State committee holds textbook hearing on campus

Lawmakers in Washington and Harrisburg hope to make buying textbooks easier, cheaper and more… Lawmakers in Washington and Harrisburg hope to make buying textbooks easier, cheaper and more competitive.

A federal law that will place some requirements on universities and publishers to push for competitive textbook sales will go into effect July 1. And on campus earlier today, a pair of state House committees held a hearing about making a similar, more stringent law for Pennsylvania.

The State House Committee on Education and Committee on Consumer Affairs took testimonies on a state textbooks bill at a morning hearing in the William Pitt Union. The committees heard testimony from several people, including a representative from Barnes & Noble Bookstores, an independent bookstore owner and a representative from a publishing firm.

Paul Supowitz, director of Pitt’s Governmental Relations, said that Pitt occasionally provides spaces for hearings like that one, but the University does not necessarily support them.

State Rep. Joseph Preston Jr., D-Allegheny County, introduced the bill and co-chaired the hearing. He said that meeting at Pitt was a matter of convenience, and that he thought it was appropriate to discuss the bill in a higher education community.

The 9:30 a.m. meeting did not see a large turnout, Supowitz said.

“If there were students there,” Supowitz said. “There weren’t many.”

The federal law — the Higher Education Opportunity Act, which passed in 2008 — has a number of similarities to the proposed state bill.

Both bills try to open up the process of selling textbooks. Under the federal law, all colleges would be required to disclose the class size and required textbooks for each class at their universities to any bookstore that requests it.

That, Preston said, will give bookstores outside of the university system a chance at fair competition, because they can know what textbooks classes require before the term begins. “What is wrong with that information being public?” Preston said. “It’s public knowledge when the class begins anyway.”

The state bill might take the process a step further than the federal one, Preston said. The bill is still in committee, and Preston doesn’t know when that might change.

“We can make some stronger competition in the state,” Preston said.

The state bill, the Accountability in College Textbook Publishing Practices Act, was referred to the education committee last year. Preston said that by holding the hearing, the committees hoped to find out more about the situation with college textbook sales in Pennsylvania.

He said some of what he heard surprised him.

“Right now, books might be reprinted with 20 or 200 words changed,” Preston said. “That costs millions of dollars.”

The state bill would require publishers to disclose substantial changes they make in each edition of a textbook, and require the publishers to give 45 days notice of a change in the price of their textbooks.