“Guess how much this book cost.”
April 25th, 2008 by Kim
It’s a question I asked many people last fall when I took an online microeconomics course and was suddenly caught toting my Econ book everywhere.
A couple of my friends who are my age and who graduated recently from college guessed $80. Nope. It was $120.
That’s right. One hundred and twenty buck-a-roos. Try buying it used online? Too bad. It’s the brand new 8th edition with a copyright date of 2008! Amazon.com lists the new book for $151.20; new and used starting from $85.93 (it was “new and used from $120″ when I bought it in Sept. 2007). No thanks. It’s not even a hard cover!
The skyrocketing cost of textbooks can be attributed to a number of factors, mainly the inclusion of CD-ROMs and other supplements that drive up the cost of the books. When I was in college, I recall spending as much as $250 for books each semester. And as a political science major, I was one of the lucky ones — some of my math or psychology major friends paid even more than that for hardcover textbooks with questionably useful CD materials attached.
A New York Times editorial today applauds a bill pending in Congress that would require publishers to sell “unbundled” versions of textbooks and to reveal book prices in marketing material to allow professors to make less pricey selections for their classes. The editorial suggests colleges and universities might turn to digital textbooks to keep materials affordable and chides publishers for hiking up costs:
Right now, textbook publishers are calling the tune. They add as many bells and whistles as they can and pump out new editions as quickly as possible — as a way of making perfectly good textbooks obsolete. Not every book can be cheap. A specialized text that only a few people know how to write and that reaches a small audience will be costly by definition. But there is no reason for an introductory textbook to carry a price tag of, say, $140 in an area like economics where the information changes little from year to year.
You have to wonder where all that money is going. This article from the Daily Toreador, the student newspaper of Texas Tech, quotes stats from the U.S. Government Accountability Office that suggest the cost of college textbooks increased at two times the rate of inflation between 1986 and 2004. It says:
According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics Web site, as of 2001, 64.4 cents out of every textbook dollar is retained by publishers, while 11.5 cents is forwarded to the authors of the textbooks, leaving 24.1 percent of the cost left over.
Chad Davenport, assistant store manager at Varsity Bookstore, said Varsity only keeps approximately 5 percent of the total cost of a textbook.
“We mark our books up 20 percent from what the publisher charges,” he said. “At that point, we still have to pay for freight coming in, the labor to put the books on the shelf, electricity to keep the store open and credit card charges.”
Davenport said the average incoming freshman spends approximately $900 for his or her first year of textbooks.
Although I love flipping through a book assignment armed with a highlighter and a pencil, digital books make a lot of sense in this era where we’re trying to be more eco-friendly and reduce waste.
On the economic side, forcing penniless students to shell out $900 for books each year is outrageous. With food prices, gas prices and the general cost of living on the rise, it is unfortunate that the cost of education should follow suit. When faced with spending $140 on the textbook or being unprepared for the class, students may not have a choice. Promoting more online learning or offering hard copies by request would at least give schools and students more options. And as I learned in Econ, that’s always a good thing.
April 25th, 2008 at 1:05 am
Good Blog. I will continue reading it in the future. Nice layout too.
Aaron Wakling
April 25th, 2008 at 6:33 am
Long time lurker, first time poster. I really enjoy your blog btw…very intelligent and well-written. About the topic…
I totally agree that the cost of textbooks is getting outrageous. As a law student, I spend well over $1000 on books each year, and our professors often make spend a couple hundred dollars on books that we will only use a few times a supplement to our primary textbook.
While I applaud Congress’ efforts to unbundle books, one the issues I’ve come across is not being able to sell my books back or getting less than 20% of what I paid originally upon resale to the school’s bookstore. To maximize profit, publishers constantly come up with new editions every year or two even though there really has been no change in the substantive material. I mean, honestly, has Constitutional law really changed that much in the past year? I doubt it. To make it worse, professors rarely will change textbooks to a cheaper version because they are too lazy to create new lesson plans after they’ve been using a certain one for several years. Somehow I doubt Congress can do anything about limiting new editions though.
April 25th, 2008 at 7:43 am
I recall a certain UH art professor whose book was required for his class and it wasn’t cheap. It was Introduction to Art and many Arts & Science students took this course to fulfill one of the basic requirements. Any problem with this? I’m sure he made a bit of money with this arrangement.
