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Why Are College Textbooks So Absurdly Expensive?
- arjn 14y agoAnd here is the article referenced in the OP : http://slate.me/VaV0lS http://slate.me/VaV0lS
- gnosis 14y agoInteresting that the American Enterprise Institute (a conservative think tank) is the one coming out with criticism of high textbook prices. Aren't they supposed to be "pro business"? Shouldn't they be cheering how much profit the textbook industry is able to squeeze out of consumers?
- leod 14y agoMaybe they believe that there is a higher long-term profit in having well-educated workers.
- nathos 14y agoI'm sure they would point to the market-distorting high availability of (government-backed) loans as a factor in inflated book prices (and tuition, etc.). And to some degree, they'd be correct.
- fleitz 14y agoAEI is pro-capitalism / freedom, not pro-business, they also do a lot of work on the ridiculousness of the war on drugs. AEI is fairly consistently against distorted markets, I believe they were consulted on the recent Republican paper that came out against the copyright policies with regard to the DMCA and fair use.
- ianstallings 14y agoSaving money is business. As far as I know no capitalist in history likes being fleeced and when others do the fleecing it erodes confidence in the system. Never good for a true capitalist. Also, conservatives are not all alike. This appears more Libertarian than say, a neo-Christian group.
- arikrak 14y agoIts not fair capitalism, students are forced to buy the books .
- zinssmeister 14y agoa problem for sure, that's why startups like http://www.bookrenter.com/ http://www.bookrenter.com/ are turning a nice profit.
- kjackson2012 14y agoI'm not generally someone that supports illegal acts, but I fully support pirating/copying of textbooks. The fact that textbook publishing companies have a virtual monopoly and then do other things like coerce professors to continuously force students to use yearly new editions of textbooks makes me believe that the only solution is to pirate their material and starve them of money. Sorry that some good textbook authors are affected by this, but frankly, there is a bigger issue here, and collateral damage is to be expected. The only solution is to charge fair prices, and until that point is reached, I believe students should pirate textbooks to their hearts content.
- maeon3 14y agoSo your solution is for them to charge fair prices? While we are fixing prices, I suggest we also fix the prices of DeBeers diamonds to appropriate market value. Then why stop there? Lets have the government set the prices of all overpriced commodities, including outrageous salaries. Someone's already beat you to this idea though, it's called communism.
- kjackson2012 14y agoThere is no "market" for textbooks. Professors assign a single textbook, and students are forced to buy it. If a class could somehow allow for different textbooks would allow students to pay for cheaper textbooks and create price competition. But it's hard to do in practice if not impossible. I didn't say they should mandate a fixed price. I said the book publishers should charge a fair price, one that decreases the amount of pirating because it's low enough so that it's not worth it for students to pirate. That's up to them. Until they do, I fully support pirating of textbooks.
- jamesjguthrie 14y agoI also fully agree with pirating textbooks. I'm still at university and require books every now and then. Just the other night I needed access to a book that hasn't been published as an e-book and was $105/£65 if I even had enough time to get it from Amazon. So I downloaded it from a popular torrent site.
- arikrak 14y agoAlso like in Medicine, the US publishers charge US students much more than they charge students elsewhere (even in other Western countries). I think part of the reason they're able to do this is because college itself costs much more here. When people started importing international books, they started changing the questions in those books. That's also how they are able to sell new editions constantly. Many subjects (math, mechanics, etc.) don't change much, but the publishers come out with different editions every 2-3 years so people can't just buy used books. It's a ridiculous system, but hopefully open textbooks and online education will help change things.
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- hdx 14y agoThere are very few things I hate, but textbook publishers is certainly one of them. Really, a Calculus book with material from a century ago costs 150 bucks? And they change the order of the exercises every 2 years so you can't get a used one? A F#$%^&* hate those mafakas.
- obstacle1 14y agoI suspect that many faculty do recognize the issue and are taking steps to correct it, but are held back by systems put in place by college admins. Anecdotally, over the course of my program (CS) I paid around $50 per term for textbooks. The majority of materials we worked from were either open source/free (e.g. SICP) or canonical texts (e.g. CLRS) available electronically from the library. That said for each course, there were other very expensive textbooks listed as required on the syllabus. We'd always get the "required, yes, wink wink" from profs on the first day of class, with a strong statement that all of the course material could be gleaned from the open-source or free resources we'd been given. But yes, the expensive texts were "required". By someone other than the professor, obviously. I don't know how common it is for universities (or specific departments) to have relationships with textbook distributors. But I suspect that's what went on in the courses I describe. A large publisher makes a deal with the university, like "all students in {A, B, C ...} courses must be instructed to purchase Y book from our catalogue", in return for who knows what. Or maybe I just like conspiratorial thinking.
