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My kids (in grade school) still lug around 45 lbs of stupid text books. Why don't they have a kindle and download whatever they want? Is that really going to be more expensive than buying a 6 lb book that’ll be out of date in a couple of years? Or, in college, because of the small press run, paying $120 for the professor's book?
Wouldn't it be nice to be able to reference the facts in those books without having to lug around a library?
Comparison shopping for grossly overpriced textbooks runs the risk of putting nonprofit campus bookstores into insolvency?
I don’t know where to start with the multiple levels of idiotic assumption here, but I’ll just say that maybe overhead and cost of goods is the problem, if they just can’t cut it without a monopoly.
The left disdains a monopoly, don’t they? Unless their own ox is being gored, in which case the propaganda machine revs up to a high rpm whine.
Its all a scam worked thru the college.
textbooks should be low cost and reusable. the writers that make student purchase brand new, often worse textbooks just so they can profit should be ashamed
Yeah, it's called a search engine. Kids have been doing this on their own for years.
One of my kids needed a physics text book whose 9th edition is almost $200 new. He found the 5th edition (almost identical and brand new with the CD that comes with it still unopened) for 11 cents on ebay. They only difference is that the order of the problems is scrambled.
There are tons of used books on ebay and Amazon. And, of course, advertised on flyers on college dorm walls.
Students learn really quick the best place to buy books is Amazon, The pric-check tool probably wants a cut in the profit through some fee for listing them and Amazon probably told them to get lost.
By searching for the ID number online, I found the exact same book in the same condition for fifteen dollars...and that included shipping!
Needless to say, the overpriced one was returned to the bookstore.
Maybe the campus bookstores NEED to be insolvent. Either that or someone needs to take some courses on what constitutes a stable business model.
some subjects have no excuse for changing the book every semester. Calculus? How often is there a new research breakthrough in calculus?
If a stick and some flat ground was good enough for Pythagoras, it’s good enough for me.
All kidding aside - college textbooks are way overpriced.
Back in undergrad, we had to buy the “latest edition” of the math texts. Why? The math hadn’t changed from the last edition, but they reordered the practice problems. So when the prof assigned homework, you’d be doing the wrong ones.
Auburn University Bookstore already does this, including Amazon.
Simply go to
http://auburn.verbacompare.com/
I just looked up the first course and section [ACCT 2110]. The bookstore is currently sold out, but students can RENT it OR order it from Alibris, AbeBooks, Amzon, etc new or used. Prices range from $57 to $197.
Very convenient!
Text books have been a major scam for the last 40 years and the schools have been in on it but the government will not investigate because . . . . the schools are the government.
A system that is a scam deserves to be foiled. I would not be at all surprised if some enterprising youngster would not form a pool, buy the $200 textbook, disassemble it, scan it and share it with members of the syndicate for use on their Laptop or whatever. Would this consumption and copying not be for “personal” use and not for resale for profit?
Back in the day it was not at all uncommon for us to buy one textbook and share it and copy the problems for distribution. That was a long time ago when copying was less convenient than now. Of course the group of us also had an office on campus where we based our efforts. It was a “found” space way up in an attic and furnished with stored desks and chairs. A wonderful cooperative arrangement done under the radar screen. There were six of us, we worked in the labs, and it was great to be undergraduates with the equivalent of grad student privileges. Our profs who also used the labs turned a blind eye to our activities and seemed to enjoy the whole proposition.
Textbooks have always been a profit center for academicians and academia. Doesn’t it seem a little unethical to charge usurious prices to a captive audience?
Why should common knowledge be a profit center based monopoly?
Open source is the way to go for these subjects.
Textbooks are horrendously over priced and the sale of the books is the biggest racket in the print industry.
Thank the Greenies & the spotted owl for the price of paper causing constant price increases.
That, along with new information on any particular topic.
I think that soft-covered ‘Supplements’ to any textbook would be far cheaper than totally reprinting the books.
Thousands of books are thrown into the landfills each year by major cities school districts.
College store manager here- will not go a rant right now, except to once again note how stupid lawmakers are.
The Higher Education Opportunity Act has required all Universities to post online the textbooks being used for classes the past three years. If you did not see yours,it’s probably because the lazy professor never bothered sending his book order in.
The past two or so years, there have multiple sites that you can go to that have accessed booklists from stores online sites without permission and posted comparative prices for each class at multiple sites. Many stores now actually post the comparative prices right on their own website-we hate losing the sale, but if the student clicks in from our place and purchases, we get the affiliate income. Plus we now have some amazing purchasing tools that let us purchase en masse from marketplace sellers with one click, lowering our cost of goods and allowing us to pass savings to the students for the books we can acquire in that manner.
As for digital, it is coming, but slowly. Students are pretty savvy,but until the faculty making the decisions are totally comfy with digital - a lot of the lead faculty still are not at ease with email-it won’t be a deluge.
In short,the stuff that lawmaker is talking about has been around at least a couple of years. Typical lawmaker.
Printed books are much easier to use - you can make notes in them, you can buy older editions, you can sell them when you're done, you can read them in sunlight sitting under a tree and printed books don't spy on you and watch which pages your reading and tell your professor how much time you spent with their book.
The most evil thing is the phenomenon of online homework. Under the guise of automated teaching, students are charged to do their homework. The online homework access for a 6 week class I recently took was $168. Every move is then monitored and it's non-transferrable.