This situation seems to be much more prevalent in departments like sciences, engineering, law, medicine etc.
I’m a grad student in history, and i’ve been on both sides of the pedagogical fence–student and TA/teacher–and in my experience, textbooks aren’t used very often in history courses, except in surveys. And even then, i know plenty of professors and grad students who, when designing courses, prefer to design reading lists involving multiple primary and secondary sources, rather than just a big fat textbook.
This doesn’t always mean that the books are super-cheap, but it does often mean that they can be picked up second-hand online, from bookstores, or from previous students. Also, designing courses with multiple sources also allows the teacher to include journal articles that can be xeroxed very cheaply or even downloaded from databases like the JSTOR academic journal database. And, as i said in an earlier post, if only a chapter or two from a particular book is required, the university library will scan the relevant section and place it online for students to download.
So far I’ve spent over $300 on books this semester, and I’m still not done getting all the books I need. I’m an English major, and have been taking lots of survey classes. This means buying a lot of anthologies, which are expensive.
This semester has a book list that is costing me more money than any other one class- It is a Ethnic Literature class, and I need an Anthology on African-American, Asian American, Hispanic American, and Native American Literature. So far I only have 2 of those, each costing~$40.
But the thing that bugs me the most this semester is my Young Adult Literature class. Its not so much the COST of the books (they’re fairly commob paperbacks) but the fact that we MUST buy them-she won’t allow us to just check them out in the Library :mad:
I am too tired to respond adequately to this, however, I can tell you that the profit margin on new textbooks is about 25%.
In other words, if you paid $100 for a new text, the bookstore paid the publisher $75. The remaining $25 covers freight, store overhead, staff, shrink etc… The average t-shirt in any store (university or otherwise) has margin ranging from 50%-75%, so a $20 Tshirt probably only cost about $8 from the manufacturer. For a University Bookstore to be profitable, they most have a high percentage of their total sales come from things other than textbooks.
I used to manage a campus store that was highly profitable because almost 20% of my total sales came from candy, soda and junkfood. However if I hadn’t sold food, the store would’ve been running severely in the red
OK. I’m biased - I work at a textbook company (albeit a 6-12th grade one, not college). But I can tell you our profit margins are pretty damn low. Low enough that the multinational that bought us out a few years back canned about 1/3 of our asses and are demanding better profits from those of us who remain – they insist that the profits should be in the double digits annually. How many businesses do you know that are comfortable with single-digit profits? This is not where you make the big bucks.
The sad fact is that books are expensive to make on anything less than a massive scale, like bestsellers, and textbooks do not qualify for that scale.
I’ve been on the student end and the instructor end of this equation, too. It sucks, no denying it. But a lot of what you need to have just doesn’t come cheap.
Some instructors and profs go out of their way to research prices and choose the cheaper texts whenever they can – I sure did. But there are often few choices. The trend is towards more coursepackets – copied and bound sets of articles or excerpts that the instructor knows they’ll use. But even there, fees must often be paid if the article is longer than “fair use” rules allow. And shouldn’t it? If you’re an author, don’t you want to be paid for your work?
Revisions rarely happen for purely cosmetic reasons, because they’re simply not cost effective. Someone in the system is demanding it, and it’s not usually anyone that stands to make money on the deal. Many learning institutions have gotten smacked around by taxpayers who complain their kids are being subjected to outdated materials.
I feel your pain – and not in the Clintonian sense; I’ve been there and my own shelves groan under expensive texts I may never open again – but my higher-educated guess is that these prices are a result of the entire system, in which no one is getting a juicy cut.
{{{sigh}}}
Have any of y’all tried Powell’s? They carry some textbooks, they’re independent, and their prices are good.
I wish you happy studying and a stable bank account.
You know what’s even worse? Of my five classes, the bookstore has run out of books for three of them. I already had mine, or got what I could from BN.com (cheaper, I might add, new from BN than used on-campus!). One of the courses is my Intro to Cinema class. Did I mention that there are 150 people in each section? And 5 sections of the course? The professor was flabberghasted when less than half our class had the book…“But…there are 150 people signed up for this section, and there are five sections! It’s not like they didn’t know they’d need em! And it’s the same book we used last year!”
