Why are textbooks so expensive?

Factual Questions
42

If nobody but the textbook company makes money on the books, why do you guys force people to use the latest edition, when you already know the previous version worked perfectly fine? Heck, in general, the differences are slight enough that having different versions of the textbook doesn’t even matter.

The only reason I was forced to buy new books was that leftover scholarship and grant money wouldn’t be given out for a month or two, and the campus bookstore would let you charge to your official account. Heck, there was even another bookstore that would sell them cheaper just across the street–and that’s still the new ones. Half the people in any class I had had old versions. Heck, in my teaching class, one person actually had a version that was 10 years (and thus 5 editions) out of date.

43

My physics teacher had us get a copy of a physics book that had been out of print for nearly 20 years. It was the last semester he could get the bookstore to stock it, primarily because it was so cheap, and they made no money on it.

My Latin teacher recommended a book that was in the public domain. Again, the bookstore grudgingly carried it, but after a couple of years, the teacher stopped offering Latin, partly I think, because she didn’t want her students to fork over money for a language that’s been dead for 1500 years and studied for the last 2000.

My art history professor required the standard Gardner’s Art Through The Ages. I remember it being around $60 when I was an undergrad 20 years ago. A friend just spent $140 on the latest edition for an online class. Seriously, art history has changed that much in 20 years?

44

In the five years that I’ve been a full-time student, I’ve never been forced to use the most current edition of a textbook if a previous edition would suffice. I’ve also been encouraged to comparison shop to buy them at the cheapest possible price. The vast majority of my professors made this information clear, and more than a few told me not to even bother buying the book because they weren’t planning to assign anything from the book; they had to list a textbook, so they did.

The only time I’ve been required to buy the most current edition was for my educational psychology course. The university required it because it came with additional material that most students would need in order to pass one of the required teacher certification exams. It was also heavily referenced in class. Having an old edition would have put me at a significant disadvantage.

And, truthfully, anyone who walks into class the first day with all of the “required” textbooks is a sucker. As I said above, most professors are pretty open about whether you need the book or not, and some have copies you may be able to borrow for the semester or at least until you get some cash to buy the books used, or whatever. It’s always worth an ask.

45

Another insidious textbook scam is bundling textbooks with workbooks. I had to pay $110 for such a bundle last year and now I can’t resell the textbook portion to anybody because they can’t get the workbook any other way than buying the whole bundle.

The bookstores are beginning to try another one - renting textbooks. Rentals, and e-books, are going to crash and burn at the prices they’re offering, which is a shame, because e-books should really take off for the paper waste reasons, but publishers are going to kill them in the cradle.

I can buy a textbook at $150, use it for a semester, and then sell it to a friend taking the class next semester for $100 (the bookstore is selling useds for $110). I’m out $50.

OR, they suggest, I should rent the book…for $70-$80. There is no resale chance, I have to worry about returning the book immediately after finals, I’m penalized if I damage it or miss the return date, and I’m out at least $70.

Ebooks are no better. They’re trying to push a DRM-laden file with no resale prospects on me for again $70 or more. Worse about the ebook is I can’t share it with anyone like an actual textbook.

46

Another factor: I’ve had teachers who, instead of listing one required book and 3-4 recommended ones, officially listed them all as “required” and just spread the word to the students that only the one was actually needed. This was actually done as a favor to the students, since some of them were on scholarships that would cover the cost of required textbooks, but not optional ones.

My mom just told me the worst textbook-price story I’ve ever heard, though. She’s currently taking a geology class, and the required laboratory manual, an edition custom printed for that university, is $70. Seventy bucks for a lab manual! On the bright side, at least, for the textbook for the class itself, the prof is letting them use any of the last five editions, and she was able to get a used copy for about $15 on Amazon.

47

Let me include some hard, cold, firsthand-experience facts here.