- aroberge 14y agoI've worked at three Canadian universities, including being a senior administrator at two of them, I've been to meetings with other senior administrators accross the country ... and I've never heard anything of the kind. Profs always have the freedom to decide which textbook(s) to recommend/require - something that is fundamental to Academic freedom.
- pmichaud 14y agoI was married to a professor for years, and it's a little more complicated than that. Full time professors do have some leeway, but they catch shit if they try to require something "weird," or inconsistent with other professors teaching similar classes. Adjunct professors have exactly zero say in the books they teach with, they can't even require extra books (which would be a sort of workaround). And consider the trend to hire more and more adjuncts in lieu of full time faculty.
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- JimEngland 14y agoI am really excited to see what companies like Boundless (http://boundless.com http://boundless.com) do to disrupt the college textbook market. Boundless is taking OER resources and syncing it up to the chapters in existing textbooks, so a student can enter the textbook for the course and get a customized online replacement.
- mediocregopher 14y agoAs a college kid who refuses to pay for textbooks: Thanks! When you go to the site it already knows what school you go to (or at least it did for me). There's more then one school in my town, so I don't know if they just do geo-location and go with the larger school, or if they have some other source (I don't see how or what though). On one hand very cool, on the other a little worrying.
- JimEngland 14y agoThey probably have mapped a list of IP address blocks to universities. Pretty clever :)
- tzs 14y agoThe publishers will tell you that it is because it is a lot of work to produce new editions every couple of years to keep the textbook up to date. I'm pretty sure they are lying, at least as far as that explaining the high prices. Here is why I believe this: http://www.amazon.com/Calculus-Vol-One-Variable-Introduction-Algebra/dp/0471000051 http://www.amazon.com/Calculus-Vol-One-Variable-Introduction... http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0471000078 http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0471000078 These are Apostol's excellent two volume undergraduate calculus textbook. Volume I is $231.25, and volume II is $189.49. They were around $22 each when I bought my copies in 1977. I'm sure that NONE of the subsequent price increase is due to revisions and updates, because there have been no revisions or updates. Volume I is still the second edition (from 1967) and volume II is also still the second edition (from 1969). (There has been no need to revise or update them). Based on inflation, these books should be about $80-90 per volume now (if we assume that $22 in 1977 was a reasonable price).
- textminer 14y agoMaddening how so many classic textbooks have new versions every few years that add a few nominal features ("Calculus in the Real World!" "Online Tutorials That're Worse Than What Someone Else Made on YouTube!") with the real goal of shuffling around the exercises so a student can't do his or her homework without having the correct edition. Completely squashes resale markets.
- FuzzyDunlop 14y agoApparently nothing is sacred when it comes to trying to make a quick buck.
- WalterBright 14y agoYeah, I bought my copies of I and II used in 1977 for about $10 each. I was shocked at how high the Amazon prices for them have gone.
- nova 14y ago> Based on inflation, these books should be about $80-90 per volume now (if we assume that $22 in 1977 was a reasonable price). And based on the fact that books and other "intellectual" goods may be expensive to create, but only as a one-time investment, and all the years that have passed they should be dirt cheap by now. In fact, they should be in the public domain, if we had something resembling a fair copyright law.
- betterunix 14y agoI propose an alternative: after some number of years of teaching, professors get a year off to write textbooks; these books are then distributed under a creative commons license, with university libraries acting as archives and hosts for textbooks. Encourage students to share their books with others. We do not need the textbook publishing industry in this day and age. They have outlived their usefulness: we can distribute books without them. When their idea of a "new edition" is to change the problem sets, when their idea of an electronic edition is "something you cannot read past the end of the year," we do not benefit in any way from their existence. We are not talking about entertainment here, we are talking about an important medium for preserving and propagating human knowledge -- the very thing that has led to the overwhelming success of human civilization.
- droithomme 14y ago> after some number of years of teaching, professors get a year off That exists, it's called a sabbatical. Teachers are expected to do original work during their year off, and it often consists of writing books.
