I agree, the whole idea is ridiculous. I had to get an $80 (paperback) textbook for a class. After a few classes, I realized that we didn’t even need our textbooks ever! All tests and classwork was based on his own lectures, the text was for background. I read a few chapters in the book I guess because I didn’t want to feel like I wasted so much money, but I’d be surprised if anyone read past Ch. 1 in that book, or even opened it for any reason past that.
It’s almost like professors don’t make it any easier, but I guess they don’t want any responsibility.
You had to convince your instructors to give you the ISBN numbers? At my school you just stick your course code into a website and it pops up with all the pertinent book details, including ISBN.
I’ve looked up books on amazon.com, but when you convert from American to Canadian currency and include tax and shipping, it’s a lot more expensive than just buying them from the campus book store.
What on earth are you talking about? What subject are you studying in which you think pictures are “worthless bullshit content”? Clearly you aren’t studying any form of engineering in which well-made colourful diagrams, schematics and pictures are an absolute necessity in understanding many abstract concepts.
There’s not a textbook I hate more than the one you open up and it’s nothing but page after page of text and tables of formulas with NO visuals, graphs, or anything.
For what it’s worth, I’m taking a night class at a local JuCo just for the hell of it. The textbook is Professional Cooking: Fifth Edition by Wayne Gislen. It was bundled with a Student Workbook. The set cost $82.50 at the college bookstore.
I got the textbook and the student workbook (puchased separately from separate vendors) through amazon.com’s used book service. Paid around $50 after shipping & handling for both books. I had qualms about buying a used student workbook, but the vendor assured me that it had never even been opened. When it arrived, there was a slight crease in the front cover, which could have been from shipping for all I know. Otherwise, the book was perfect. Ditto for the textbook. YMMV.
When I went to UC Berkeley, there was a privately run textbook store right across the street from campus. But I was a grad student, so I didn’t have to buy much.
Librarians can look up the ISBNs for you also. It’s not very hard. Or they can show you how. If you go to a university, you will most likely have access to the OCLC WorldCat and 99.999999% of all college textbooks will already be cataloged by someone and you get the ISBN number from the catalog record. I wouldn’t suggest trying to go to libraries to check out a textbook as libraries rarely buy textbooks. Why? They’re too expensive and they end up getting checked out once, usually by a student who never returns it. Most college libraries will keep reserve copies of textbooks so you can just judge whether or not you will need access to the textbook 24/7 or if you can just go to the library to read the relevant parts.
What my uni did for the Spanish courses was keep the current book for those students who had already begun the sequence of courses. Students taking the 101-level have to buy the new book, which they will keep for the duration of the sequence. This way, we’ve spent the $130 for book, workbook, and lab manual once. Which really came in handy this year.
Another thing you can do to beat the cost of textbooks is to organize a textbook exchange or borrow books from friends who have already taken the course. I’m borrowing a friend’s music-appreciation book and CDs, so I won’t have to spend the $70 that a book and CDs will cost.
In some subjects(Recent History), I can see why you’d need to have the most up-to-date textbooks. But does the Field of Mathematics change so much every 5 years that you need to issue new textbooks for Calc and below?
Some books on more rarefied subjects are on much longer revision cycles—I heard of one engineering book that was recently revised for the first time in more than 10 years.
I usually end up spending $500-600 for my books. Usually 6 books, and used because I go early before the used ones are snapped up. However, this year I decided to give Amazon’s used books a try. 5 books for a total of $96, and that includes shipping. One book they didn’t have, so I had to go to the book store. I wish I had been using Amazon the past 6 semesters.
I always waited a couple of weeks to buy my books for two reasons: (1) found out didn’t need them after all; or (2) if we did need them, there was always one or two people who dropped the class so there were used ones available. I don’t recommend it for everyone, but I was a really good note taker so my class notes were good.
Part of the cost of text books is related to a problem involving economy of scale. Aside from paper and ink the biggest cost of printing is setting up the plates. That cost is the same if you are printing one book or 100,000. If you print the 100,000 you have a bigger base to spread out that initial cost.
