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"Key findings from the report include: When publishers bundle a textbook with an access code, it eliminates most opportunities for students to cut costs with the used book market. Of the access code bundles in our sample, forty-five percent-nearly half-were unavailable from any other source we could find except the campus bookstore. This eliminated student's ability to shop around and meant that they were forced to pay full price for these materials. For the classes using bundles, students would likely be stuck paying full price, whereas for the classes using a textbook only, students could cut costs up to fifty-eight percent by buying used online. Schools that have invested in open educational resources (OER) generated significant savings for their students. OER are educational materials that can be downloaded or accessed for free online while carrying many other benefits for students and professors. For example, in Massachusetts, Greenfield Community College's use of OER in three of the six courses in our study meant that students there could spend as little as $31 per course on materials, compared to a national average of $153 per course. Switching the ten introductory classes in our study to OER nationwide would save students $1.5 billion per year in course materials costs."

"The average cost for a textbook bundle in the report sample was $157, versus $134 for a new textbook from the college bookstore or $56 for a used textbook from Amazon. The report calculated that by switching from publisher textbooks to open educational resources from organizations like OpenStax, the 40 colleges in the sample could save students up to $13 million per semester for these 10 courses."

"The other states will begin to jump in. What starts as a plan to help wait-listed students will quickly gain steam as a "solution" to the "higher education crisis." And due to the particular economics of bundling, it puts the entire architecture of higher education in jeopardy."

"There is an interesting study out in the journal PNAS: "Evaluating big deal journal bundles". The study details the disparity in negotiation skills between different US institutions when haggling with publishers about subscription pricing. For Science Magazine, John Bohannon of "journal sting" fame, wrote a news article about the study, which did not really help him gain any respect back from all that he lost with his ill-fated sting-piece. While the study itself focused on journal pricing among US-based institutions, Bohannon's news article, where one would expect a little broader perspective than in the commonly more myopic original papers, fails to mention that even the 'best' big deals are grossly overcharging the taxpayer. Here is the figure of the article, apparently provided by the PNAS authors:"

"On most four-year college campuses, full-time students don't pay by the credit hour (think by channel on your cable bill). Rather they pay a flat fee for the semester (a programming package on your cable bill) and are typically allowed to take as many courses up to a certain limit."

"The $0 [Mavericks] price is linked to the trend towards vertical integration," says programmer and longtime OS X watcher John Siracusa. "A company that makes both the hardware and the software for a device can choose where to put its profit margins. Given the proven magic of 'free' in the minds of consumers, it's better to put all the profit in a single basket. Free hardware is difficult to pull off, so software gets the nod: buy our hardware, get our software for free."

This is a collection of slides, handouts and links that accompany my presentation during the USDLA's National Distance Learning Week events.