College Textbook Costs
Posted in General, Money, Politics by George
The Virginia Gerneral Assembly just passed a bill to lower the cost of college textbooks for students. Well, in theory.
The bill requires public schools to give guidelines to professors and bookstores, encouraging professors to limit use of new editions of books and to acknowledge that they are aware of the cost of their assigned books. Bookstores are told to order books without extra supplementary material that is not needed.
In theory, this is fine, but it doesn’t get to any of the roots of the college textbook problem. First off, many of my professors already acknowledge how much the books cost, and they do so by telling us: “sorry, your books for this class are going to cost you hundreds of dollars for this semester.” So I don’t think acknowledging is going to do anything.
Secondly, regardless of whether supplementary materials are shipped to the bookstore or not, college bookstores jack up prices so high, in particular Barnes and Noble at William and Mary, our only college bookstore, that I have been able to find books online that are often half the cost of in the bookstore. I regularly save hundreds of dollars every semester by ordering online, yet even with this method I pay hundreds each semester for books.
Yes, it’s true that books cost quite a bit of money in college to produce. But the average professor doesn’t really care that much, and the average bookstore that has monopoly power over the textbook supply on campus takes advantage of students. Telling professors to have “guidelines” and to be “courteous” about assigning textbooks, or asking the bookstores to cut costs by a few dollars here or there doesn’t get to the root of the problem at all.
I think that we should change this bill to be a little bit more to-the-point. Professors should have a price cap on books they are allowed to assign for the semester, and college bookstores should be required to set their prices no higher than a small percentage above the national average price for each book. The advantage of this is that students will know the maximum amount they could pay per semester depending on the number of credits they took, and overall prices would drop because the bookstores would be restricted from monopolistic pricing.
March 12th, 2006 at 10:33 am
It’s interesting that in some nations, like India, books are made on cheap paper, with cheap ink, and then sold for rock bottom prices. Like 5 dollars. That’s where your international versions from Amazon are from.
I wonder what causes publishers to be ok with selling books for cheap in India, but not here? Probably b/c most of us will pay the money for it.
March 12th, 2006 at 5:00 pm
I actually don’t know much about international editions. I need to definitely start buying those… I’ve looked on amazon but I guess I don’t look early enough to get them.
April 25th, 2006 at 7:06 pm
I’m so sick of freaking expensive books and the fact they keep coming out with new editions that have like a word changed every five minutes. I have been using the site cheapesttextbooks.com which has really got me through my college years, they gave me really good deals on a whole lot of book sites. I just can’t wait until everyone uses sites like this one so that overpriced book companies stop making so much money.
April 25th, 2006 at 7:34 pm
Mel,
Strangely I just had a really annoying experience with a different version of a text. For my international econ class, I am using the version prior to the current one. While working on a problem set with a fellow classmate, we found that the numbers in a few of the problems had been changed. If I hadn’t been able to look at the newest edition I would have gotten the problems wrong! What good does a publisher do for students by changing a few numerical examples?
April 25th, 2006 at 10:07 pm
thats easy george… they get to hike the price to 100 bucks and put out a new “edition” with a couple changed numbers and some new colored charts.
ha…what good for students? publishers are in the market of making themselves money…
If the book is good, then profs will assign it and the students will have to buy it. If it sucks, then the profs will get pissed because they will have to do more work…
The latest craze in my classwork is “reading packets” For 3 of my classes we had 300-400 pages of journal articles, selected chapters from books, newspaper clippings and stuff like that. No way of getting around it…can’t find this packet online from india, and have to pay 100 bucks for it because of the copyrights.
April 25th, 2006 at 11:22 pm
Arrgh! I hate stupid reading packets. You can’t sell them back and you have to buy them in the bookstore! No me gusta!!
April 26th, 2006 at 9:26 am
either i have been brainwashed or i have been pummelled into submission by the bookstores over the years…but i really don’t care anymore…i have never sold a book back to the store…i have done some wheeling and dealing selling/giving books to teammates/friends.
At this point, most of the stuff should be fairly useful to me, and I would think that when you are in law school you’ll be keeping those books.