The other portion of this formula has to do with the “publish or perish” atmosphere of universities. In order to get tenure professors have to get a book published. No publisher is going to publish a book no one will buy, so of course professors will assign their book. This means maybe each book runs a couple hundred or a couple thousand copies so there isn’t a way to spread out the cost. Add to that that university book stores have pretty high overhead and a fair amount of theft and you get high book prices.
Thats it no evil profiteers, just economics and a free market economy in action.
If you learn nothing else in college, this is a great lesson about markets.
This was a struggle for me in school, also. I think the textbook exchange with friends is a great idea. I saved a lot of money and time and angst in school when I could find people to cooperate with, and wish I’d done more of it. I did once get through intro to biology using my friend’s year-old biology textbook. With an index, table of contents and syllabus it was pretty easy to get what I needed from the book. I don’t think the prof ever got to whatever brand-new cutting edge stuff was added for that edition.
The ISBNs were nowhere to be found on either the syllabi or at the campus bookstore’s website (I’m a remote student, so I couldn’t just go there, either). The class admin wouldn’t release the info I wanted to me, the instructors were reluctant, and I finally had to take the issue to the Dean.
I couldn’t rely on just the titles either, as half of the books were CIS technical ones that change every 6 months or so.
Speaking of gratuitious changes, take a look at “The Complete PC Upgrade and Maintenance Guide, 15th Edition” by Minasi. 15 editions? I had to review this book for my school because we were trying to decide whether to spend the money to upgrade from edition #11, 2001 (We’re a private college, and we loan the books out instead of making students buy them). A few minor changes in the details of late-model processors, ATA, and USB – nothing that I didn’t already have supplemental information for, and certainly nothing that I could justify purchasing 50 new books for.
Bird, Stewart, and Lightfoot’s book on transport phenomena (very important in chemical engineering) just had its 2nd edition come out in 2001.
Unfortunately, I took the class in fall of 2000 and got stuck with the first edition, which came out in 1960. I think using the more recent text would’ve helped considerably (I had a very hard time in that class) because the diagrams were awful and the problems in the book really tried to trick you on conversion units (they’d give information in mixed up units and ask for the answer in other mixed up units). Really a waste of time just setting up the problem (hello, my calculator can do unit conversions out to 6 decimal places, but I have to use the crappy conversion table in the appendix because that’s what the answer is supposed to be calculated it).
I assume you mean “professors will assign their own book.” True, but then again, if the guy who wrote it doesn’t think it’s good enough to use, how good can it be?
Actually I know of several profs who are authors who calculate the royalties they earn from assigning their books to their own students, then give an equivalent sum away to charity or to a university organization. A very equitable approach I think.
That’s true for subjects that are rapidly changing. However, for subjects like first semester Calculus, US History, etc… that are basic, and aren’t quite as subject to new discoveries, there’s not much point in requiring a new book every 4 years or so. In my 5 undergrad years, the engineering department went through no less than 3 calculus books, which were the 2nd, 3rd and 4th editions of the same damn book. I had to buy 2 of them, and there was so little difference (basically the homework problems changed) that I felt highly ripped off.
Graduate school makes more sense, but I still have a problem with some 150 page text-only book that’s soft-bound costing more than a huge-ass nicely bound glossy coffee-table photo book.
I think that ** Johnny Bravo ** has it right- there aren’t any options for getting alternate books, and you can’t really do without the book in most classes, hence very inelastic demand. Kind of like copyrighted AIDS or cancer drugs- one company makes them, the people that need them really need them, hence the outrageous prices.
I think that states should regulate the textbook industry- fair profit regulations and what-not. I have a hard time believing that costs are significantly higher for publishing a textbook than any other type of book, so without the inelastic demand, the market wouldn’t bear such a high price. And since those high prices impact people who generally are ill-equipped to pay it, then the govt. ought to step in and regulate it- if they want people to go to college, they shouldn’t make book costs tack on another 33% onto your tuition and fees (here in Texas anyway).
