Yikes! I recently visited a college bookstore and saw textbooks bearing price tags that each easily averaged $100. Some were more than $225 each. [Meanwhile, a crackling good biography on John Adams–complete with exhaustive research notes–costs about $35. Go figure.]
Are students finding creative ways around actually buying textbooks, such as a textbook equivalent of file sharing, or photocopying textbooks en masse, or whatever? I’ve read that some students are simply not buying their textbooks, but what about the rest? In the age of illegal music file-sharing, does there seem to be respect for copyright laws?
Mods: I’m not suggesting that anyone violate copyright laws, just trying to find out how students are responding to spiraling costs.
IIRC It goes something like this:
(1) Buy used.
(2) Sell book back to the bookstore.
(3) Or alternatively, curse, with all of your heart, those greedy bastards for issuing a new edition. Try to sell the old edition online at amazon / ebay.
Whatever proceeds you get back can be rolled into the next semester’s books, or - more likely, drunk on a Friday night.
Sorry - maybe somebody else has a digital textbook ring, but that’s the way I remember it.
When I was a student I bought second hand books whenever I could. There was one course where I didn’t buy the text. For that one I just borrowed from a friend. Or just didn’t read the text. Did I mention it was a pointless class.
Lots of people go to alternative sources for textbooks, as mentioned already. Buying used saves a few dollars, but not many ($80 instead of $100, etc).
The professor will almost always have one copy of the textbook on reserve at the library. Some students will read the book there at the library, and some will photocopy the assigned reading–even at 10c a page, it can come out cheaper than buying the whole book, especially if you won’t be reading the whole thing for the class.
Some people get together a group of two or three, and buy one copy of the book, which they share.
textbooks.com seems to have books at a discounted price, and there are many other websites that sell textbooks for less than the college bookstore. http://www.campusbooks.com/ has new and used.
Most of my textbooks are at the university library (on reserve or in the reference section), so I just hole up with a notebook whenever I’ve got to read a chapter or do a problem set.
Textbook prices in the sciences are ridiculous! I’m a humanities major, but I’m taking my gen ed classes this term, and JESUS! My intro-podunk-100-level geology textbook is $120 used! That hits hard for everybody, I’m sure, but it stings like a bastard on top of it when you’re used to working out of the same Oxford Complete Works and Norton anthologies for the past two and a half years.
I don’t even have the advantage of getting my books at a discount. I’m a Spanish major and my books are usually something like (to borrow from this semester) “abstract Mexican novel about a vampire names Jesus that’s really an allegory for the oil industry” or (to borrow from last semester) “this really specific book about two decades in the history of Spain.” Since all the books are imported, they are extra expensive (your typical paperback novel is about $40) and it’s not like I can just get this crap off e-bay. I have to get them from this really pretentious bookstore in town that specializes in never having what you need when you need it.
Mr. Olives says we’re all whiny babies because if you include textbooks as just another cost of college it’s not that big a deal. But as someone who has an after-tuition income of about $10,000 a year, I think it’s worth complaining about to have to spend $1,000 of that on textbooks.
There are a lot of ways students save on textbooks, and the resourceful ones make out like bandits.
First, I’ll often ask the professor if the new edition is required, or if an older edition is okay. If the older book is fine, I’ll buy that one. Sometimes, profs will flat-out tell me that the book isn’t necessary for the class; that they have to adopt something, but that they don’t plan to use the book for anything but supplemental material.
Second, some professors or departments keep review copies of textbooks that publishers’ reps send them. I’ve had friends ask about using these copies for the semester, and some departments and faculty request extras so students who can’t afford books can use them.
Third, there may be equivalent material online. I’ve used websites to substitute for textbooks lots of times, and some sites are better than some books because they’re more current.
Finally, most instructors are sympathetic to students about textbook costs. They know books aren’t cheap, and some will look for alternative materials that are free or a lot less expensive than the standard college textbooks. OTOH, some are absolute pricks and you must buy the assigned book OR ELSE. But I think they’re in the minority, as these things go.
I buy used on Amazon, usually “new” ones go for nearly 50% of the list price. Used ones are even cheaper ($20 for a $120 book, for example), but I like my books to be nice and shiny. If the textbook is for background only, one can always use cheaper versions, or get another book in the same area using the methods we can’t talk about.
Olives–Hey, you joined! Good for you. I thought I’d have to pay your subscription to induce you aboard! (And I would have, too.) I agree with Mr. Olives’ position here, but I do my bit to keep students’ costs down: I haven’t ordered a textbook for a class in quite a while (well, I had them buy a novel last summer) because I mainly use out-of-copyright texts that I post links to over the internet, or teach movies that I make available on Reserve.
Oddly, students haven’t had to pay a nickel for any textbooks this past term–and still they bitch about how hard it is to print them out when I ask them to bring a chapter to class or something.
When I took Physics I didn’t buy the book. Physics doesn’t change and unless there’s homework you can use any book really. Once I bought the book and made copies of all the stuff I could for a friend.
