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In what the California Public Interest Research Group (CALPIRG) calls a “mixed message,” Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger last week split the baby on two bills designed to lower the cost of college textbooks, signing one that sets up a framework for possible book price reductions but vetoing a second bill that would have urged colleges to set up textbook rental services. 

CALPIRG sponsored both bills. 

In a press statement released last May when the two bills passed the Assembly, CALPIRG said that AB 2477 (the book price reduction bill sponsored by Assemblymember Carol Liu, D-La Canada Flintridge) and AB 2678 (the textbook rental bill sponsored by Assemblymember Paul Koretz, D-West Hollywood) “work together to lower the price of textbooks so that college students can spend less time working to pay for expensive textbooks and more time studying.” Neither bill would have made lower textbook costs mandatory. 

Both bills passed both houses of the Legislature easily, with local Assemblymembers Loni Hancock and Wilma Chan and Senator Don Perata voting for both bills.  

Assemblymember Koretz’ office said that textbook rental services would have “provided books to students for a fraction of the cost of purchasing” such textbooks. 

It is a matter of contention whether California universities and colleges already have the authority to set up textbook rental services. While Schwarzenegger says that “nothing in current statute prohibits a California university or college from establishing and maintaining” such a service, CALPIRG Legislative Director Steve Blackledge says that “some of them felt like they didn’t have the authority for the funding mechanism. ... [Koretz’ bill] made it quite clear that they had the authority to do it, and laid out some of the parameters where they could go about doing it.” 

In his AB 2678 veto message last week, Schwarzenegger said that while he “support(s) the author’s intention to lower textbook costs to college students, and am generally supportive of textbook rental programs as one means to make the overall cost of college attendance more affordable...I am opposed to provisions in the bill that would allow additional fees to be assessed to all students, even those not using the program, in order to keep a textbook rental service financially self sustaining.” 

Koretz disputed that contention, saying that “among the 20 colleges and universities in the U.S. with textbook rental programs, none require students to pay fees if they decide not to rent their books,” adding that his bill “left the decision of how fees would be levied” to the colleges themselves, “where it belongs.” 

But while Blackledge at first said that California colleges would model a textbook rental after what he called the “successful programs” in the country which have not charged mandatory textbook rental fees for all students, he conceded that there was nothing in the Koretz bill to ensure that California colleges would not charge such mandatory fees for all students. 

With the signing of the Liu bill, professors in California state universities, community colleges, and the University of California system will now be encouraged to “give consideration to the least costly practices in assigning textbooks” and to “disclose to students how new editions of textbooks are different from previous editions and the cost to students for textbooks selected.” The bill also discourages such textbook company practices as “bundling” textbooks with workbooks and CD-ROMS that the students do not necessarily use for their classes. 

Blackledge called the Liu bill “step one of what will eventually be a two-step process. It simply puts in place a series of best practices for the college textbook industry to follow, and to make it quite clear that the legislators and the State of California are concerned about [high textbook prices]. If [those suggestions] don’t happen, I think that a lot of legislators will be upset and will be looking to push something stronger in a year or two.”