- batgaijin 14y agoolly olly oxen free, show thyself oligopoly!
- davidglb 14y agoGuess it's good timing to mention my startup for college textbooks: http://fiftyorless.cloudapp.net http://fiftyorless.cloudapp.net
- stinger 14y agountil we can get publishers to pay heed, students are happily renting books. Chegg has seen tremendous growth for its rentals. Also, there are open source books http://www.marketwatch.com/story/chegg-partners-with-openstax-college-and-20-million-minds-to-provide-open-source-etextbooks-2013-01-09 http://www.marketwatch.com/story/chegg-partners-with-opensta...
- maeon3 14y agoThe solution is simple: Make sure Colleges have to pay for half of the price of student books and put that cost into Tuition. That way when students measure the inflated tuition prices (due to lots of $400 books), they go with the other college that has book prices that are reasonable. Colleges trying to increase enrollment will discover that switching to a non corrupt book seller will be in everyone's best interests. Free market will thus be restored and prices will float according to their value, rather than by authoritative fiat.
- codva 14y agoMy son's Spanish book this semester is a special edition - Googling the ISBN brings up only the school bookstore. $175, but that does include the web access code for online stuff. What a bargain! Luckily we were able to score all the books for his other 4 classes for about $130 at Amazon, so I guess $300 for the semester really is not that bad.
- arjn 14y agoPerhaps there is a good chance here to organize a collaborative effort to write open-source (free) textbooks from scratch.
- bitdestroyer 14y agoI received my AA at a community college last year and they were beginning to take an interesting direction when I was leaving that I hope to see other institutions take. The college itself was commissioning certain professors (department heads in some instances I believe) within each department to put together their own textbooks for certain subjects. When I would go to the bookstore, I remember seeing books branded with the colleges name rather than your typical textbook publishers. If I remember correctly, these textbooks were significantly cheaper, something on the order of ~$30 for an algebra or calculus book (I can't remember which it was). Sure, it takes a little bit of work, but in the long run the students save money and the college may actually stand to make a little (or a lot, I don't know what, if any, markup is on them) money as well. I've had professors apologizing to students in pretty much every class I've taken because of the textbook prices, so they're definitely starting to look at alternatives. So much so that I've had a couple professors tell us to return the books.
- Edootjuh 14y agoI recently followed a Computer Networking course, and the teachers actually went though pains to ensure those with older editions could follow the assigned exercises. From what I could tell, the differences between the 6th, 5th and 4th editions were not discernible in the text, only the exercises had changed positions and had subtle variations in the numbers and wordings. That was my first experience with the textbook industry. The book, Computer Networking: A Top-Down Approach by Kurose and Ross was very good, but the obvious abuse of their monopoly by forcing students to buy the newer editions gave me my first look into how the textbook industry operates. Still, I have great respect for my University (Utrecht University in the Netherlands) for (until now) either using syllabi that can be freely downloaded or cheaply bought for a hardcopy or accommodating students with older editions of textbooks. EDIT: Oh, and I recently found this link: http://www.textbooknova.com/ http://www.textbooknova.com/. It's probably not legal, but free textbooks!
- droithomme 14y agoWhen I was in school I'd sell my unwanted books not to the bookstore for 1/30 what I paid, but to a student in the next session of the same class for 80%-90% of what I paid. I advise others do the same whenever possible as it dramatically reduces the average price paid. Version churn can work to your advantage. Recently I bought a couple of previous-edition textbooks on subjects I was interested in. In both cases the newest edition was over $100 and the previous edition less than $10. The differences between editions are negligible. Despite this, I realized reviewing these books that the reason I don't normally do this is that textbooks are almost universally of utterly abysmal quality and riddled with errors, superstitions, and nonsense compared to the state of the art knowledge in any field. For-pay college and textbooks are a waste of time and money. Stealing textbooks is pointless and futile as you are doing something illegal, but for taking something of no real value. Speaking here as a sometimes college lecturer and teacher.
- Shari460 14y agoPlease contact me! I am a student fighting for what is fair!! Shari merkle shari30@aol.com
- Shari460 14y agoPlease contact me! I am a student fighting for what is fair!! Shari merkle shari30@aol.com
- Shari460 14y agoPlease contact me! I am a student fighting for what is fair!! Shari merkle shari30@aol.com