Transcript: Making College (Textbooks) Affordable

Recorded at 2022 Copyright & Technology Conference

For podcast release Monday, October 31, 2022

with

•Steven J. Bell, Ed.D., Temple University in Philadelphia.
•Jim Best, The Cornell Store
•Laura Stevens, Cengage Group,
•Lily Todorinova, Rutgers University-New Brunswick

KENNEALLY: Publishing industry analyst Bill Rosenblatt, wrote for Publishers Weekly that higher education is the publishing segment undergoing the most disruptive changes today.

“It’s certain that the textbook market of 10 years from now will bear little resemblance to today’s market, even if we don’t know exactly what it will look like,” Rosenblatt declared.

Welcome to Copyright Clearance Center’s podcast series. I’m Christopher Kenneally for Velocity of Content.

Now that many college text materials are available in digital form, publishers and universities are implementing new models for distributing and charging students for them. These new models aim to help more students afford to attend college in their chosen fields of study.

Earlier this fall as part of the 2022 Copyright & Technology Conference, I moderated a panel discussion, Making College (Textbooks) Affordable, examining the hopes and challenges that publishers and universities alike face over these new business models and how open-licensed or public domain materials can contribute to the goal of making college more affordable for more students.

Joining me onstage at the Fordham Law School in New York City were –

• Steven J. Bell, Ed.D., associate university librarian for research and instructional services at Temple University in Philadelphia.

• Jim Best,Assistant Director of Merchandising & Inventory Planning at The Cornell Store, the official campus store of Cornell University.

• Laura Stevens, Executive Vice President and General Counsel for Cengage Group, one of the world’s largest education technology companies. And

• Lily Todorinova, Open Educational Research/Undergraduate Experience Librarian at Rutgers University-New Brunswick.

Jim Best, I would like to start with you, because this is really where the action happens – at the bookstore – or where it did in the past. Things are changing, obviously. A lot has been changing on the Cornell campus. This fall, Cornell launched something called the Cornell Academic Materials Program, which you described to me as Netflix for textbooks. Tell me what that is.

BEST: We’re calling it CAMP for short – the acronym. Cornell likes their acronyms on campus. So Cornell Academic Materials Program. It’s a one-flat-fee program, a digital-first program where undergraduate students – we haven’t rolled it out to the grad students yet – receive all of their required textbooks for $225 per semester. So a digital-first program, but also we’re working with our publisher friends that if it is not in a digital format, we’re still offering that in a physical format to the students.

KENNEALLY: You talked about your publisher friends. Tell us how this was developed. What kinds of negotiations, discussions – what was in mind? What was the strategy?

BEST: Two years of negotiations working with other departments across campus, such as the bursar, registrar office, faculty senate – having faculty on board for a program launch of this size is huge – and then including Cengage with our negotiations with working them on price. So we were able to get the price where we needed it to be to offer the textbook materials at the $225 value.

KENNEALLY: So it’s been like offering health insurance or the food plan or something like that for a student. How is it going so far? We’re just beginning the semester.

BEST: We are just beginning, and I’m happy to say that this past Friday was our opt-out period. We had about a three-week opt-out period where students are automatically enrolled into the program, but they have three weeks to basically use the materials for free and weigh the benefit versus participating in the program or going the old-fashioned way, a la carte. We gave them three weeks to do that. And we had 73% participation in the program as of last Friday. So I would say it was fairly well received.

KENNEALLY: This is your latest effort along these lines. Cornell in 2016 – you had a separate program on inclusive access. Tell us about that and highlight for us the differences.

BEST: Inclusive access was a program that we, yes, did launch in 2016. That was not across the board. That was by course. And that was based on whether faculty wanted to participate in the program or not. Obviously, through the pandemic, we saw a huge ramp-up in that program, and we saw a huge increase in the digital materials needed, because as most campuses went – we had a couple of semesters where they weren’t even coming to campus, so getting their materials to them digitally was the easiest way to do that. That kind of pushed us into – another name that I’m calling our CAMP program is inclusive access 2.0. So it’s kind of our IA program on, I guess, steroids.

KENNEALLY: An interesting piece of the CAMP program is the creation of these digital bookshelves, which I thought was interesting, because I think a concern a student or a parent would have is, well, you’ve got that material for the semester. When the license expires, poof, it’s going to go away. That’s not how it’s going to work.

