It’s been awhile since I’ve been in college and my wife is now taking some classes in the evening. She was telling me her text books are over $100.00 each! Why?
I mean, I can buy a new novel for $30.00! Why the inflated costs for college text books?
Demand.
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Captive demand. Some textbook companies suck cock, plain and simple. The most blatant use of “planned obsolesence” I have seen yet was a $80 intro to business accounting textbook that I had to buy that was mostly fairly unnecessary pictures and bar charts, but that came with a CD of simple subject review exercises and password for “online web services”. Those web services, being a number of simple online tests and a message-board utility, run by the book publishing company. But after every year, the textbook company invalidates all the used passwords, and the teacher who taught the course required that we used the services to coplete the dozen or so ten-question quizzes–so everybody had to buy a new book, every year. And did I mention the book was a POS also? I had like 300 pages, but could have easily been boiled down to half that.
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Captive demand. Some textbook companies suck cock, plain and simple. The most blatant use of “planned obsolesence” I have seen yet was a $80 intro to business accounting textbook that I had to buy that was mostly fairly unnecessary pictures and bar charts, but that came with a CD of simple subject review exercises and password for “online web services”. Those web services, being a number of simple online tests and a message-board utility, run by the book publishing company. But after every year, the textbook company invalidates all the used passwords, and the teacher who taught the course required that we used the services to coplete the dozen or so ten-question quizzes–so everybody had to buy a new book, every year. And did I mention the book was a POS also? I had like 300 pages, but could have easily been boiled down to half that.
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From Concordia University:
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Way back in my day, mostly afore them confounded com-pyoo-ters and fancy color graphics, the commonly offered explanation was that text books had to be updated frequently in order to correct errors and keep them up to date with new information. I found that explanation to be less compelling than the fact that the author of the textbook often taught the damned class.
It’s not so bad . . . the book store will buy back that hundred dollar text for eighteen bucks. :rolleyes:
Last semester I was required to buy a pretty useless computer disk for exactly $99.99. With the information inside the packet, I was able to access a certain education-related website. I only used the disk itself once. So in essence, I purchased a hundred-dollar password.
It’s all seems a ripoff to me. I keep every text book I think I might ever consult again, even once. Of course, not every student can afford to do this. With the budgets some of us operate on, we need to let ourselves get taken advantage of.
I think it’s ridiculous, too.
Resell it on Amazon or Half. You get a little more than the ridiculous bookstore buyback prices. I got a little flier with my $90 new textbook saying I was guaranteed to get half back at the end of the year! Whoa, mama! No thanks. I’ll sell it for $60 on Amazon.
I’ve noticed that practically all introductory textbooks now come with a CD, and a lot of them now include ‘web services’. The ‘web services’ are often 30- or 60-day trials of a paid service. Of course, introductory textbooks are always quite large (‘textbook-sized’) and have lots of full-color pictures and filler material to allow them to reach the ~1000 page mark at which it seems justifiable to pay $100 for the book.
I’ve seen some even worse methods of increasing the cost of books. One introductory organic chemistry textbook comes with a plastic ‘stereoviewer’ that lets you see 3d renderings of about 40 (mostly simple) molecules without going through the trouble of building a model. It probably added $5-10 to the cost of the book, though it was relatively inexpensive for an organic chemistry book.
I’m not sure how it goes in other fields, but advanced-level (upper-year undergraduate and up) chemistry textbooks are markedly different than the introductory versions. I imagine the same is true of the other physical sciences, math and engineering. The textbooks are no longer textbook-sized, with page after page of full-color photos somehow related to the subject. Suddenly they’re black-and-white and about the same size as the average hardcover novel. Some of the books aren’t even hardcover. All of the illustrations are directly related to the subject: structures and equations only. Generally, even the book’s cover will be practical and prosaic, with maybe a drawing of a molecule, and always the word ‘Advanced’. These books cost less than introductory books, but still aren’t cheap.
I imagine the reason for this is that Concordia’s (via Sofa King) Reason Number Two is either invalidated or carried to extremes. Authors of introductory textbooks can justify adding color, filler material and CDs to raise the cost of production because their books have a fairly broad market within the academic community. A relatively large number of students will be taking freshman calculus or physics or sophomore organic chemistry. The number of students studying related topics in their final year drops immensely. So authors of advanced-level textbooks can only hope to sell a very few copies each year. (They don’t update them every year, either.) Thus, even a relatively simple book will be quite expensive, and I suspect many don’t make a profit at all. The motive for writing advanced-level textbooks is more recognition than profit. One of my final-year courses even had a textbook that was also available online – but it was written by a Harvard prof, so he probably didn’t need to be too worried about making the book profitable.
