Cost of Books for college/University

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
1

I think I already know the ansewer to this question, but why are these text books so expensive ?

I understand short runs

ie: couple billion books and price cheap , couple hundred thousand , price goes up.

I also get changing world

Medicine, Law, Finance all are evolving and newer info gets added to the book , which make a generation run , say ten years not feasible.

Publishers are under pressure already to provide cheaper alternatives

ie: they are starting to think about charging for chapters only.
While I am not currently in any educational program, I did happen to be reading about the market reacting to this in the Toronto area , except it involved copyright violations and those inventive students finding ways to get more bang for their educational buck.

I have also read a number of threads on the dope indirectly related to the problem of expensive course materials and some of the reasons why.

Here is the link to the article

The high cost of university textbooks in Canada is driving students and copy shops to contravene federal copyright law, creating a thriving underground photocopying industry.

So we have courts to deal with the result of this and I dont doubt that the publisher has lost money that wont be recouped.This being hard copy piracy , I can’t see anything to defend on the student side, and not doing themselves any favors with being a generation that has no problems using p2p networks and such, sorta makes me wonder if these text book companies are owned by the music industry , to recoup money lost on music.

But this leaves a bad taste in my mouth for some reason and would love if the doper comunity could edumacate me on the nessesity of prices being that high. Does this reflect the cost of all books ?

I could see engineering and medicine being a platinum tier reflecting the ever changing nature of those fields , gold tier being law and finance and silver for various other scolastic genres.

Or You pay to play and those diciplines are going to be the most expensive and books are relatively cheap for the price of the course alltogether , or something I dunno :slight_smile:

Declan

2

There are a lot of factors driving the costs up, but the big one is that the buyers are a captive audience. The professors and administrators who make decisions about which textbooks to adopt get them for free. As a result, the publishers don’t have a strong incentive to keep costs down; they do have an incentive to dazzle their audience with shiny glossy pictures, schmancy technology, and kickbacks. (I was on a textbook selection committee when I was a grad student, and it was … an enlightening experience. At the end of it, one of the representatives from the publisher of the winning book took the whole committee out for beer and appetizers at a local bar. I still have the free tote bag I got from another publisher. Now that I’m a Proper Professor with an office of my own, the publishers give me free books like candy. I try to be mindful of costs when I’m choosing books, but my department has standard, required texts for some of the courses.)

The publishers also have a vested interest in making sure that an edition doesn’t stay on the market for too long – they want to force students to buy new books, not used ones. So there will be a new edition every three or four years, whether there needs to be one or not. Some of the changes really are necessary, such as adding information about citing Internet sources to a freshman composition handbook, but many of them are window dressing.

3

A major problem, IMO, is that the people making purchasing decisions(the professors) are not the people who have to actually pay for the textbooks. If universities provided textbooks to students free of charge(paying for it with higher tuition), I am certain that textbook prices would drop.

However, I don’t believe that universities really care about textbook costs. A portion of the profits are lining the author’s profits – and those authors are pretty much exclusively university professors. Some personal experiences that have led me to this conclusion:

In my first year, I took an introductory Computer Science course. This course was required for all students in the faculty. The course text book was written by one of the faculty’s professors. Huge sections of the text were blank, except for the letters TBC (To Be Completed). :rolleyes:

For my second year algorithms course, our professors decided to change the standard textbook for the course to CLRS, the absolute gold-standard book of algorithms. Our professors explained to us that they were saving us money, because CLRS is also the text for third year algorithms. Come third year, guess what happened? The required course textbook for third year algorithms was changed from CLRS to a book that our professor admitted was inferior to CLRS. :dubious:

(I do have to give credit where credit is due, though: my textbook costs in fourth year courses dropped dramatically because instead of requiring a textbook that was only tangentially related to the course, the faculty instead produced comprehensive sets of course notes for many fourth year courses. The notes were essentially mini-textbooks that covered all of the material in the course, only much cheaper – between $15-30 CAD)

4

I majored in history so I probably lucked out. As I recall, the most I ever spent on textbooks for my classes was biology, algebra, and Spanish. It’s been a while but the algebra book cost me roughly $150 and the biology book plus the lab book cost me a little over $200. I’m fudging my numbers a little. My Civilization book cost be $150 but I got to use the book in Civ I and Civ II.

College books are expensive for a lot of reasons. They’re typically printed in limited numbers, they have a captive audience, and, let’s be fair to the publishers, a lot of them are very well put together. I still have my : Past and Present book which I’ve consulted several times since graduating.

While I can certainly empathize with students wanting to save a few bucks there are better ways to do it than photocopies. It’s a lot easier now to sell your books on eBay or some other outlet. You wont recoup the whole cost of your book but you’ll be able to get a lot more for it than the campus bookstore would give you. Likewise this means that someone searching for a book for this semester will be able might be able to find a former student selling it for a reduced rate.

Of course this usually doesn’t apply when a new textbook or edition is being used for the semester.

Odesio

5

This is all in my on going experience.

1.) Most new editions of on going text books that I encounter are the same as their previous versions. Most ECON, FINA, and other general business text books contain the same information. The publishers change the examples and sample problems and slap on a new design for the hard cover, which they always happen to be. Little added content and hours added in. Maximum profit.

2.) School Stores. I don’t know how it is at other universities, but, at my school, it is not uncommon to encounter a 50% markup when comparing prices between the bookstore and the local Wal-Mart. So, if you buy your textbooks there, you are going to get bent over the table. No lube.

3.) Professors are using CD’s packaged in with the books to do homework. This means you can’t borrow someone else’s book or an earlier version. You need to pay to register at the website. You need to buy the book to get the CD. Blower.

Last book bill: 550

6

I chaired a textbook evaluation committee (but for public schools) and had a similar experience. I can still call up the rep and get a comp of just about anything I want, as long as I don’t do it too much. College textbooks, as mentioned above, have a captive audience. You could argue that they require a lot more editorial input than your average hardcover, but after about the 5th edition, where not much has been changed, they’re just taking advantage of the situation.

7

The price of math textbooks has increased astronomically over the past few years. When I bought my copy of Rudin’s Principles of Mathematical Analysis in late 2001, it was right around $100. Now it retails for almost twice that, despite being the same edition. That seems to be consistent with the price changes I’ve seen for other textbooks. What happened?