When I was in college I remember scraping together whatever money I could for a semester’s worth of books that usually ran around $300 to $500 THEN. One semester I remember a tab of $650. The state college bookstore also kindly included two or three credit card applications in the bag after purchase.
They used to buy our used books back after the semester...for $5 per book...and then resell them to others for more than ten times that amount. If I had the internet back then I would have scoured the country for discount, used, old editions or even some black market copies.
College bookstores are state-sanctioned ripoffs. More often than not one could have managed through the semester without more than a few of the books, which the professors wanted us to buy and then referenced for maybe one week of work.
Yeah, someone got rich there until the kids figured they would just leave out the middleman and sell direct to other kids.
Same here. Saw that happen many a semester. I remember one class I took that required a new and very expensive book (first printing). We used the first two chapters of the book and no more.....