BEST: Working with our publisher partners, we were hoping – and right now, it’s publisher to publisher based on what they’ll give us access to, but a lot of them have given us perpetual access to the digital materials. So that’s lifelong ownership. That was part of the feedback that we were getting back from the faculty, especially on the humanities side, because you get some of those classics if you’re taking a humanities course, but instead of moving box to box out of your basement as you move around as a recent grad, your digital bookshelf moves with you automatically, and you have access to those materials.

KENNEALLY: And of course, education is cumulative, right? So just because you read that Shakespeare in freshman year doesn’t mean you’re not going to come back to it.

BEST: Exactly.

KENNEALLY: Who’s driving this? You’ve brought up the faculty already. We heard about what students are paying. But who would you say is the principal driver?

BEST: We’ve heard through the years students – I mean, the cost of materials has grown and grown and grown. And through this program, we’re really just trying to give students an equal playing field no matter what major they were deciding to move forward with.

KENNEALLY: Tell us why that’s important. I was an English major, but chemistry majors might see this differently. Is it because the textbooks cost more for organic chemistry?

BEST: Exactly. The STEM courses tend to have a higher purchase price for the materials. We didn’t want the students to be picking a major based on how much their academic materials was going to cost them moving forward.

KENNEALLY: When it comes to faculty, though, how do they feel about all of this? You mentioned that it was important to them that this perpetual bookshelf exists. How do they respond to the idea of these kinds of programs? Are they for them, against them?

BEST: We had quite a bit of good feedback. I was actually surprised, because like I said, two years of conversations around getting this program launched, and we had many meetings with our faculty senate on campus, individual faculty just to get the program out there, because we learned from some of our counterparts, UC Davis being one of them, that when they rolled out a very similar program back in 2020, it wasn’t communicated very well. So we made sure that we were reaching out to every department on campus, and we worked with our publisher reps to make sure they were getting the word out, too, once they were visiting these faculty members.

KENNEALLY: Tell us finally, Jim, about the publishers that you are working with. What’s in it for them? What drives them to the table to want to talk about this?

BEST: One of my pros for that was market share. We’re taking the used book market right out of the equation on that. We’re taking rentals right out of the equation. For the digital materials, we use Verba VitalSource as our e-reader. They’re working directly with the publishers to get the digital format offered through that. They’re also helping out with courseware if the publishers have courseware affiliated with the materials. It really comes down to market share. We’re giving the publishers more and more market share compared to the used book industry getting a slice of that pie.

KENNEALLY: I want to turn to Lily Todorinova from Rutgers University. Your role as open education research undergraduate experience librarian at Rutgers isn’t one I’m familiar with, so tell me what you do.

TODORINOVA: Yeah, it’s a bit of a lot of things, actually. It’s very student-centered. I work with primarily first- and second-year students on getting them acquainted with an academic library so they know how to use the resources and know all the things that are available to them. I work with a lot of first-year students, transfer, undergraduate research, also students that have trouble affording higher ed. We have an equal opportunity fund program at Rutgers that serves students to which education is not accessible still. So I’m very much involved with that aspect of affordability by default because of the population of students I serve.

KENNEALLY: Explain the kind of student body you have there and why that ties in with this question of affordability.

TODORINOVA: Yeah. The student body is growing. It’s very diverse. It’s not the same student body that we had five years ago, 10 years ago, 20 years ago. It’s a moving target of getting to know them and their needs and their priorities. Things are getting a lot less affordable for students and for all of us. Being in New Jersey where we’re located, which is kind of in the middle of the state in a pretty expensive area – you know, these students are struggling with affording any course materials. So when we talk about affordable textbooks, it’s almost hard to figure out what that is, because it is different for every student in whatever circumstance they’re in – if they’re waiting for their financial aid checks, what their rent is like that particular year. The pandemic has really pushed a lot of people to the brink, and we’ve lost a lot of students to attrition, to just not going back to their classes. So we definitely feel that in where we’re located and the type of student body that we serve.

KENNEALLY: So for you, Lily, the affordability question is tied to the accessibility question, the access to education.

TODORINOVA: Sure. Yeah, because we are the library, we are the second place students go to find their course materials, right? So they try the bookstore, and then if they can’t afford the book, they’re like, oh, wait, we have a library. So that’s probably what they spend their budget on, right, is textbooks for everybody and every class. That’s not what we spend our budget on. We rarely purchase textbooks for those large survey courses where it is a chemistry book that costs like $500 or something. We would drain our budget if we did that for every class. So it’s not possible for us to do that.

