Textbooks authors, publishers, formats and costs in higher education

Abstract

ObjectivesThere is little empirical data reported on retail prices of college textbooks beyond self-reported surveys and no published datasets. Textbooks, as an ancillary cost, can contribute to the overall rising cost of education which can impact upon students’ ability to succeed in Higher Education. This study sought to understand more about costs of college textbooks by conducting a systematic collection of several thousand textbooks from faculty readings lists in one Higher Education Institution in Ireland and a retrieval and analysis of the retail prices of a selection of those books.Data descriptionQueries were made of the course catalogue database of a Higher Education Institution in Ireland resulting in generation of records for required and recommended textbooks for 15,414 books from 3030 unique courses for the academic year 2017–2018. This data was cleaned and processed before being used to query Google Books API. The dataset presented here represents the combination of data from the course catalogue and the Google Books API queries and comprises 2940 records of textbooks. Details for each book including title, authors, publisher, ISBN, retail price, ebook format, pdf availability, and public domain availability.

Determining Textbook Cost, Formats, and Licensing with Google Books API: A Case Study from an Open Textbook Project

“…We then used the Zenodo platform to generate a digital object identifier (DOI) for the code. 12 One of the functions of the Zenodo platform is to allow for code to be properly cited and referenced. We published our code in this way for others interested in replicating this work in other contexts.…”

Needs Analysis of Education for Sustainable Development-Oriented Textbooks in Biotechnology Courses

“…Teaching materials can be made and arranged systematically in various forms according to the needs and characteristics of the material to be presented (Bahtiar, 2015;Basaroh et al, 2021;Mardiyanti, 2024). Textbooks are one form of printed teaching material that plays an important and strategic role in improving the quality of education and is the main teaching material in higher education (Costello & Bolger, 2019;van Campenhout et al, 2021). The variety of books as teaching materials in higher education includes reference books, monographs, textbooks, dictates, modules, and book chapters (Ditjen Risbang, 2017).…”

“…Based on this, it is necessary to develop teaching materials in the form of books, in this case, a textbook was chosen that contains project activities and problem-solving about fermentation techniques in the field of biorefinery to broaden students' insights and improve the achievement of biotechnology courses. Textbooks are handbooks containing a collection of course materials equipped with assignments, exercises, evaluations, and other supporters to support the learning process and can help students to learn independently (Bahtiar, 2015;Costello & Bolger, 2019).…”