Why University And College Textbooks Are Expensive

by niyam bhushan

Textbooks cost money — lots of it. For many students, the most painful moment in every semester (with the moment they troop through the registrar’s personnel to pay their tuition, that is) is when they’re standing at the cashier’s stall in the campus bookstore with an armful of books and a credit card that’s already groaning under the weight of a too-high balance. And the problem is getting worse, too: Associated Press reported a few years ago that the cost of textbooks has nearly doubled in the past twenty years, outstripping the average rate of inflation, so that it’s now 25% of student’s tuition expenditure at public-teach tuition levels.

Student griping in this area textbooks most commonly blames the campus bookstores, and to be honest, those stores do have some share of the responsibility. They do not make it simple for students to save money on textbooks. While many of them do sell used books repurchased from previous students, they add a steep markup there, too. (The campus bookstore therefore acts as a sort of combined new and used bookseller; it charges its customary markup when it sells the book new, and then charges that markup again when it sells the exact same book used to next year’s students.) And some are even bolder; Harvard’s Coop bookstore, for example, supposedly expelled some students who were writing down ISBN numbers so they may possibly look up cheaper copies of the book for sale online.

So much for the campus bookstore, but there is far more to the tale. Most of the painfully high price of the book has been taken care of even before it reaches campus, because publishers have three things working in their favour: students have to buy the books (unlike fixed customers, who can walk away without consequences when the price makes them uncomfortable), they can publish new editions annually with smallest new material to quash used book sales, and they can justify this on the foundation that academic knowledge is constantly changing and requires fixed updating, unlike the more static book market outside of the Ivory Tower. Fortunately, there are some ways for students to combat these challenges.

Students Have No Choice
College classes are instructed by their professors to buy specific textbooks. Students therefore have small choice in the matter, save for the very treacherous choice of choosing not to buy the book at all and take their chances that they will be able to succeed by paying close attention to the lectures and occasionally glancing at a acquaintances copy.

In any other part of the publishing industry, customers have to be given incentives, like sales, discount prices, or at least reasonably attractive standard prices that don’t make them want to race out of the store in a panic. Students, but, do not need incentives, because publishers realize that they’ve already done the hard part of selling the book when they convinced the professor to place it on his course syllabus. Unfortunately for students, most professors deliberate the book’s price a more or less irrelevant factor in their decisions: they choose what they believe is the best book to teach the course, and hope that students will be able to cope.

This Year’s Edition: Better Than Ever!
Well, not really, but textbook publishers are becoming increasingly adept at packing textbooks with more or less irrelevant content that justifies publishing a new edition, yanking the ancient one out of print, and thus forcing professors to have all their students upgrade to the brand-new copy rather than making do with grown-up, cheaper ones. If the ancient edition is out of print, moreover, professors don’t really have any options: the bookstore can’t order more of the ancient book in for them, and they can’t risk hoping that the bookstore will be able to collect enough used copies to supply the incoming class.

Of course, publishers advance a very uncommon explanation for the constant upgrade cycle: the Ivory Tower is a house of constant change. Academic knowledge is in a state of perpetual flux; today’s accepted knowledge is tomorrow’s antiquated foolishness. To a certain extent this is certainly right. Moreover, the academic market, even the textbook market, is never going to compete in sales volume with the latest books on the New York Timesbestseller list. So the prices were going to be higher anyways.

Of course, the extent of this shape is debatable. The “accepted knowledge” at the first-year assessment level, for example, is pretty much accepted knowledge yesterday, today, and tomorrow. Save for a few biased science and economics textbooks that need to be regularly updated to account for contemporary actions, it seems hard to believe that this winter’s edition of a first-year textbook in most academic subjects contains any meaningful differences from the edition that was published six years ago, save perhaps for some insignificant organizational tweaking.

Plus, that excuse would be simpler to stomach, but, if it were not for the various other methods textbook publishers then stoop to. When I took my first university classes nine years ago, it was uncommon but not unheard of for a textbook to come wrapped with plastic on account of a special enclosed CD (nowadays, a DVD) with a special supplementary study guide, or perhaps a long password that would get you access to a special database of articles and study tips online. Nowadays, these gimmicks are far more commonplace.

Deliberate the value of these. Students didn’t need them thirty years ago, or ten years ago. Why are they needed today? A cynic might say that the real reason for these expensive additions is because they require the book to be sold in shrinkwrap. A shrinkwrapped book, on most campuses, can’t be returned for a refund once the seal is broken. So you’re stuck with it, even if you realize you don’t need it or if you choose to drop the class a couple weeks in. And in many cases the bookstores will refuse to take them back for resale, either.

Resist the Publishers!
There are four major academic publishers — Houghton Mifflin, Cengage (once Thomson), McGraw-Hill, and Pearson. The depression isn’t helping them much, but none of them are just so bankrupt, and all of them are very large. You as a student have no friends in the industry, and few in the bookstore either. But there are always options.

The less scrupulous of my friends go what may possibly charitably be described as copyright fraud by buying books, photocopying them, and then returning them for a return fund. This is a copyright violation, at the very least, I am sure, so obviously I’m not recommending you do that. But there are more legal options.

The first king to keep in mind is that there is never a rush to buy the book. Place off that act as long as possible. First, the lineups will shrink; and second, it gives you time to plot your approach. Can it be bought used, on eBay or Half.com or Amazon Marketplace? Can you simply try out it out of the store (not usually, unfortunately)? Do online stores like Amazon or Barnes & Noble (or Chapters-Indigo in Canada) sell it at a discounted price?

Some textbooks also have international editions, printed for sale in developing countries at steeply discounted rates. To cut corners, the printers usually use cheap paper, switch out the colour photos for black and white, and pull other tricks to lower their expenditure. But the essential content of the book is still the same, and there are large numbers of book sellers in places like India who sell these editions back to First Planet students through the Internet.

Last but not least, if this textbook was already published in an earlier edition, find a copy of it. These are invariably cheap because there is no demand for them, and very often, as I stated above, the changes will have been quite superficial. If you try out it out and find that that’s the case, deliberate just buying the ancient edition and paying close attention to places where there are insignificant differences. You can pick up ancient editions from pretty much anywhere — ancient students and the Internet being the most obvious choices.

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