I never resold any of my books. I think the value they’ve had in looking up some long-forgotten aspect of first-year physics or molecular biology has outweighed the value I would have gotten from selling them.
That being said, I do have some books that I’m keeping just in case I want to see what a book looks like when it’s on fire. =) The book my first-year calculus prof wrote is among them.
As a geology major in college I found the technical texts to be exorbitantly priced. (Try pricing engineering books today at amazon).
One semester I needed four books, two for optical mineralogy and two petrology - total cost about $100. Weight about two pounds of paper. The coed in front of me, an english major, had a shopping cart full of books. Her cost? About $50.
Granted some of her books were used, but still:confused:
This is very true, the cost and risk of setting up a new print run can be immense. When you are doing a print run of 100,000 copies of a 500 page book with color illustrations on most pages you will need as many as 2,000 printing plates.
Someone has to etch those plates
Mount those plates on the presses
Someone did the layout
Someone who understands the subject edited and proofread
Someone wrote it
Materials and machinery to print and bind the book.
I could go on for days, printing decent quality textbooks is not a cheap or simple process often involving 50-60 skilled employees for several weeks . Short runs skyrocket the price.
Even then its not a guarenteed sale. If I write an algebra textbook and none of the schools want to buy it because I wrote a less than stellar book…All of the money that went into publishing that book just went down the drain. Imagine the havoc when some states didn’t want to purchase biology textbooks unless they gave equal time to divine creation? Millions of dollars used to print an otherwise wonderful textbook might as well have been Enron Stock.
You are not just paying for a book, you are paying for the publishers failures as well. Many of which are not the publishers fault.
Perhaps most of the English major’s books were novels? Just a thought. Still, I know what you mean. If you want to feel better about your purchases, get in line behind somebody in a medical program. I did that last semester and watched as she was forced to make two difficult trips to her car.
Doesn’t low demand decrease the price? Or are you saying textbooks are a high-demand product?
Yeah, I agree that most textbooks aren’t exactly bestsellers, but remember: No marketing costs to speak of, as with, say, the latest NYT bestselller. Keep in mind, too, that some textbooks have been updated with only minor changes, forcing students to buy new books instead of used. I suspect the publishers would harumph about serving the students better through “up to the minute” textbooks, but it’s all a load of shit. Plus, printing has gotten high tech with everything else, and cheap software packages make whiz-bang graphics a snap. Ever price a thesaurus? A great big honkin’ book, not a bestseller, not “maintenance free”, is practically given away. Why’s that?
A final thought: payola, pure and simple. Professors recommend books that they like; I wouldn’t be surprised if a few bucks under the table makes them like the books a whole lot more. On a more positive note, one professor I had wrote his own textbook on Laplace and Fourier Transforms and had the school cheaply print and spiral bind it. It sold it to students for (get this): Fourteen dollars. You read right.
Art
Oh man, I wish. One semester in my Mechanical Engineering undergraduate days, my text books for one semester cost me $400+. Most of the texts I’ve seen which are higher than 1st addition are usually just reprints of the first addition with corrections and maybe some extra pretty pictures. I figure this is how they combat the used book market.
One semester while working on my MBA, our instructor had us get a new text book which costs $106, was very thin and as he put it, “This textbook is horrible so we are not using it next semester”. Which meant the bookstore would not rebuy it. The text provided no answers for the questions it contained and was missing a chapter. Yes, a whole goddamn chapter was not included. He didn’t care because he received the teachers version which he did not have to pay for.
A topic never deserved to be pitted more than this one.
A friend in an LVN program, had to pay $731.42 for new books. Used, she would have saved, roughly $100…that’s for nursing, not no fancy engimaniring…
The most ridiculous example I have offhand is sitting two feet away from me – Perrine’s Story and Structure. Your typical collection of short stories, many now in the public domain due to their age. Paperback binding. NO color anything, its just a paperback book, of the size of many other paperback books. The paper quality is slightly glossy, but come on, a ream of glossy paper can be had for a few dollars, and I’m sure publishers pay far less.
Cost? $70.
Huh?
Yea, my Norton Generic Anthologies of World/American Lit clocked in at $65 used. Each. And it’s the same 20 stories I’ve read a dozen times. They can’t cost THAT much to license.