Most professors are pretty good about allowing you to use previous editions. I had a few professors that wrote the text and sort of insisted that you buy the book. It would piss me off professors teaching the same course had different books. Some of the books you used for Chem I & II. That was great if you had the same prof for I and II but out of luck if you didn’t.
Textbooks are expensive to produce. One alternative would be to print them in black-and-white on low-quality paper, like The Da Vinci Code, but they probably wouldn’t hold up well. And they would obviously still be much more expensive than mass-market paperbacks, because they are a comparatively niche market.
Publishers and authors make almost nothing on used books, so the profit margin on a new edition drops off precipitously after the first term. Thus authors are encouraged to produce new editions every 2-4 years (average in the sciences seems to be about 3).
I encourage my students to share texts and/or shop at Amazon. As someone posted above, information in intro-level science courses doesn’t change that rapidly (with the possible exception of astronomy over the past decade), so using older editions should not be an issue at all. I do remind my students that if they are using an earlier edition it’s their responsibility to check that they are reading the right chapter in any given week.
The publisher of one of my current texts offers the entire text in PDF format on a CD, for roughly half the price of the print edition (considering that production is practically costless this seems overpriced, but since it’s easily shared among multiple users there is a rationale). I’ve had the bookstore offer them the past few semesters but students don’t seem to go for it. I’d be interested if anyone here has any comments on that.
I was at a conference a couple of months ago and saw a presentation questioning whether the textbook is even necessary, given the extent of material that can be made available through the tubes of the internets. However they were concentration mostly on upper division classes.
Nick Strobel, an astronomy instructor has produced an entire intro-level text that is freely available on the web (astronomynotes.com ). I’ve been planning on working up something similar for introductory earth science, but I’m well short of actually posting anything yet. Maybe by the fall…
I agree you with you, olivesmarch4th; the cost of technical texts is egregious, and unlike tuition (about which you can complain to the university) profits from texts go straight back to the publishers. (And it’s not like textbook authors make a killing; the royalties off of textbook sales are a pittance.) Publishers regularly update the texts with new versions, which is fine if they are adding new material or correcting mistakes, but often these revisions consist of little more than reordering some information and changing the problem sets without material improvement to the text. In the mechanical engineering field, the same few venerable texts are used again and again (for mechanis, Hibbler and Beer & Johnson are the old standards) and yet the costs are outrageous; ditto for mathematics. I could see in a field like computer science where there are rapidly changing ideas, but in the fundamental sciences and engineering disciplines there’s no real need to alter the texts repeatedly. Heck, my standard references for vibrations and mechanics are Den Hartog’s excellent classics, published by Dover in softcover. They’re much superior to the texts I was required to purchase for those classes.
What really gets me, though, is the often poor quality of the binding. I can’t count the number of pricy texts that I’ve had fall apart. Compared to the “Permabound” Schaum’s Outlines or Dover Publishing softbacks which hold together through much use (even though they’re printed in b&w on much cheaper paper), fabric-spine textbooks just don’t seem to hold together well, and from a practical point of view, I’d rather have the comb-bound texts that lay flat. Texts are often much too large as a portable reference, as well; much extraneous information (including bloated problem sets that would be better published on-line or in a seperate workbook) is included instead of just presenting the core information and exposition.
Textbooks are just a scam that academia has bought into. There’s really no reason that you couldn’t teach a class from Schaum’s Outlines and notes.
I’m a student, and pretty much everyone buys used if they can help it. If it has to be new, it’s usually best to go online for cheaper prices. We usually compare prices at the campus bookstore, half.com and Amazon. Some cases, you have to go with the bookstore anyway, because a lot of professors assign readings for the first week or two of class.
As far as creative solutions go, I have two examples. The first is really a creative solution on the part of the professor. The class was a general ed one for mass communications - all mass comm majors have to take it, and it’s popular with other students who need an easy humanities class. The class size numbers around 200 or 300 students per section. Because of the large size of the class, and the fact that it is taught every semester, the professor was able to work out a deal with the publishing company to print special copies of the book specific to our university that only had the chapters that we would need for class. I think the price was about $20 or $30, pretty cheap for a textbook and much less expensive than its normal price.
In the second, my economics class was given the option of either buying the book ($120) or buying an online version of it ($65). I opted for the latter and just printed out the chapters I needed while at work. However, students couldn’t share online versions, as each student needed their own account to submit assignments (the online accounts were also included in the purchase price of the hard copy textbooks). Still, you could save a pretty big chunk of change that way. The only problem was that you couldn’t sell your books back at the semester’s end. Book buyback is always a gamble, though - you never know if you’re going to get back 50%+ of your purchase price, or 75 cents because the book is being bought “wholesale.”
I haven’t been a student in years, but I read somewhere about some students who were buying their textbooks from India, where the same text is used in a much cheaper edition (lower quality paper and binding).
Actually, you can often even buy it from England for much cheaper than here. A common strategy is to find out what textbooks are needed for a class, buy them once at a bookstore and then once online, and then return them to the bookstore once the online versions come.
A lot of students use the International Edition - much cheaper. But a few students have been burned by that strategy when the problems are slightly different. Most, but not all, instructors will work it out.