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It goes by many names, but no matter how you cut it, the new “Inclusive Access” model for college course materials is a bad deal for students.
Educators are moving increasingly towards digital textbooks, especially during the COVID-19 pandemic. This has left publishers scrambling to keep access limited and revenues high with paywalls, DRM, and expiring access. These options force students to choose between a rotten deal and gambling with their grade by skipping the purchase altogether.
Rather than challenge these artificial scarcity tactics by embracing Open Education, colleges are making a deal with publishers by creating “inclusive access” models—but this positive sounding name isn’t inclusive at all. Under inclusive access, colleges simply charge students for digital textbooks and materials on their tuition bill—and their access often expires when the course is over. This automatic billing only serves to ensnare students. Exploding digital textbooks don’t belong on your tuition bill when open licensing offers more equitable alternatives.
Publishers Keeping Up an Old Grift
The rising cost of college textbooks has been an absurd joke for decades. Publishers convince an instructor to use their book and gain potentially hundreds of obligatory student customers, with a renewed demand every semester. While students’ pesky habits of sharing and reselling textbooks puts some downward pressure on the price of new books, strategic releases of new editions have managed to keep those forces at bay.
Exploding digital textbooks don’t belong on your tuition bill when open licensing offers more equitable alternatives.
However, with the rise in demand for digital course materials, which has accelerated during the pandemic, publishers have sought new ways to enforce an artificial scarcity. Digital goods have virtually no reproduction costs and can be easily remixed for new innovative purposes, but rather than pass those benefits along
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Read the original article: Inequitable Access: An Anti-Competitive Scheme by Textbook Publishers