But explaining that to a freshman as they come in is really tough. They’re kind of like, what are you here for, you know? (laughter) That’s what you’re supposed to do, right? It’s a really tough conversation to have. And it’s a conversation – now, it’s the beginning of the semester. I’ve had it so many times already. And every year, like I said, it gets worse.

KENNEALLY: And students’ reaction has been to lead the charge for more options.

TODORINOVA: Yeah, absolutely. We have a really active student government at Rutgers, which I’m thankful for, because they’re very involved. Student government is interested in donating some funds to have their fellow students have more affordable textbooks at their disposal. They’re very interested in transparency of pricing of course materials. So when they register for a class, they want to know exactly how much that’s going to cost, which is often difficult to find out upon registration. And also in terms of any inclusive access or equitable access, they want to know how are these conversations made? Who makes those decisions? Because I feel like students are talked at quite a bit, and in a lot of institutions, they don’t get to be in deciding roles depending on, again, how things are administratively. But they feel that, because their opinion is not really valued in this arena.

KENNEALLY: Thanks for sharing that side of your conversations with students. But you also work with faculty. You’re helping them develop these open education resources. We’ll call it OER from here on out just to make it easy. Tell us about those kinds of conversations. And maybe to start, define OER for everyone here.

TODORINOVA: Basically, these are freely licensed resources that are not just free, but anybody can take them and reuse them and use them in their classroom and do whatever they want with them, essentially. So nobody worries about modifying the existing OER and content.

In terms of faculty, I think there is a strong interest in developing their own teaching materials, because there’s a shift that I’m seeing over time between content and pedagogy. If you’re focused on pedagogy, then the content kind of recedes a little bit – not completely, but somewhat in the background, because you’re trying to create something that’s alive to the experience of the students in the class. That’s how we learn. So that’s connected to that shift. When faculty apply to our course redesign awards, we really do want to see that creation of materials that are nontraditional and can be reused, can be used internationally, nationally. They don’t have to be locked behind the course management system of Rutgers University. They can be shared more widely.

I think in general, faculty is interested in that kind of work. The problem is, of course, time, money, proper incentives. Even with the faculty that on a philosophical level believes in this, it’s often hard for them to get there.

KENNEALLY: It’s interesting to me, too, that the librarian is at the center of all of this. I started by imagining that maybe the bookstore was, but things are moving. It sounds like that. You are in that conversation with students and with faculty. How has it happened that the library and the librarians are so important to all of this now?

TODORINOVA: Well, I think it is because we’re like this neutral space on campus. We serve faculty and students. As I said, we are viewed as a place where you should be able to go and find free things. So by default, that conversation that we have with students about where’s my textbook? Oh, we don’t have your textbook. So by default, we’re involved in that.

We’ve been doing reserves for a very, very long time. Reserves are where a faculty member requests that we buy usually like one copy of a book, and we hold it behind – there’s a lot of red tape – hold it behind the desk, and then a student can come in and use that library material for X amount of hours – sorry, textbook material. Having a free textbook in the library is a reserve model. And of course, we are realizing over time that that’s not necessarily equitable. It just depends on – can the student get to the library? What if somebody already has the book? It’s just not really solving the larger problem.

That’s why it’s kind of amazing to me as well that libraries have been so quick to jump into this arena. But I think it’s good for us to get into it, because we’re used to working with publishers, working with faculty, working with students. So it makes sense.

KENNEALLY: Tell me about the licenses or the kinds of copyright holders – who are the rights-holders for some of the OER materials that you’re developing?

TODORINOVA: The person that creates it either has some rights, or if it’s an OER, then they’re giving those rights to whoever else to modify or do anything with the existing content.

So I feel like copyright and OER are kind of two parallel tracks. They’re kind of operating – for OER, they don’t use copyrighted materials, and they don’t create copyrighted materials, so they’re two parallel things in my view. When I talk to faculty that are creating OER, I don’t really find that conflict as much as maybe you would think. It’s really just about do I have time to do this? Do I have incentive to do this? How do I do this?

KENNEALLY: Well, Lily Todorinova from Rutgers, thank you very much.

I want to turn now to Steven Bell from Temple University. Steven, you’ve been talking about, writing about, thinking about this textbook affordability crisis for over a decade. Tell us about that. These are new developments, but this is not a new problem.

