Digital devices are formatted differently, and with students reading the same text on phones, tablets, laptops, and paper, it’s a challenge just to get them to the same place. More troubling, sometimes dozens of students are watching the NCAA tournament (or whatever) in class when they are supposedly following the text. When discussing sensitive topics, students are also afraid of having their comments recorded by one of the devices in the room. The many distractions of digital devices are one of the key reasons physical books so consistently outperform digital texts for reading comprehension.
Supposedly, the Obama administration adopted Inclusive Access (which has now metastasized into Equitable Access) on account of the inevitable triumph of digital textbooks. That has turned into an ill-advised and, to the extent that it has proven to be true, largely self-fulfilling prophecy. The current digitally dominated textbook scene is not the product of a free market or a marketplace of ideas. It is, rather, the result of a too-cozy relationship among universities, publishers, campus bookstore retail chains, and government.
Fortunately, even with a heavy federal thumb on the scale, physical books have not been entirely wiped out. The fact that professors, many student advocates, and the more prestigious universities still prefer real books reflects the simple truth that physical books are superior to digital texts for learning, for a whole variety of reasons.
The Trump administration ought to get rid of Rule 164. At the very least, it ought to change the opt-out provision to an opt-in. Yes, humanities students might be assigned slightly more expensive books as a result, but the increase will likely be more than offset by both the return of the secondary market and the end of the requirement to subsidize STEM students.
Now, what about that other way in which colleges are undercutting books: reduced reading assignments for students incapable of taking in full-length books? Earlier this year, Emory University Emeritus Professor of English Mark Bauerlein and I announced model legislation designed to address this problem where it begins — in K–12. (Further coverage of the proposal can be found here, here, here, and here.) Our model bill would require a certain minimum number of full books to be assigned in middle-school and high-school English classes, with half of those books published before 1900. That’s still a good idea, but it needs a tweak.
Bauerlein and I assumed that reading books “in their entirety” would mean physical books, not the digital excerpts currently pushing full books out of K–12 English classes. Watching the replacement of hardcopy books by digital textbooks at the college level, however, has convinced us that even a mandate to read full books in K–12 might eventually be fulfilled with digital texts.
That’s why Bauerlein and I will be fine-tuning our model bill to ensure that when middle-school and high-school English classes read full books, they are physical books. Given the rapid rise of digital texts, it’s all the more important that students experience the joys and advantages of real, full-length physical books as early as possible. If the next generation is to choose between formats intelligently, it must have knowledge of both.
I have no illusions that the growing substitution of digital for paper can easily be staunched. The forces pushing in this direction are pervasive and many-sided. Even so, I’m offering two practical proposals, one federal, and one for the states. First, repeal the federal rule that forces students to learn from inferior, evanescent, and privacy-violating digital texts that cannot be either possessed or resold. And second, guarantee that students in middle school and high school learn how to read great works of literature through the medium of physical books. Both via their own direct effects, and through the national debate they could launch, each of these proposals might help to preserve our books, and all they give us.