Posted on 01/13/2020 5:57:07 AM PST by karpov
As college textbook prices have increased 88 percent since 2006, education reformers wonder how universities can make books more affordable. One simple thing they could do is to stop selling textbooks with absurdly high mark-ups, the difference between the cost incurred by the bookstore for textbooks and the price at which they’re sold. While some progress has been made within the UNC system, much room for improvement remains.
The University of North Carolina at Charlotte, for example, signed a contract with Barnes and Noble in 2009 to merge its university bookstore with Barnes and Noble. That conjunction promised students lower book prices, bringing down the mark-up from 23 percent to 18 percent. However, merging the bookstore has meant that students still pay higher prices than they would if they bought books from an online competitor or the book publisher. The rationale for the merger may have been affordability, but textbooks remain expensive for students who trust UNC-Charlotte’s bookstore to offer the best price.
When students feel they’ve been overcharged, they take to social media to let the bookstore know. On the Barnes and Noble UNCC Facebook page, one student left a review describing how the bookstore charged him $115 to rent a used textbook—which he found on Amazon for $15. “Barnes and Noble needs to be boycotted for exploiting college students for insane profits. I will never spend a dime there again,” he wrote. Another student left a review stating that the bookstore sold an access code for his textbook for $96, but he discovered that the code was available through the publisher for $55. Yet another student left a negative review, writing that bookstore employees told him that he could return books on a certain day, and then refused to accept his books when he came back.
(Excerpt) Read more at jamesgmartin.center ...
A few reasons textbooks cost a lot: 1) The publishers create lots of materials for the teachers — quizzes, tests, videos, PowerPoint slides, case studies, online materials, etc. 2) There are often separate teacher editions of the textbook 3) The publishers give free sample textbooks to the professors (I sold them online, making several hundred dollars) 4) The authors get paid.
For most courses the content in a 3 year old textbook is fine. The biggest problem is the tests and assignments get into leaked.
It’s a scam. Everyone up and down the line gets rich off daddy’s wallet. There is no reason to require new textbooks with a CD which only allows one student to sign up on. That CD charge to submit homework should be included with tuition.
Back in the day, I bought used-used-used books for a couple dollars. Or used the library copy. Or used texts my parents still had. The only thing that had been updated from my parents’ Bio and Chem textbooks were the pictures from black and white to color. The content hadn’t been changed. Chaucer and Shakespeare haven’t updated their works.
See post 16.
Back in 1967, when I was a budding freshman at an Iowa University (Drake), I could buy an entire year’s worth of textbooks for under $90. And those were new books, which the bookstore would buy back for 50% at the end of the 2 semesters.
I bought the earlier editions when I went back to school. $10 vs $200 new.
Now some schools are requiring the purchase of text plus online problem sets. You can’t buy used problem sets. You can’t buy problem sets without text. You can’t get credit for assignments without them. You can choose to buy printed text, or save a few dollars buying the ebook, but the ebook expires after a year.
Electronic publishing ought to save students money, but the publishers are smart bastards.
College is about 90% worthless anymore. It’s a con.
It’s because Calculus completely changes every year! ;p
Could be that the material needed an update. But, as Christians, we are taught to assume that all others are turds.
I thought teaching math had been outlawed since it’s racist!
Oh, by the way. Teachers and professors are not allowed to charge anything for materials they create for class. The fees charged for those materials are levied by the publisher and the the university book store. It wouldn’t be fair to make the teacher pay for the bindings, would it?
College textbooks are a racket and always have been.
Most textbooks issue new editions every few years and professors (who are in on the racket) require students to get the most recent edition. In only a few subject, such as modern history or advanced engineering, do textbooks need to be updated every few years and that could easily be done with supplements. Other subjects, like undergraduate calculus courses, have not changed a hell of a lot over the past few hundred years.
When I was in college back in the 1970s, I always hit the bookstores early to try to find good copies of used textbooks. It really pissed me off when they came out with new editions so I could not buy used ones.
Of course, now most college textbooks are ebooks (with DRM to prevent copying), so your only options are to rent copies for up to $200 per book per semester, or pirate them.
When I was teaching high school I advised my college-bound seniors to tread carefully with required book purchases. High school textbooks also get updated every few years whether they need it or not. The publishers limit online access, typically to about 6 years. Our admin usually looked to replace book sets to maintain digital access and also to show parents that they were using nice new materials, justifying tuition increases.
Let them get the money from their fabulous endowments or from cutting out useless basket weaving classes or eliminating administrative jobs in inclusion, diversity, or assistant to the assistant to the dean, etc.
I know a place that is even cheaper than Amazon if you can find the book within its site. I will tell you but I do not own or work for the site nor do I currently have an account on the website. However, I found some of the materials very interesting. The site does not just cover textbooks, it covers a wide array of text, audio, video and other stuff. Its an organization that goes by archive with a dot and the first three letters of the word organization after the dot and archive.
With an account there you can check out books and other material. You can even find old cd-rom images of various operating systems etc. The other day i was looking for a book on basic electronics and found a plethora of materials available. The hardest decision was which one to check out to read.
Of course, the students. They are the ones who enrolled in the course in order to enrich their own lives in the first place. It is not the responsibility of anyone else to provide educational enrichment, save the parents.
Gary Busey in “Foolin’ Around”
Bookstore scene.
https://youtu.be/Pq6DUOiiHuk?t=186
Even worse are the ones that have a special edition of a common textbook made up just for that school, so you have to buy it on campus. Only the problems are different. I saved buckets of cash by buying my kids' books online whenever possible.
The ever increasing cost of books is a big reason textbooks get pirated more and more over the past 20 years, it’s also the main reason pirate sites just for books took off. These books would be in PDF form.
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