BELL: Well, I got interested in open education back in 2009. One of the best-known open advocates is Nicole Allen from an organization called SPARC, which advocates for open education generally. Let me just say – when we say open education, what are we talking about? It’s sort of an umbrella term for a variety of ways in which higher education would hope to be sharing information more openly than in closed environments. So it’s an umbrella that includes open education resources, but also open data, open science, open access journals. Our goal, our ethos as librarians, sort of getting back to that question of why the library? Why are we at the center of it? Of course, because we are a good neutral space, but it’s part of our heritage, our ethos to want to make information freely available or at least available with the least number of barriers as possible. This is really a growth out of that whole philosophy.

I heard Nicole Allen speaking – at the time, she was on the Student Public Interest Research Group – talking about the escalating costs of textbooks and what a problem this was creating for students. At the time, we were trying to do a lot with open access and open access publishing at Temple, and I thought this would be a really great way for us to communicate more with faculty about not only the importance of open access publishing – that is, publishing your research in an open journal so that it’s freely available to anyone. It’s not behind a paywall. The ability for them to share or use open textbooks and to create open textbooks and create open assignments for their students – open pedagogy is another concept that’s under that term of open education.

So that’s how I got started, and we at Temple created one of the first textbook affordability projects. What we do is – and at Rutgers, they have a very similar program. You’re offering stipends to faculty. We offer anywhere from $250 to $1,500. We’re constrained by the amount of funding we have. But we try to do about 10 of those grants per year. That has helped over that decade to create a core of faculty that are our open education champions, and we depend on them to then go out and communicate to other faculty in their departments and across the campus about the importance of open education as a way for us to achieve textbook affordability for our students and help them have a more affordable higher education in general.

But also, it’s not just about the economics of it. It’s about – we know that when students have access to the materials, they have a better learning experience. And many of our faculty now, especially our newer faculty coming in, have a social justice commitment as well, and they want to make sure that they’re not contributing to their students’ food insecurity or their housing insecurity. They want to make sure they’re doing everything they can to help their students to have that more affordable higher education. So that’s something that’s become pretty important for many of our faculty.

And when we talk about textbook affordability, I tend to think of it as a spectrum. On one end, you’ve got your most expensive options, which is your print textbook. I’m looking at a book that we have. Many, many students need it for their course – Interpersonal Communication: Everyday Encounters. The print is $228. It’s actually the same price as an organic chemistry book that I looked up as well. But there’s many options. They could go to the used marketplace. They could get a digital copy. They could rent a print. At the other end of the spectrum, you’ve got your open education resources or other zero-cost materials.

So we have a lot of different options. Inclusive access can really help when there’s no other options for open education resources. But again, it’s equal. Is it equitable? Lily sort of referenced this. At Temple, we may have an affluent student from the suburbs. Their parents are helping them out with college. In the same classroom, you might have a single mother with two children who’s struggling to pay for their rent and their food, and even a $50 textbook can be not affordable to them, especially if they’re taking three or four classes, and it adds up over time.

KENNEALLY: I think the equity case is a really strong one, Steven Bell. Absolutely. But do the faculty worry not so much or not only about equity, but also about quality? Is there a quality concern when it comes to OER? Publishers, after all, add value, because they really work hard and they’ve got an investment in those textbooks.

BELL: Yeah, to be sure, for many faculty, that would be a barrier for them. There is sort of this mindset that if something’s free, it can’t be good. Who did the peer review? Who did the editing? I could just give you a ton of research studies that have been done in which faculty have given one set of students in the same class – they’ve used a commercial textbook. The other set of students in another section have used an OER book. Let’s say it’s a gen chem class. One class uses the Pearson Tro textbook. The other class uses the OpenStax Chem 1 book. Overwhelmingly, what those studies find is no significant difference in the learning factor.

I always quote David Wiley, who’s another well known open advocate. He says that quality isn’t about the book itself. It’s about whether or not students learn the subject matter. If they’re learning the subject matter, whatever material you’re using, you’re meeting the goal as an instructor.

I’ll just mention that we have at Temple an addition to our textbook affordability program. We have the Temple University Press, and we created a new subset of that called North Broad Press. We are actually – like many other academic institutions, we’re now publishing open books. So we have faculty – rather than publishing with a regular publisher, we give them a stipend of $5,000 to publish with North Broad Press, and they agree up front to give the book a Creative Commons license, and they do not get royalties. So they are getting this one-time stipend.