  1. Why do they cost so much?

Part of the answer is “because they can” (more on that in a moment), but part of it is a matter of economics of scale. Let’s compare, for example, a highly-specialized textbook that I wrote to one of my children’s books that I wrote that same year. In both cases, the publisher set the price, not me. In both cases, the publisher has raised the price since the book was released. The children’s book has sold over 50,000 copies, and in that same amount of time, the textbook has sold around 4,000 copies. My previous book on that subject sold fewer than 2,000.

Let’s forget, just for a moment, that one book is 48 pages and the other is 400 pages. That might account for a factor of two price difference, but certainly not the factor of six that actually exists. When you sell ten times as many books, the cost per copy of editing, proofreading, copyediting, cover design, art, page layout, indexing, and so on is only 1/10 as much.

  1. Who makes the money?

Despite Hari Seldon’s assertion to the contrary, authors don’t necessarily do really well. Royalties (per copy) aren’t much different from non-textbook writing, and there are many textbooks that are staff-written, meaning the writers get their same salary whether the book sells for $5 or $500; whether it sells 100 copies or 100,000.

Again, to use my Closed Captioning Handbook as an example, the retail price is $71.95. The bookstore is buying it from the publisher for 40% off, so they make $28.78 per copy sold (obviously, most of this goes to overhead, staffing, and so on). The school bookstore may be franchised, or college-owned. Either way, the school is getting a piece of that. As the author, I only make a few bucks a copy (around a tenth of what the bookstore makes). The instructor makes nothing.

Incidentally, that particular book wasn’t originally released as a textbook. When colleges picked it up as a text, the publisher raised the price by $20. That should tell you something right there.

  1. Why the new editions?

As a former college instructor, I believe that my success in teaching the students was largely based in my ability to tie the subject matter to their lives–or at least to the real world they lived in. Several people in this thread have used calculus as an example. It hasn’t changed in 200 years. Why change the book?

Since I got out of college, I’ve certainly used calculus for the same kinds of things they used it for 200 years ago (e.g., calculating optimal dimensions of a water tank), but I’ve also used it in my own area of expertise: software and electrical engineering. I have a strong preference for books that include examples tied to my own students’ majors. When I’m teaching a software engineering class, I want a calculus textbook that shows how to use calculus to determine whether it’s more efficient to use fixed- or variable-length fields in a directory.

However, the professor often doesn’t get to pick the book. It thoroughly pissed me off that one college I taught for changed my textbook every year even though the subject matter hadn’t changed. I already knew the old textbook, and didn’t want to change. But the school made me change it so that students couldn’t buy used textbooks from the previous class, hence making more money for the school bookstore (and, therefore, the school).

48

Which isn’t to say there aren’t a few authoring superstars. For example, James Stewart, the guy who writes the most popular calculus books, was featured in the New York Times last year (?) for the house he’d just finished building. It was a secluded retreat with its own concert hall; supposedly he’d made over $25M in royalties from the books. That said, it’s a book that they probably have sold many millions of copies. Wish I could find the article.
I will agree with the sentiment that the vast majority of authors are making no more than enough to recoup their time. That’s been my personal observation.

49

Suppily and demand.

The bookstore is one of the most disgraceful things that is the ripoff of Higher Education. There is no new 300 page book that should cost more than $20, and that is a nice profit. Hello

50

To reiterate my prior point, it depends on economies of scale. If the textbook is for a specialty class at one specific school, and you only need 50 copies, you can’t even print the darned thing for $20. There’s no possibility of profit. If it’s for English 101 in a hundred colleges, you’ll be printing tens of thousands of copies, and you’d be right about the $20 price.

51

What my alma mater (UW-Platteville) did was include book rent as part of tuition (which was and probably is on the lower end for UW schools). Pick up books at the start of the year, return them at the end. It was possible to buy them but it was pretty uncommon. And I don’t think there was a significant problem with book condition either (occosional highlighting or notes, but I never encountered anything serious)

Brian