(Let’s see if buying that economics text book was worth it: )
It isn’t so much “demand” as it is quantity demanded. There will be demand from most anyone taking a class that requires the textbook, but they aren’t going to need more than one. People that aren’t taking the class probably won’t have much use for the book. The demand is there, but under normal circumstanes people aren’t going to need more than one copy.
A couple of personal experiences:
I had an accounting professor that wrote the book for the class (it was terrible), she insisted that because accounting rules were always changing we could not buy previous editions because they wouldn’t match the test, wouldn’t be updated, etc. For this reason, if you didn’t take the class first semester, you had no hope of selling the book back. The professor wrote the book, and we didn’t even go through the whole thing, what’s up with that? If you’re going to write the book you use for your class why put things in it you aren’t going to bother to teach or require the class to know?
A calculus professor I got to know pretty well (always going in for help) told me during one visit that he was going to have to find another book to use the next semester since the book was now out of print. I joked with him about getting perks from the bookseller to influence his decision. He told me that it really did happen. If a book is selected for a class, especially a required course with a bunch of students it can be a big deal for a book seller. Salesmen would offer to take him to lunch, give him free stuff (book related and otherwise), but he made his decision based on which book he thought taught the material the best. He’s an older professor and a good guy, so I believe him.
A cynical look at the reasons of the high costs was given to me by a history professor when I was a freshman. He apologized the class for using a new book, since there wouldn’t be used copies, and the book he used previously was out of print. He explained that yes, the prices of books can be expensive, but to be fair, the books often have several authors and they usually live in places where the rent is very high. Sounds like as good of an explanation as any other I’ve heard.
I had an engineering class where we had a required text ($100+). The problem? There were only enough books to supply 25% of the class, and new books weren’t expected in for months. We all made copies of the book at the campus copy center for about $40 each.
It sure takes a while to photocopy a book.
–Patch
patchbunny: The same thing happened with the textbook my first-year calculus prof wrote. They ran out of books and started selling softcover photocopies of it in the bookstore. I got one of the photocopies. It was the same price as the real book.
There is only one explanation for the cost of textbooks: greed! How this plays out is interesting, however.
When I took calculus in 1955, the text cost around $5 new and I bought a used copy for half that. It was around 300 pages in a 6" x 9" format, at a guess. The last time I taught calculus, the cost was pushing $100, the monstrosity had close to 1000 pages and it was in a giant format. I got a bad back just lifting it.
One observation is that the people who choose these texts get their copies free and invariably have no idea what they cost. Once, choosing a text, I wrote to publishers of 4 possible texts, enquiring about the price. One replied that that information was proprietary (!), one told me the price and the other two ignored my request. I chose the second.
How are these texts chosen? Well, for single section courses, the instructor usually chooses them. In ignorance of the price, as I said. In large multi-section courses, they are usually chosen by a textbook committee. Each person on the committee has his own pet topic that he insists of being in the textbook chosen. One will want some problem in mechanics, another on financial mathematics and so on (here I am picturing a calculus book). The textbook publishers understand this all too well and their solution is to include any topic that anyone might conceivably want. That is part of the reason for the bloat. My personal feeling is that none of this belongs in a calculus book; if an instructor wants to include a particular topic, write some notes on the subject and distribute them. The plain fact is that the calculus courses are generally too crammed to include any of it anyway.
The current crop of books have a couple of four color illustrations (enough to be able to claim “four color” on the cover) that are utterly useless, loads of graphs (some of which actually are helpful) and giant margins that the students are expected to make notes in (no Fermats here) and, incidentally, render the book unresellable. Next year, there will be a “new” edition that will correct some of the errors, to be sure (result of careless editing), but are otherwise changed only enough to render it awkward to use the older one. The main technique, since calculus has not changed in the past 100 years, is to rearrange the exercises so that the instructor cannot assign problems by number unless everyone has the same edition.
The only solution I see would be to bypass the publishers entirely. Assign one of the professors the task of writing a text in return for some course relief (it costs no more than $5 or $6 K to hire a part timer for one course) and then make that the official text for the next five (or ten or twenty) years. Such a book can now be printed-on-demand and bound at the local copy shop for under $20 and the department will readily recoup its investment in a year or two. Who knows, other schools might even adopt it. Why hasn’t it happened? Damfino.
Prices will beome unlimited when the person who prescribes is not the person who pays. Can you think of another situation like this? Now physicians cannot be expected to formulate their own drugs, but professors can and certainly should take back the publishing of textbooks from the publishers.