That is a way in which we’re contributing to the growth of open education materials. Because that’s the big challenge right now is there just isn’t enough open textbooks for all the different disciplines that are out there. So in many cases, inclusive access or a digital version is a great affordability option when there’s no other way to do it.

KENNEALLY: I wanted to ask you about that, Steven, because we’re in a hybrid environment right now. It’s maybe moving in certain directions, but very much a hybrid environment. Can you tell us – are we seeing more on the OER side towards the early years of study and less so as those students progress through college?

BELL: If you look at probably the best-known open textbook publisher, which is OpenStax, they’re focused entirely on introductory-level materials, because that’s where you get the biggest bang for the buck. You got the most students in the introductory-level classes. They typically have the most expensive textbooks. So yeah, they’re doing a good job of hitting the intro-level courses.

If you look at the other generator of open textbooks, which tend to be academic institutions, those tend to be more esoteric in nature, probably your upper-level courses. So a faculty member would typically create their own textbook for their own course, and then they would give it a Creative Commons license. So yeah, it’s sort of split that way.

But again, the challenge is there are many disciplines where you just don’t find OER just yet. That’s the big challenge for that approach is we’ve just got to get funding to create more open textbooks. And the way we do that is we reward faculty for their efforts in creating those materials.

KENNEALLY: We were talking about faculty and library, but there’s still a bookstore, right? What’s the relationship? Is there a relationship for the library with the bookstore? Tell us about it.

BELL: Yeah, we have a Barnes & Noble at Temple University, and we have, I think, a pretty good relationship. It really depends on the institution. I’ve heard some of my colleagues who say they don’t have such a great relationship with the bookstore, whether it’s Barnes & Noble or Follett.

Just to give you an example of how we work together, every semester, the bookstore gives us a spreadsheet of all the textbooks that faculty have requested, and then we can go through that and we can identify where we have ebooks already, or we can acquire an ebook that is the same book that the instructor is using. Then we have created a database, which is like an e-textbook portal, so that faculty and students can see if the library has an ebook.

The other project we’re currently working on with the bookstore is in general trying to get more faculty, no matter what they’re using, whether it’s a commercial textbook, OER, library ebook, no textbook at all, to make sure that that information is getting into our Barnes & Noble adoption system so that – and Lily mentioned this – when students go to register for their course, this would give them a much better chance of knowing how much they’re likely to have to spend in that course. Or at least when they look up the materials in the Barnes & Noble course materials database, they hopefully would see what the cost of the book is, or maybe there’s an OER being used or a library ebook or no textbook. Too many faculty now, we’re finding, don’t bother to tell the bookstore what book they’re actually using. They’re just assuming the students are going to go to Amazon or Chegg or go get it used somewhere. So we’re trying to work together to make sure that faculty are both aware of their options and how to make better use of the adoption system.

KENNEALLY: Well, Steven Bell with Temple University, thank you very much.

BELL: You’re welcome.

KENNEALLY: Laura Stevens with Cengage Group, I want to get your thoughts, because you’ve been, as I said, instrumental in developing Cengage Unlimited, and you’ve been witnessing all these transformations in the field over a number of years. What are your thoughts on that? What have been the triggers from the publisher’s perspective?

STEVENS: I should just say I’m here representing Cengage alone, not publishers generally. We’ve walked a slightly different path, I think, than some of our competitors. I am also here in my capacity as a mom of a freshman who just started at UMass who asked me this morning to Venmo him $100 to buy his intro to psychology product. So I definitely see both sides of it.

I have been at Cengage for a long time – over 15 years – and I have watched the high cost of print textbooks really very quickly move into a very loud and vocal demand from constituents at universities, and ultimately the students themselves, for more options, choices, which has been an interesting journey for Cengage in particular.

One of the things that we started to do about almost 10 years ago now – seven or eight years ago – was deep student research to understand what they were looking for, to understand more – and we found, actually, differences between what faculty wanted and what students were looking for. Faculty were asking for sort of complicated, bells and whistles, very specific things in our digital products, which were extremely expensive for us to support, complicated our tech stacks, created a lot of additional cost, and students were really looking for choice and affordability. Stability was really important to them. Ease of use was really important to them. And cost was the most important thing to them.

As you alluded to, Chris, for Cengage, that resulted in the launching of a first-of-its-kind subscription service called Cengage Unlimited, which basically took everything that we published and put it out there for a single price for a student per semester or per year. I think it’s $125 a semester all you can eat, and I think it’s $190 for the year. I think you only need to be enrolled in two courses to already have some significant savings.

