GrinnBooks (#1343)

Topics/tags: Grinnell

Recently, Grinnell announced a new textbook program called GrinnBooks. Why can’t you find GrinnBooks through the search bar on www.grinnell.edu? I also don’t know that. Perhaps you will soon. Fortunately, I can find it through DuckDuckGo. Also: Why not GrinBooks? I don’t know. But I find the extra n awkward. After all, we’re GrinCo, not GrinnCo.

Whoops. I’m distractable today. Let’s return to the story. GrinnBooks has an interesting model for handling textbook pricing. Rather than having students pay for their textbooks individually, Grinnell will now include a hidden textbook cost in tuition and, therefore, tuition will include all student textbooks. Students can also opt out of GrinnBooks on a per-semester basis, and when they opt out, they get $200 back.

I’m still trying to decide what I think about GrinnBooks, so this musing will be perhaps more disjointed than most, if such a thing is possible.

I still recall Eldest’s first semester at Grinnell, when they were took a schedule consisting of something like Tutorial, Chemistry, Spanish, and Economics. At least, that’s what I’m going to pretend they took. The Chem textbook was close to $200, at least if you bought it new. The Economics textbook was close to $200, at least if you bought it new. And Spanish cost the most of all. There was a disposable workbook that cost over $100. (It was disposable in that you were expected to write in it, which meant you couldn’t resell it.) There was an out-of-print novel that was more than $60. And there was a textbook. With those costs, a total of $200 for all courses seems reasonable.

On the other hand, not all textbooks need to be purchased new. Long ago, Grinnell’s Department of Mathematics (perhaps it was Mathematics and Statistics at the time; it may even have been Mathematics and Computer Science) decided that it didn’t need to keep using the latest edition of a textbook. So, it arranged for the Bookstore to buy a lot of versions of one edition of the textbook (probably an already out-of-date edition) and committed to using that edition each year. I believe it costs students somewhere around $30 to buy that textbook, and they can sell it back to the bookstore for $10 at the end of the semester.

Grinnell’s library has also asked us to consider whether it’s possible to use Open Educational Resources. For example, we use an open textbook for Operating Systems (at least I think we do). Students can use it free online or buy a printed copy for something like $40.

In CS, we use a variety of options to keep textbooks expenses reasonable. we have classes in which the faculty effectively wrote the textbook. We have some classes that use OERs. We have some that use no textbooks. We have at least one situation in which we convinced the library to purchase an unlimited electronic license for about $1500, which is far less expensive than having the students buy their own copies.

I’ve even set up lending libraries for my courses. In those situations, I try to buy enough copies for all the students who will take the course and then lend them to the students for the semester. (No, I’m not a typical faculty member.)

Sometimes combinations of these approaches work, too. There was a point that Studio Art settled on a particular edition of a textbook. As in the case of math, it was an older edition. I managed to find a bunch for $4 each. I ordered them all and gave them to Studio Art.

Note that I’m not bragging. Or at least I’m not trying to brag. But when I can find the books that I know we’ll use for a class for little money, it seems better for me to accumulate them and get them to students than to go through the bookstore or ask students to look for them on the Interweb.

Our bookstore also worked very hard to find used copies of textbooks and to set up a rental program. The bookstore also provides electronic rentals. Grinnell also has a lending library for low-income students.

That is, we’ve had many efforts in place to try to keep textbook costs down.

My quick check suggests that the Spanish course is also now much cheaper.

Nonetheless, textbooks remain expensive. Even used textbooks in many fields cost more than $100. And used texts aren’t always easy to find, even for books that have been in print for years.

And so, GrinnBooks will be a more affordable option for many students. It will also help ensure that all students have the books for a course on the first day of classes. And it will discourage students from using bootleg PDFs of course texts (at least I hope it will) [1].

From a pedagogical perspective, it will generally permit faculty to select the books that they consider best for their courses without having to pay attention to the costs of those books. We won’t have to decide that this resource isn’t quite as good, but it costs 1/2 as much, so I’ll go with it. We won’t say to our students any edition of this (text)book is okay; we’ll adapt with you having slightly different versions.

Still, I have concerns. I probably even have questions. My colleagues in the bookstore have been good about answer questions when I’ve asked. They don’t always know the answer.