Also, let’s not forget the professors who put eight books on their reading list, then you use 3 of them…
OK. I’m biased - I work at a textbook company (albeit a 6-12th grade one, not college). But I can tell you our profit margins are pretty damn low. Low enough that the multinational that bought us out a few years back canned about 1/3 of our asses and are demanding better profits from those of us who remain – they insist that the profits should be in the double digits annually. How many businesses do you know that are comfortable with single-digit profits? This is not where you make the big bucks.
The sad fact is that books are expensive to make on anything less than a massive scale, like bestsellers, and textbooks do not qualify for that scale.
I’ve been on the student end and the instructor end of this equation, too. It sucks, no denying it. But a lot of what you need to have just doesn’t come cheap.
Some instructors and profs go out of their way to research prices and choose the cheaper texts whenever they can – I sure did. But there are often few choices. The trend is towards more coursepackets – copied and bound sets of articles or excerpts that the instructor knows they’ll use. But even there, fees must often be paid if the article is longer than “fair use” rules allow. And shouldn’t it? If you’re an author, don’t you want to be paid for your work?
Revisions rarely happen for purely cosmetic reasons, because they’re simply not cost effective. Someone in the system is demanding it, and it’s not usually anyone that stands to make money on the deal. Many learning institutions have gotten smacked around by taxpayers who complain their kids are being subjected to outdated materials.
I feel your pain – and not in the Clintonian sense; I’ve been there and my own shelves groan under expensive texts I may never open again – but my higher-educated guess is that these prices are a result of the entire system, in which no one is getting a juicy cut.
{{{sigh}}}
Have any of y’all tried Powell’s? They carry some textbooks, they’re independent, and their prices are good.
I wish you happy studying and a stable bank account.
Yeah, but that’s the good stuff. I took a YA lit class this summer - we just had to read the books, but did not have to buy them if we could get them another way. There was a lot of book swapping among the students.
But for the YA books, if you’ve got a decent used book store (UBS) near by and they’re not recently published (within the last six months or so), you can probably find them there. For my YA books, the ones I bought I paid an average of $1 for at my local UBS.
So, if you’re hungry, do you steal food from the supermarket? Not whole meals, mind you, just a little snack.
Other posters have pointed out, correctly, that there are situations in which photocopying limited parts of a book are permissible. Claiming that “student” status entitles one to steal, however, is a little troubling. Does your school offer an ethics course? Consider it.
I would like to thank the contributors to this thread. Your reminder to use half.com just saved me $180! (and I only bought 3 books :eek: )
Taking a chance on one book… I’m buying the 6th edition when we’re supposed to have the 7th, but the book was $10 instead of $113, so I’m taking my chances!!! (okay, technically, I could have bought the right edition for $85, but what would you do?)
It depends on the book. The book we use in my Child Development class…well, the 10th Edition just came out…the instructor took the class and used the 4th Edition and swears there haven’t been any noticeable changes.
I strongly suspect these policies are in place to prevent a semi-annual stream of bookstore mass murders, caused by someone holding up a line of 30 angry people while they debate the exact monetary value of a highlighted paragraph with a pissed-off clerk.
Barnes and Noble runs the campus bookstores of the local community college here in Austin. The store where I work also stocks community college books, and I’m consistently told we have better prices, buybacks and return policies.
I got pissed off today on behalf of a customer who came in wanting to sell back a brand-new book. We asked why she didn’t just return it, because our store allows up to 12 days after the start of class to return books for a full refund, and she explained that she’d bought it from one of the campus stores. Since she’d taken the plastic off, they’d only refund fifty percent of the price.
That’s some bullshit. We told her not to bother with our current buyback prices and offered to re-shrinkwrap it for her.
I had to buy my criminal law book brand spanking new at about 90 bucks. You know what pisses me off? At the end of the semester I will sell it back, and I’ll get about $30 back, which is the same as what those who bought the book used will get back.
