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.