One of those [2] open-ended questions is whether we will experience a kind of tragedy of the commons. If I can choose any textbook for my courses, why not pick expensive texts? For example, when I teach our upper-level course in algorithm design and analysis, I tend to use the latest edition of CLRS [3]. It’s not just a pricing decision; I like the book. But Grinnell also has an unlimited license to the electronic version, so I tend to [4] stick to the text. At times, I’ve asked what it would be like to teach an Algorithms course with Knuth [5]. Amazon charges $240 for the set and says the list price is $324. Barnes and Noble charges over $400. I suppose the $240 is not much more than the list price of a new text in some fields. But it’s still much more than the $0 we would pay for the already-licensed CLRS.

Or let’s turn to my future Tutorials. I’m not sure whether or not I’ll teach Tutorial again. Nonetheless, I have an ample supply of Style: Toward Clarity and Grade and The Craft of Research, two books I regularly assign. I suppose I can still loan them to students and even use the latest edition of The Craft of Research. But those aren’t the important ones in terms of cost. One potential Tutorial topic is something like Four Iconic Comic Strips, which will cover Pogo, Gordo, Odd Bodkins, and Keith Knight’s various strips. (It might be Five Iconic Comic Strips; I’m tempted to add Nancy and use How to Read Nancy.) I’ve been accumulating cheap copies of Ten Ever-Lovin’ Blue-Eyed Years with Pogo in preparation for the course. But why use those when I could simply get GrinnBooks to buy all eight volumes of Pogo: The Complete SYndicated Comic Strips? Or what happens if I decided that Ten Ever-Lovin’ Blue-Eyed Years is the appropriate text for the Pogo portion of the course and the bookstore tells me that it’s too hard to obtain?

Things may be straightforward for another potential Tutorial topic: Love & Rockets (the comic, not the band; the comic came first). I’d been considering gathering copies of Palomar: The Heartbreak Soup Stories. That’s probably not the wisest decision. Under GrinnBooks, I could have them get The Classic Love and Rockets 40th Anniversary Slipcase Set if it’s part of the one price fits all model. Reading the stories in the original serial form would be better, even if I wouldn’t normally ask my students to buy a $400 set.

Damn! Now I’m enthusiastic about teaching Tutorial again. Either could be a fun course. Or I could just spend the summer reading Love and Rockets. In either case, do I understand enough about literary analysis to teach these Tutorials? Hypertext, intellectual property, and even liberal education were much more in my wheelhouse. I’m also not sure that I have the street cred to teach the Hernandez Brothers.

In any case, the broader concern holds. Will choose what’s best, ignoring price be the wisest decision? Will it lead to a significant increase in the GrinnBooks portion of tuition? We’ll see.

I hope that faculty will still want to pay attention to costs. Not only will that help avoid the tragedy of the commons (or whatever we want to call this variant thereof), but it will also keep texts affordable to students who opt out.

Perhaps we should keep all those old Calculus texts around.

Postscript: I’ll admit that there’s also part of me that believes that Grinnell, as an institution, should emphasize an OER approach and that GrinnBooks undermines the OER philosophy. OER won’t work for disciplines in which the texts are texts to analyze, rather than textbooks. But shouldn’t educational resources for other disciplines be open? And shouldn’t our models encourage us not only to embrace open educational resources but also to create our own?

I suppose that’s a topic for another musing.

Postscript: Part of me also really wants to teach a Knuth-based course in algorithms.

Postscript: As long as I’m considering Tutorial topics, I can see some joy in teaching a Tutorial on Constructionism. I wonder what books I’d use. Mindstorms, certainly. Probably Visual Modeling with Logo. Maybe I could start with a guided reading.

Speaking of that, I wonder how GrinnBooks works for guided readings. I should ask.

Postscript: In case it’s not clear, I consider GrinnBooks an important experiment. I’m grateful to all the people who have worked hard to make it a reality.

[1] I am not aware of any students who have bootleg PDFs of course texts. I’ve simply heard that some students do download such files, many of which are trivial to find on the Interweb.

[2] I’d originally written one of the greatest questions. Grammarly suggested that I should use most excellent instead of greatest. Did Grammarly train on the scripts of the Bill and Ted movies?

[3] Cormen, Leiserson, Rivest, Stein. Algorithms.

[4] Grammarly also wants me to drop all of those tend tos. But I don’t stick to the CLRS; there have been semesters in which I’ve used other texts. Grammarly doesn’t seem to understand nuance.

[5] Knuth. The Art of Computer Programming, Volumes 1-4B.

Version 1.0 released 2025-03-22 .

Version 1.0.1 of 2025-03-22.