Nice strawman. While I won’t go into the whole “it’s not theft, it’s copyright infringement” thing, it should be totally obvious that - even if it is theft - duplicating a piece of paper in no way deprives someone of that paper. Taking an object out of a store does.
Yes, undergrads take ethics at my university. It taught me that different societies have different values of right and wrong. Intellectual property is a foreign notion to a large amount of the globe. Redistributing copyrighted works is only considered unethical by some.
Duplicating a piece of paper instead of buying the piece of paper certainly does deprive someone of something, specifically, the selling price of the original piece of paper. It’s theft.
I’ve bought 3 books in the past month from a “print-on-demand” publisher, where they jusp print a single copy as someone buys it. And they all were 300-400 pages, and cost in the $15-$20 range, including shipping.
And they were all specialized books, with far less demand than your average college textbook.
Sorry emily, but I think you’re confusing the massivly expensive overhead of your big publishing company, with all of its highly paid executives, PR machinery, etc. with the actual expense of printing a book.
I don’t particularly want to defend the company I work for, which I think has its own issues, but there are some problems with comparing a print-on-demand book to a textbook.
First of all, PODs are usually written by single authors or small teams on their own initiative, sometimes as part of other research or other paid gigs. Textbooks, on the other hand, typically require dozens or even hundreds of people’s work for at least 18 months (and around here, that 18 months is building on work that’s been going on since the early 90s in many cases). Many of the supporting people’s names may never appear on the credits page in either type of book, so you can’t compare them easily. These are not just building janitors and other “overhead” type personnel, but also research assistants, graphic artists, copyeditors, etc. whose work directly impacts the pages you see.
In addition, there are also costs associated with the peripheral research, fact-checking, usability testing, etc. that goes into making it a classroom-ready textbook. POD authors may have the luxury of doing without those things if they’re career academics whose personal experience replaces research.
PODs are usually single-color printing on basic stock paper with very basic bindings. Textbooks are often full-color printing on clay-surfaced paper that needs to be supported in heavy-duty bindings.
PODs are usually straightforward single-column text with some diagrams or illustrations. Textbooks are often much more complex, with multiple columns, sidebars, special features, Teacher’s Editions with all the answers in an overprint or an answer key, complex graphics, etc.
PODs are usually one-off projects for which the authors are solely responsible, and their liability is limited to providing a book when asked for. Textbooks are often parts of a series, and any mistakes found in them may incur penalties on the companies that produce them. (In Texas, if the TEA finds any errors in books sold to public schools, the publisher is fined up to $50,000 per error, regardless of the errors’ magnitude, including typos and “errors” that are only erroneous according to particular interest groups, like the infamous and influential Texans who believe that mentioning the environmental costs of the Industrial Age in a history text is gratuitous anti-capitalist propaganda.)
At least among the books we work on in my department, 300 to 400 pages is rare; our main texts are typically 800-1200 pages with extensive indexes, cross-referencing, keyed handbook sections, glossaries, and correlations with state standards. These are accompanied by up to dozens of “ancillaries” such as consumable workbooks, audio enrichment recordings, special books for “struggling readers”, test-prep materials, website access, etc., which are often given away to schools for “free” as part of competitive incentives. Of course university textbooks don’t usually come with ancillaries; YMMV.
Also, POD is only cost-effective when the number of copies in demand is relatively small. Larger runs incur overhead (where you gonna put those boxes of books? etc.). Many POD technologies are not readily adjustible to larger runs.
There have been successful exceptions to these differences, but so long as textbooks in the US are adopted by committees and politics is involved, such exceptions will be rare, and the exceptions aren’t subject to the same market forces. We’re a publicly-traded company and have to show a profit; most POD houses don’t.
In point of fact, there is insanely intense competition in the secondary school textbook market – and our book prices are close to the less-competitive, more specialized ones y’all are suffering in college. It’s just that in college you pay for them directly out of your pocket, instead of having taxes subsidize them for you.