I spent $600 on a semester’s worth of books this Spring, resold them back for $100.
My UOP Online classes did this - you were charged for a PDF version whether you wanted it or not. You could also access the text on a web page.
However, it was pretty miserable having to read textbooks on a computer screen, with the web version being even worse than the PDF version. I think most of the students would have preferred to buy dead tree versions (and many did, even though they’d already paid for the PDF). Many of the books were locked so that they disabled Acrobat’s capability for user notes and highlighting.
For some classes, I printed the book (good thing I have a laser printer with duplex capability). For many other classes (whenever the security/permissions permitted it), I converted them to text and read the books on my Palm PDA.
Two words: TOO MUCH! In the statistics course that I teach the textbook cost $120 new and about $70 used. Students have complained about the costs and I am sympathetic. I recommend that they go on-line to find a price that’s usually much lower than the price at the university bookstore. I am also exploring less expensive textbook options going forward, e.g., e-books, readers, customized books from publishers.
In many, if not most, cases, they do.
It’s a serious problem, and in K-12 books too. There are *many *reasons why this isn’t happening more. One big one: simple inertia of the whole textbook business, from writer to publisher to printer to warehouse to retail to professors through to students. Enough people still want (need, require, demand) the print versions that publishers would have to offer them *alongside *electronic versions, making print runs even smaller, but not reducing costs significantly. Nobody has figured out a large-scale business model for making this work yet, but believe me, every publisher is working on it. There have been model programs in high schools and colleges for all-electronic delivery, some pretty successful, but none have yet been successful *enough *to inspire sweeping change. It’ll happen soon.
Related: “Pretty much all students” have net access, but not 100%.
Another big reason: it would make pirating a whole lot easier. Publishers aren’t keen on that part. Similarly, if your textbook contains any material authored by someone else and included with their permission, the process of getting permission to put that material online is completely separate. Many authors uniformly refuse to allow online reproduction, even if they are heavily anthologized in print.
When I taught college classes, I went out of my way to make sure I didn’t require anything expensive… but I taught a freshman comp course I designed myself, not from a department syllabus, not in a data-heavy field, and not in a high-level or specialized subject.
FWIW, academic publishing is not particularly lucrative for any single part of the business chain. Publishers’ profit margins are typically in the single digits (and were so even before the recession). I doubt many of the professors authoring $250 texts are getting rich from them, though there may be a few. Short-run publishing is just expensive, with many steps involved, requiring lots of labor, materials, transportation, and storage, and with few ways to recover costs if a book doesn’t sell as expected. I had high hopes for publish-on-demand, which would seem to circumvent many incidental costs, but it doesn’t seem to have taken off. I hope it does.
I graduated last December. I made it a goal to never spend more that $75 a semester. I routinely took 5 courses that required 7-9 texts. I got at least 5 from the library, 2 from the internet (Literature like Shakespeare) and bought the last two one edition back for $35 each.
The bookstore is my enemy. Every penny I spend on eBay is a middle finger to the bookstore. If you’re spending >$400, you’re just not trying.
((cue Engineering and Math students saying they “need” a new book))
Strong suggestion:
At end of semester, get quotes from these two sites, which get “buyback” values from 5-7 different online buyback systems.
Then, comparison shop your student store’s buyback values.
Sell to the highest bidder.
On edit:
Oh, and for “bootleg” instructor’s edition buyback and some International Editions, www.textbooksrus.com
I review engineering books for a magazine, also low volume, and they average about $100. Though they have questions at the end of the chapters, they aren’t primarily textbooks. And authors don’t get rich from them (I can assure you from personal experience.)
I get the books free, of course, and I suspect many people get their companies to pay for some.
My physics books have mostly ranged from about $50 to $100. The cheapest was a celestial mechanics book that was only about $20-- I’ve heard that that was due to the author willingly taking a smaller cut, for which everyone in that class was grateful.
Professors are usually understanding of this: Most profs in my experience will find out what the corresponding chapters and sections are in earlier editions (especially in cases like Jackson’s Electrodynamics, which was significantly better in the second edition than the third), and in the handful of cases I’ve had where the professor assigned his own book, he made it available for cost (typically a comb-bound or spiral-bound stack of photocopied sheets).
I shall take this under consideration for the next year!
I’m working on a masters in a business field right now. So far all of my books have been around $200 from the school bookstore. For my summer class, the bookstore price is $200, Amazon’s price is $120 and I can get it from Amazon marketplace in good condition for around $80. I finally figured out how I can look up the info on my textbooks far enough in advance to order them before classes start, this past semester I spend almost $800 in books from the bookstore and I just cannot afford it.