We also participate in inclusive access on a case-by-case basis with schools. It’s so interesting the Cornell example of a blend of the two – it’s sort of inclusive access meets an all-you-can-eat sort of thing. And we also partner with OER. We actually have a partnership with OpenStax, and we work with them as well. There’s definitely a place for them in the ecosystem of materials.

I think one of the things that’s interesting is what a publisher like Cengage had to go through in order to start offering products like we are. We not only have our authors, our subject matter experts. We also license a ton of content that’s necessary to include in our materials in order for students to access the primary source materials that are still covered by copyright, certain imagery, text that we license, and really having to work with photographers, other publishers through the CCC primarily to come up with licensing models that allow us to include critical third-party material in a way that – you were talking about before – well, we want to keep these books. That’s not necessarily what’s in those licenses from five or six or eight years ago. So that has really been years of work getting ready to launch a product offering like Cengage Unlimited.

KENNEALLY: I think you used the term for me when we were talking about this earlier about sufficiency of rights. Can you expand a little bit on that?

STEVENS: Yeah. I think as we went through – so Cengage Unlimited was launched in 2018. We were probably over 10 years into our digital journey of acquiring digital rights, offering ebooks. But I think if you look back 10 years, we were about 10% digital in terms of our revenue and sales. We’re now up closer to 80%. That is a serious pivot. So if you look back 10 years, publishers, including Cengage, were licensing around print runs, print models, which when you’re in a digital world are really somewhat obsolete.

So there’s been a process working with the CCC, other publishers, other rights-holders to understand how we can affordably license sufficient rights to offer what our students want, which is both flexible, affordable access as well as reflecting the fact that this is a digital product, not a print product. And multiple students want both a print and a digital version of their products. So it’s really licensing at a very high volume – I think it’s a couple hundred thousand items we license a year into our products – and getting sufficiency of rights such that we don’t have holes in our products as we distribute them to our students.

KENNEALLY: You mentioned that you’re a partner with OpenStax. I want to ask you about your views on OER and the role OER can play in this – we’ll call it a hybrid environment. Is it ultimately a full solution? You talked about pivots. Could a university pivot to entirely OER? Do you think that might ever happen?

STEVENS: That’s very fraught. I think that there’s space in the course materials, courseware ecosystem for all kinds of players. I do think there is a view that OER is free, and it is not. There’s the investment costs. We’re hearing about costs to incent faculty, money that has to be raised in order to incent faculty to participate. I know the costs of what are involved for Cengage as a publisher. Like I said, we have our authors. We have editorial teams, product development teams, support teams that go out and help our customers use the products. We have platforms, assessment engines. We’ve acquired platforms. We’ve built our own platforms, particularly starting in the STEM world, where you absolutely must have these digital assessment engines, and they’ve got to be accurate, and they have to work, and they have to be reliable. It costs quite a bit of money.

And since Cengage is of the view of choice, choice, choice, we still print books. So we haven’t necessarily gotten rid of the costs of making print products available in multiple versions, including low-cost versions, as well as developing, updating – our software engineering costs alone to build, make sure are stable, especially during the first few weeks, around midterms, around finals to support the load of students that come on board – it’s expensive.

KENNEALLY: We’ve heard a lot about the way that students have really taken an advocacy role around this and so forth. Is this another example, as if we needed it, of where the digital world, the digital environment, kind of flips power and has put power in the place right now of the student and made the student much more of your customer really directly than it ever has been before?

STEVENS: I think that’s definitely true. The student voice – it’s just interesting that up until that time – call it 10 years ago – the view, I think, of most publishers, including Cengage, was that the institution and the faculty were the sole customer. The student was sort of a downstream user – a captive audience is exactly right. So while, I think, we’re still seeing that course materials are selected by the institution and the instructor, potentially, how the student can actually access and the options that they have in terms of choice to access those materials has shifted and has come, at least for Cengage, directly as a result of student feedback.

KENNEALLY: Laura Stevens, thank you very much. Well, with that, I want to thank our panel – Steven Bell with Temple University, Jim Best with the Cornell Store, Lily Todorinova from Rutgers University in New Brunswick, and Laura Stevens with Cengage Group. Thank you all very much.

(applause)

And if I may just add a final thought as you leave, if you want to prepare for a test, read a textbook. If you want to prepare for life, read some poetry.