Luckily nobody would ever think to post those PDF’s to the net. Killing much of the financial incentive to make new textbooks even when desparately needed.
Add $20 to that and it still is pretty cheap compared to lots of books, and that’s still alot more than it should be, considering the economies of scale that should exist.
Why, of course. The question though, when people complain about textbook prices, is how much of that $20/$40/$60/$100 is actually legitimate cost, and how much is profit above the normal rate of return or executive salary or other unnecessary expenses etc.
That’s fair enough.
See, this is where I think you’ve got a different picture of campus bookstores than I. The bookstores at the schools I’ve been to are run by the school. Their operating budget, particularly as far as facilities go (building, electric, etc) are part of the University budgets. Also, the bookstore sells a lot besides used books (new text books, University branded items, office supplies, non-textbook books, etc etc), and would in fact do a thriving business without used book sales. I understand that gross income is important as far as the business goes, but it is not as if it’s an independant organization that’s trying to survive. The building is owned by the university, the staff are university paid staff, and the folks at the registers are work-study students. The bookstore is more like a line-item in the total University budget than it is its own entity.
It’s fine that the bookstore does minimal business a lot of the time (though with summer classes and a thriving campus, they’re still open and doing business year round). Most classrooms lay quiet most of the time; during the summer or whenever, but that cost of facilities and maintenance is paid for by my tuition, not by text book sales profits.
What’s more, their prices are more or less the same as Amazon’s, so the “seasonal business” theory doesn’t work at all
Oh, I don’t know. I think that a publisher could put a PDF of a textbook on the Net and charge for the password. It wouldn’t be any different from students buying one copy of a textbook to share.
Robin
I’m not going to school, so pardon my ignorance. They charge .15 cents to print a page in the lab?
Also, who said that you have to print every page of a 500 page book? Just print what’s required, or what you need to take notes with. The rest you can read in the lab. I still think it would be cheaper then buying a $70 dollar book, and another, and another, and…, what’s just 5 more? When only 30% of the books will be used all semester. It Could also be lucrative for some students. Some of them can buy a powerful printers, charge .10 cents a page instead of the .15 the schools charge on their copiers/printers. Also require these students to only print off the orginal CD to avoided copyrighting, or go to jail. Gotta love capitalism! And what better place to learn it, then in college! I’m sure printers would be banned soon after by the board of education though… Students shouldn’t be able to help themselves. :rolleyes:
I think this is a good idea. My undergraduate university in Sydney, Australia had a student-run second-hand bookstore that worked on consignment. You were able to set your own price for the book, and once it was sold you got your money, minus 10% charged by the store for overhead. At the end of each academic year, the store would have a half-price sale. Anyone with books on consignment had the choice to allow them to be sold for half price, or to come in and pick them up.
The good thing about the system was that the price of the books on sale tended to reflect their condition, their newness, etc. A student offering a textbook full of yellow marker pen and dog-eared pages knew that the book wouldn’t fetch as much as one in pristine condition. And students who wanted to save money could do so as long as they were willing to putr up with a somewhat ratty book.
Contrast this with my current school here in the US. The on-campus bookstore is a Barnes & Noble. They buy used textbooks back at 50% of cover rpice (no matter what the condition), and sell them for 75% of the cover price (no matter what the condition). So, there’s no incentive for students selling their old books to keep them in good order. And, on the buying side, the person who gets the last used copy pays the same for a crappy, marked-up version as someone else paid for a version in mint condition.
I think that this points up where at least part of the blame should go in these situations–the universities themselves.
Sure, publishers and bookstores are for-profit enterprises. But universities are not, and in my opinion they should ensure that when an on-campus bookstore contract is awarded, the students get a reasonable deal.
At my undergrad school in Australia, the campus bookstore changed while i was attending the university. The university called for bids from book retailers to determine who would get to run the new store. A bunch of for-profit and co-op book chains expressed interest. One of the conditions that the universoty placed on the contract was that the bookstore must offer all students a 12% discount on the price of new books. This did not discourage bids, because the companies knew that a campus bookstore (especially at a large state school like that) has a large stable market. Even in the internet age, a 12% discount is generally enough to over-ride the price advantage of places like amazon, without the added cost of shipping or the hassle of having to wait for your books to arrive.
I think that universities should exercise this type of leverage when deciding on who gets to run the on-campus bookstore. If the profit margin under those circumstances is too low, then places like Barnes and Noble might drop out, but i’m willing to bet they wouldn’t. At least in the US the campus bookstore has one advantage that its Australian counterpart (or at least my Australian uni) doesn’t have–the chance to make a profit on the outrageously-priced school merchandise like sweatshirts, mugs, mascots, keychains, etc.
Not at any university i’ve ever been to. My own school charges 6.5c a page. I’ve done research at plenty of other universities throughout the United States, and the most i’ve ever paid for photocopying or printing is 10c per page.
Also, as you say, there’s not necessarily going to be a need to print out all of a 500-page book. Often, it would be perfectly reasonable to just look at the relevant stuff on the computer screen.
My department’s lab charges nothing.
I’m not saying that there’s not room for you to be frustrated with the prices of textbooks, but both of your examples do have counter arguments.
First, in the case of your prof requiring his book - what’s he supposed to do? Write his book and NOT assign it? And often textbooks in their first years are not well known. Then say 10-15% of professors teaching a given topic will have their own texts on the matter - that further draws down the number of texts in a print for any given text.
