Sky and Telescope - August 2017 - 84

FOCAL POINT by Andrew Fraknoi

Student Aid

IN FEBRUARY 2016, after surveying nearly 5,000 American

college students, the U.S. Public Interest Research Group concluded that the retail cost of textbooks had increased over the
past decade by 73%. While experts ﬁercely debate the exact
ﬁgures in such studies, no one disagrees that textbook prices
have become a major concern, especially at community and
state colleges where students count on lower costs to make
college affordable.
With recent mergers of college textbook publishers - some
claim that only ﬁve large corporations control 80% of the market - it's easy to blame the lack of competition for the steep
rise in prices. But culpability also lies both with the relentlessly
efﬁcient used-textbook market and with college bookstores,
many of which are themselves owned by large corporations.
When students resell books after their course ends and
these copies are resold, those who created the book get noth-

ing. All the proﬁt goes to the bookstores; none of it returns
to the publisher, authors, or editors. Thus, publishers must
squeeze their entire income from a textbook's ﬁrst year on the
market. This helps explain why publishers bring out new editions so often and charge an arm and a leg for them. Typical
introductory astronomy textbooks retail for between $100
and $200, and even used copies at bookstores can be pricey.
Recently, a group of charitable organizations, including
the Gates and Hewlett foundations, decided to do something
about this situation. They formed a nonproﬁt organization
called OpenStax, based at Rice University, with the mandate
to bring at least one high-quality, professionally edited, free
textbook to each subject area in which college students take
introductory courses.
OpenStax began with science and math books, then
expanded to economics, psychology, and history. Students
mainly use the books in electronic form, though they can
generate printed copies at cost.
When astronomy's time came, I and my co-authors, David
Morrison (NASA Ames Research Center) and Sidney Wolff
(National Optical Astronomy Observatory), were delighted
that OpenStax turned to us. We'd been writing introductory
astronomy textbooks since 1995 that explained astronomy in
everyday language while using clear analogies, examples from
students' own experiences, and touches of humor.
Starting in 2015, we began to assemble an updated and
signiﬁcantly revised textbook - cleverly entitled Astronomy -
that would ﬁt with the needs of today's students. For example,
with so much useful material about astronomy now on the
web, we could include links to short videos, apps, interviews,
animations, and even music or ﬁction related to astronomy.
Also, we can more easily revise and update an electronic book
when (and only when) the need arises.
With the help of about 70 astronomers and educators, we
ﬁnished the book in October 2016. Astronomy is now freely
available to anyone, not just college instructors and their
students, at openstax.org/details/astronomy. A hub of free,
shared resources resides on the same webpage. In the end, we
hope it all makes the cost of cracking the books on astronomy
a tad less, well, astronomical.
¢ ANDREW FRAKNOI chairs the Astronomy Department at
Foothill College near San Francisco and was the 2007 California Professor of the Year. For 14 years he served as Executive
Director of the Astronomical Society of the Pacific.

A U G U S T 2 0 1 7 * SK Y & TELESCOPE

BACKG ROUND: M UCHM A NIA / G E T T Y IM AG ES; ICONS: MICROONE / BIGSTOCK PHOTOS.CO M

With the cost of college textbooks soaring, the author helped create
an introductory astronomy textbook that's free for anyone to use.

http://www.BIGSTOCKPHOTOS.COM http://www.openstax.org/details/astronomy

Sky and Telescope - August 2017

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