In undergrad mine were usually less than $100, averaging around $60 but some were more. I took a nutritional sciences class once, the book had come out the month before, it was over $100 and by the time the semester ended they had a new edition and the bookstore was offering like 17 cents back.
myskepticsight,
You mentioned buying business titles on the Amazon Marketplace.
Amazon third-party sellers have competitive prices, but they’re not allowed to sell the cheaper International Student Editions.
A phenomenal percentage of business, economics and engineering titles have cheaper editions sold overseas.
As an example, Business Driven Information Systems by Paige Baltzan (ISBN 0077300343) has an $190 MSRP, costs $141 new from Amazon, and can be had new from an Amazon marketplace seller from $108 delivered.
On sites that permit International Ed.s to be sold (ABEBooks and Biblio would be good examples), you can get a book with the same content delivered for $57.
That’ll be my last time firing off helpful shopping info in this thread. Sorry for rambling.
Some of the books on Marketplace are just used normal US copies, although some are the international versions. Someone else has told me about Abe so I will check there as well, thanks.
It bears noting that if you get 2 or more warnings from Amazon for selling the International Editions on their marketplace, there is a very good chance they’ll disable your seller account for life.
I’ve heard of some of my international classmates bringing the international editions with them, having bought them in their home countries for $10 or less. The printing, binding, etc., are admittedly lower quality, but that’s still a tremendous bargain.
Yeah our’s did. You’d be reading along and they’d have a problem, “Go to the website for a written out solution.” So you went to the website. “Click here for the solution.” So you clicked there, “YOU MAY ACCESS THIS INFORMATION FOR A ONE TIME CHARGE OF ONLY $29.99!!” Yes, you guessed it. After paying $150 for their book they charged you to access the on line information.
Worst I ever did was a Music Lit class. Required were the new editions of both the book and two books of scores, $180 + $45 + $45 respectively. Then if you wanted to actually LISTEN to the music and scores they were describing you had to buy the two “optional” $40 CD sets. All told $350 if you wanted the whole shebang…for one class.
A couple of enterprising (and felonious :D) students ended up selling bootleg copies of the CD sets to other class members and ended up subsidizing much of the cost IIRC.
Chronos,
There are two breeds of textbooks overseas.
One is the same as the US version with a different binding (softcover) and the same quality paper, etc.
Another is the “eastern economy edition”. This is the type, for example, found in India. It has black & white illustrations, if any, and is printed on lower-grade paper.
I assume you mean pirated editions. I’ve seen pirated editions of engineering text books, which you can tell from the cover, which looks like it was made from a bad color copy of the real cover.
I’ve read about students at some colleges who set up a nice business of importing legitimate foreign editions and selling them for less. At least there the author gets royalties. It seems different from bootleg editions for which the author gets nothing.
Uh, no, that would be the “4th” class of college textbooks: pirated.
There are 3rd-world low-cost editions that are black and white, cheap and actually printed by McMillan or John Wiley & Sons, etc…
I have a friend who is a visiting professor at 2 different colleges, teaching rather specialized graduate studies courses. We have talked about this a couple of times.
He has selected what he feels is the best textbook in the field for use in his classes. (Except at one school, where the department told him he had to use a different textbook, a much inferior one in his opinion.) He said that it was expensive, but that it is a very good reference book for the field, and they would likely keep a copy for their use in the profession. Therefore the high price didn’t bother him so much.
But a major consideration is the college bookstore. (At the one school where they insisted he use a specific textbook, he heard from other professors that they agreed that it was not the best book, but that ‘the bookstore has a lot of copies of that one on hand’.)
He was also required to notify the college bookstore of the books he was using, so they could order copies. This graduate level class had 12-18 students. The bookstore said the price of the book would be $139, and they planned to order 18 copies. He suggested to them that they should order fewer copies, because:[ul]
[li]the book sold online for only $80-$90 new, and used copies in the $60’s.[/li][li]It was a graduate level course, with students quite used to using the internet and purchasing things online.[/li][li]Students typically knew 6-9 months in advance that they would be taking the course, and so had plenty of time to obtain books online.[/li][li]There were several copies of the book available for checkout in the college libraries, as well as additional copies at the nearby public library.[/li][/ul]so he expected that many of his students would get the book from somewhere other than the college bookstore.
The college bookstore response was rather surprising to him: they said he should forbid his students from buying the book except from the college bookstore. Something he thought to be completely silly and unenforceable. Then they threatened to complain to the head of the department if he undercut their sales by allowing ‘outside books’ into his classes. And they said that if students bought textbooks elsewhere, they would have to raise the price on that book to cover the cost of the unsold copies.
I thought the that last statement showed pretty clearly why the college bookstore was in financial trouble!