As for the book buy backs - over the summer is when new editions come out. Or when the professors choose to change their textbooks. End of semester book buybacks from the school bookstore are a GAMBLE. There is no guarantee that the text that was used for Chem 101 in the Spring Semester will be the same text that is being used for Chem 101 come Fall. So - for the texts that the bookstore is reasonably certain will be used again, the price the student recieves will be even higher, up to 25% of the price. But for the majority of the texts, especially in history survey courses or literature, etc, with the texts changing so often from year to year, the bookstore is going to end up with some books that they can’t sell back come the next semester. If you’re willing to accept that risk yourself - you can ALWAYS get a better price for your used text - both from the bookstores, or directly from other students - once the next semester begins, and the text has been assigned.
Understood. However, what I meant was that professors sometimes assign a textbook, require students to purchase it, and then not use it. The student is stuck with a useless textbook.
Here’s the thing. We’re not selling to the bookstore, we’re selling to the wholesaler. The wholesaler can presumably find a buyer for the books they take back, regardless of whether our profs use them or not. Therefore, decisions my university’s professors make about textbooks don’t really matter.
Robin
I rent my books if possible. This semester I had one book I needed (an accounting text you could break bones with) and rented all but one of the others. The book I had to buy cost more than half the price of all the others put together. One consolation is that it is brand-new, so I should be able to get money back on it.
Sorry, I’d missed that part of your original post. :smack:
Not necessarily - see other posts here about transferring books to markets. But, you do have a point. I’m not saying that all the complaints about textbooks prices are ridiculous, just that there are other factors than you’d seemed to consider. And even when you can be sure the prices are completely legit - let’s face it, they’re still an additional burden. It’s just not a result of a vast capitalist conspiracy, usually simple market rules, with often an additional twist of for local monopolies.
Welcome to the bizarre world of academic presses. It’s hardly one-sided, as quite a lot of substantive knowledge flows from them. But–and brace for a huge qualifiier–they quite definitely aren’t written for wide consumption, thus the usual market forces don’t apply. ‘Publish or perish’ is grimly accurate, and the publishing had better take proper scholarly form. Very few specifically scholarly books are marketable outside of academic circles, and their appeal can make them suspect in the cut-throat atmosphere of academics. If the masses actually like something, there’s probably something wrong with it.
Not to sound cynical, though I am, academic publishing plays by a distinctly weird set of rules. Those rules certainly don’t include costs to students. Students aren’t consumers in the usual sense, just ‘predictable purchasers’. The academy usually allows teachers to choose required texts, so no big suprise when they require their own hard-won published titles. The best title in terms of actual information or cost? Maybe, though possibly not. Very few academics can write worth a damn, certainly not enough to overcome the strict requirements of academic protocols. To be blunt, ‘academic speak’ leeches all the vitality right outta actual communication. As a brake on cynicism, it’d be tremendously hard to pour oneself into writing a textbook and not cherish it for reasons beyond money. Very few people have gotten rich from academic presses.*
The system is very unbalanced. It takes a helluva lot for any title to pass through ruthless dissection to be declared a standard. My main point is that academic publishing is a peculiarly stagnent system with a different set of markers. A teacher requiring purchase of his/her own book is only a blip on the grand scale, though it’s little less than extortion to students. Sad as it is, students are little more than paying apprentices in the academic game.
*Toole’s ‘A Confederacy of Dunces’, posthumously, and a few other exceptions. They’ve widened their standards for nonacademic writing.
You mean they’re THAT respected? I think you overstate the case, badly. 
Wasn’t St. Martin’s Press an academic only press until one or two of their books in the 50’s caught the attention of the non-academic world? IIRC completely by accident, too.
But, yes, I can think of very few texts that are real money makers on the collegiate level for the authors. Though, there are exceptions - when I was going through undergrad Guyton’s Anatomy and Physiology was one such standard - used by something like 50% of all persons taking A&P in the US and Canada.
Actually, there’s no requirement that you OWN the course books, just that you read them. If you are the disciplined type (IOW, you don’t wait until the night before the test to do the reading/studying), there are other ways to save.
For example, make a deal with another classmate to share a book and buy it jointly.
Or pay a classmate ‘rental’ to use the book during a stretch of hours when s/he is unlikely to be using it.
Or just go to the campus library and use one of their copies for free.
I did the last for pretty much all my non-major classes. Bring your laptop, take extensive notes as you go (which, btw, is a great way to retain material: the thinking about what you’ve read so you can condense it to the important points, followed by typing it all out, is MUCH better at getting the info to stick than simply running your eyes over it), xerox a few charts or such that you think you’ll need to consult again… Bingo! Several hundred more dollars to party with each semester.
Also keep in mind that textbooks are often written by committee: by many, many more than one person, like a Stephen King book. I charge $25 an hour for my textbook factchecking services; I make as much as $100 a page, depending on the subject. The layers of editors and authors and designers a textbook goes through are many; everyone’s getting a salary.
–lissener, who’s been working for Scott Foresman for 15 years.
And as far as used bookstores: New-book stores tend to buy on credit, and return what they don’t sell. Used-book stores pay cash up front; thus they must ask for a larger return on it. Plus they tend to buy a LOT more books than they sell, so be grateful they’re buying your books at all. Trust me, a used-book store’s profit is never more than 2%-5%, and that’s WITH the big markup on those books they do sell.
Er, there are exceptions. I put off buying a $110 book to the last minute, hoping I wouldn’t really need it. I did, and got it two weeks before the end of the semester. I took it back to resell it in mint condition, expecting a massive loss but hoping for at least $30 or $40 to cover moving-out expenses.
They offered me fifty cents.
I sold the book for $70 online a few weeks later.
This sort of thing is not uncommon. If the book isn’t being used next semester (even over the summer) or isn’t used for huge courses, generally you get next to nothing for it.
This is kinda curious to me since I work in a wholesale environment and we are not allowed to deal with the general public.