April 25th, 2008 at 8:40 am
OH SNAP like spoiled Bi Bim Bap! Is what I have to say. Unfortunately we have no choice in the matter. It’s like my board exams, which costs thousands, but I have no choice because there is only one test offered by one group!
April 25th, 2008 at 9:05 am
College students all over the world are suffering from this problem of textbook price gouging. Ok, maybe a little exaggerated but when you in that line in the bookstore waiting to buy and sell back your books you wonder where you money goes.
I’ve been fortuneate enough to not have it as bad as some of my friends when it came to buying an insane number of textbooks from semester to semester. While the online or digital solution seems like a good idea, I’m not totally for that only because it is hard for me to read lengthy pages of text off a computer. Most often I have to print it out otherwise my brain and eyes short circuit.
Props to Congress for trying to get to the bottom of this.
April 25th, 2008 at 9:38 am
Let’s see…when I was doing my undergrad at UH, I took 6 engineering courses in one semester (yep, not my smartest decision) and my receipt from the bookstore was in the $650 range. Awesome.
Subsequently, after completing the semester, I went back to the bookstore and made a killing with the textbook buyback program.
April 25th, 2008 at 9:40 am
College book exchange. Less whine more find.
April 25th, 2008 at 9:53 am
In the final decades of my teaching career, I used Dover Books as much as possible, They run about one or two dollars. Of course, I was an English professor, so older works were naturally the largest part of the curriculum.
April 25th, 2008 at 9:56 am
When we were college sophomores taking the biology core, my roommate and I split the cost of our textbooks (about $400/quarter). We’d have to study out of multiple textbooks on any given day, so we traded off–it was a great arrangement, and saved us both a lot of money that year!
I hated selling the books back to the bookstore because you get hardly anything back. I remember getting $.25 once for a paperback novel I paid $10 for at the beginning of the quarter. What a joke!
April 25th, 2008 at 10:50 am
My daughter goes to a college prep high school - we are accustomed to paying in the neighborhood of $200 per school year for books - except for 9th grade - which we were warned about early on - for some reason 9th grade was the most expensive year for books at this school - we paid around $300 even though half the books we bought used from school mates. I guess its good training for us for the college years to come!
I like the on-line idea but like yoda808 - my eyes wouldn’t be able to handle. (plus, highlighters are fun!)
The publishers are definitely into the profit - revising and obsoleting previous editions but hemajang’s art prof clearly had an ethics issue.
April 25th, 2008 at 3:50 pm
Good point — college profs who make their own books required reading is another thing I’ve wondered about. Fortunately, this didn’t happen too much at my school… when profs did assign their own volumes, they photocopied only the pages we students needed to read and gave them to us gratis. It was nice of them, but I’ve heard from friends at other schools that this wasn’t always the case, and many times they ended up having to purchase their prof’s expensive book for the class. It’s hard not to be frustrated by that.
April 25th, 2008 at 4:15 pm
I know which professor hemajang is referring to - I, too, took his class and had to buy his textbook. While it did bother me a bit, I believe that his textbook may have been used at other schools as well. That being so, I thought “Who better to learn from than the author of the textbook?”
I recall paying over 100 dollars each for a few textbooks, which I bought used. Although there were no new textbooks available anyway, I can imagine I could have payed an arm and a leg more for them. There were several semesters where I paid over 300 dollars for books… and, that was a long time ago (I mean, consider that my UH tuition was only 225 dollars a semester and I paid more for my books!)!
April 26th, 2008 at 9:40 am
One problem: academia is already a pretty rough field when it comes to making money. If we want to attract the best, the carrot needs to be pretty big’n'juicy, and while I think most of the time the carrot is something other than money, I’m hesitant to discount any way for academics to make a better living.
Instead of complaining, why don’t more students get enterprising? I have several friends who, every year, go and hang out outside the bookstore during hot book buyback periods offering $5 more for any book than the bookstore’s written quote. They then take the books and resell them, cheaper than the bookstore would have, both to local students and online. It’s a pretty ready market, considering the completely ridiculous prices most bookstores offer on buybacks and the equally ridiculous prices they expect students to pay for used texts.
April 27th, 2008 at 6:29 pm
I went to college in the early 1950s. I attended a midwestern state college. We didn’t buy any books but rented them! It was probably a practice left over from the Great Depression. Of course, after graduation, we didn’t possess any books! But the cost of textbooks problem was solved!