A couple co-workers of mine are preparing to send a child to college for the first time, one to Gonzage University and the other to Evergreen State College. The guy sending his son to Evergreen is just howling about the cost of the books, it will cost over $1000 just for the first year. He tried to find used books but got a late start and could not find any. The other guy, who is sending his daughter to Gonzaga says he has no complaints about the cost of the books, including one that costs $320. He considers it just part of the expense of sending a kid to college. I was wondering if other thought the cost of college textbooks was out of line or is it just a cost like all the others?
It wasn’t so much having to shell out the money at the beginning of the year that bothered me–like your second friend I just chalked it up to standard college cost. It was at the end of the year when they gave you maybe 5 or 10 dollars back on a book you’d spent $150 on, and then turned around and put it back on the shelf used at $80. That chapped my ass every time.
the bookstore, though convenient, might not be the way to go.
Amazon.com, half.com, and BN.com have all been much cheaper alternatives for me. eCampus.com sucks - made a book i needed three weeks late, and didn’t send me a check when i sold them some of my books.
$1000, sadly, sounds about right - my fiance spent $200 on one book a few years ago, so I guess if you multiplied that by five classes, that would be feasible.
Anyway, if said coworker is soliciting opinions - tell him to have the kid get the ISBNs from the bookstore and order them elsewhere. naturally, this needs to be done before classes start. 
I read an article recently (http://www.recordonline.com/archive/2005/08/23/textboo0.htm) that said an average of $900/semester for books right now. My college bookstore wanted $120 for one and I found it online for $50. If you have time, shop around. The best thing is to shop using the ISBN. That way you’ll get the same book!
I think one of the major problems is the near-yearly release of new versions. I bought the most recent version of a book last year, and compared page-for-page with the teacher’s previous year version. The only changes were some differences in the numbers in sample problems! WTF? We get charged for a new book that has all the same old information. What crap. But I suppose book companies have to keep their stock holders happy, too.
My university has a rental system in place. I pay about… NOTHING. 
Right now I work in a university bookstore, and it’s not unusual to see tabs of $1000, though $400-$600 is more standard. One physics text we sell retails for $169! At least that one’s thick; we also sell thirty-page manuals for forty bucks. I think the cost is out of line, especially on the required texts for introductory subjects. Of the seventy-five kids in Physics I, maybe five will turn out to be physics majors who use their books beyond college. Would it kill profs to order a cheap book for intro classes? There has to be a fifty dollar book out there that does the job just as well.
I hated the “new edition” thing, mostly because there’s some subjects where you don’t NEED to buy a new edition, ever (until the book physically falls apart on you), so having to buy a shiny new edition felt like a total waste. I had to buy a $70 math book for just that reason; the prof apparently changed up the text every three or four years. What exactly is NEW in the world of math? Math doesn’t change! (Well, except for new theories, but that’s in high-end math and I was taking College Algebra I.) You can use a math book from the fifties and it will be just as accurate. Seemed like a scam job.
Your major makes a big difference in how much you’ll pay. I was an English major, so half of my books were novels which I ended up buying online (Half.com or Ebay) for $2-$5 each. Science and pre-law students seemed to have it the worst when it came to price. One thing you can do to help costs is shop around and find out which classes use cheaper books, and take those classes for your required intros. That’s a big part of why I wound up taking Biology instead of Chemistry for my required science; the bio book was much cheaper than the chem book and you didn’t have to buy lab equipment. Every little bit helps.
In my undergrad years, I’d say the average wasn’t more that 200-300$ per semester, although I did have a couple of approx. 500$ semesters (as well as a few 150$ semesters).
OH! That reminds me… Some Profs will tell you on the first day of class that you don’t need to buy all the books that are listed for the class and that they are required to put down textbook names, so they do. Example: When I was EET at Penn State, the Prof for one class said, “Don’t buy the lab book. I make printouts of what you’ll need for the labs.” Too bad we had already bought the books! So now I pretty much wait until after the first class to see what we’ll REALLY need. This has happened to me a couple of times. (I’m a perpetual student!)
I have yet to get one of those teachers they always show on TV that scream and rant at some poor student for not having the books with them on the first day (or having read something prior to the first day’s class) I wait for the day when one of them tries something like that on me! evil grin
Don’t go to law school.
–Cliffy
I don’t know if the costs are out of line, considering that a lot of the books are thick with lots of fancy graphics and typesetting, but the frequent updates enrage me. You buy a book that covers 3-5 semesters, but they seem to update it every year or two. On top of that, where I go you often have to but a new goddamned book if you take the same class at a different campus. Are the laws of physics somehow different 2 towns over!? (Were they magic grits?) It’s supposed to be the same course. There’s got to be some way for someone to stop this racket. I swear, if I’m ever a professor I’ll buy up a bunch of books and rent them out to the students, and keep the damn things for a decade.
Gee, and no one’s mentioned the “shrink wrap” and “required CD” scams. In neither case are you allowed to return the book. Thus, none are sold used, and your used books make good doorstops.
It is a scam; publishers perform needless updates to help cut down on used books. There have even been some cases where they updated a book without the author’s knowledge or permission.
The professors could probably speak up for their students, except they get their books for free and have no idea of what the bookstore charges.
Speaking of scams, I had more than one class where three or four of the required books were, interestingly enough, written by the professor. It always seemed shady to me, especially when we ended up only using them once or twice all semester.
No problem there!
In the four semesters at my current university I bought three books (~ 150 Euro combined,) all voluntarily. It differs from department to department, but our professors are expected to provide everything that is really required for the course. Most of the time this is in electronic form. Of course sometimes we use books from the library, but usually not in a way that would justify buying them.
This was back in the early 90’s but I dropped a class once because of the book price. It was the professor’s book and basically a vanity job so it was $550 for one damn book.
I’ve had expensive semesters, and I’ve had cheap. In general, math and sciences books tend to be the most expensive, although I think the most I paid for one of my books was for my Gardner’s Art Through the Ages (still on my shelf). When my husband was working on his upper division history requirements $500-600 a quarter was not unusual. We just paid about $600 for his first semester at law school, but that included Black’s Law Dictionary and some other references.
Be forewarned about getting books on half.com and others, though. Make sure you’re getting the right edition! Sometimes the differences are minor, but sometimes, major.