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Our guide at the last college we visited with DS17 said that most kids end up ordering their books from Amazon for about 1/3rd the price as the school bookstore. She said that if we can, plan a trip up later in the summer, check out the required books for his classes then order them on Amazon or Barnes and Nobel. We plan on doing that as much as possible.
Anyone with internet can just amazon/e-bay the same exact book for 1/4 ~ 1/2 the cost. You can even just borrow from a friend who took the same class last quarter, editions usually last at least a year or 2 and in most cases, older editions are perfectly fine for the class. International versions of the textbook can be exactly the same, word for word, but cost $70-80 less. Course reserves, library check outs.... these are all ways you can bypass paying vast sums on text book.
I barely spent any money for my ochem, calc or biology books. In fact my physics book cost me $11 when the bookstore was selling it for $120. If you are resourceful enough, you'll usually find a way to beat the system.
Just bought an Anatomy & Physiology book for my wife.... $210.
It's a good book i'm sure....but comethehellon.
It's almost like the colleges are in bed with the publishing companies. They could have easily kept the previous edition and it would have cost $75 less (and there would have been used books available for much less than that)...but they didn't....they selected a brand new edition. They could have waited a couple of years to upgrade (it's not like the human anatomy changes that much over time) and you could have found used ones for sale on the net.
I've had kids in colleges since 2003 and I can count on the fingers of one hand the number of books they've bought from the bookstore that are new. Most of the time my kids have gotten them on-line or used from friends or the college book store. If someone is buying all their books new at the bookstore, they are not paying attention.
I've had kids in colleges since 2003 and I can count on the fingers of one hand the number of books they've bought from the bookstore that are new. Most of the time my kids have gotten them on-line or used from friends or the college book store. If someone is buying all their books new at the bookstore, they are not paying attention.
When I was in school I did the same thing when I could. You could get a used-but-good text book for half of what the new one was.
The problem was as I got further along in my major to the upper level classes the books started to become a lot more specialized (and expensive) and there weren't a lot of people out there who had ever heard of them much less had them available to sell. And our profs had the tendency to keep us on our toes by requiring we have the most recent edition and/or switching books all together....and some of the books were written by our own faculty!
I would sign up for classes in the spring and think I had a line on some used texts but by the time classes would start in the fall the instructor would have changed the text book requirement.
As long as the new books in question can be used in future courses by the professor or other professors, there will be a healthy secondary market, which essentially means that buying the textbook has a rental option.
Professors use new textbooks since the examples are more current, the figures up to date, and the pedagogy and research are more likely up-to-date. Students are notorious for losing interest in treatments that are not ladened with bells and whistles. Hell, professors would rather teach on the board using the techniques they learned as grad students or from older texts. So part of this is demand driven.
In theory, the high prices reflect with more precision the intellectual value of the book. IP laws are better than ever at providing ROI to authors. That said, I find it interesting that "international editions" of textbooks (softcover) sell for as little as 1/4 to 1/5 of the US retail price. This suggests the "trade barriers" in textbooks.
Finally, the horrible introduction of power points into lectures means that teachers want ready made lecture notes, test generators, and instructor manuals. These are not that expensive to generate but provide added profit streams.
Finally professors and students have reached a social compact that has led to the watering down of many university courses and the growth of MCQ assessments. The easiest solution is to give MCQs, PPT slides, and pretty textbooks. Professors who do none of the above get adversely "punished" via evaluations, etc.
In my case, I made it a point to teach the best course possible regardless of books, i.e. in such a way that made the books a worthwhile investment, for purchase or "renting." The only term in which I was not successful is when (a) the class level required me to make my teaching more accessible (and therefore, a book went from required to hardly used) and (b) the course was not made annual due to budget cuts so that the most natural secondary market, the next year students, vanished. Still, I think the course justified the expenses--as they were the best books available at the time.
If you quit buying new textbooks you have stopped the cashflow for the people who write these books. If you put them out of a job then you won't have any new textbooks in 5 years because no one will have an incentive to continue research for them and write them and publish them!! The textbook market is very small; it requires a lot of research to produce a disproportionately small number of books going to a very small portion of the population.
This is spun to look like another "free market failure" because this one sided article in Wikipedia (the endless infallible fountain for all truthful knowledge) was written to play on the emotions of cash strapped students instead of looking at the facts of living in a free capitalist society.
In my days in elementary and middle school we had old out of date books for everything. Even math books can be obsolete. There was no benefit to saving money with old outdated information. I want new updated textbooks.
And by the way, have you looked at the price of tuition? If you want to complain about paying too much for something, complain about that!
This is true however, do take note that some of these textbooks require little to no updating. Also note that many paper back books come out new with a price tag of only 10-20$. I understand that they need to make a profit but anything over 100$+ is just a straight up rip off. Maybe 50$ new sounds more realistic.
Interesting story: a prof I had last year had a book he co-wrote as one of the required texts. He was actually surprised when we told him that it was pretty expensive (he had no idea how much it cost). I didn't imagine the profs made big bucks on the books they write, but I guess students aren't the only ones getting screwed by the publishers!
Instead of buying textbooks like I did for undergrad, I am now renting my textbooks through chegg.com for the semester. I print out the shipping label from my account online, get a box and send them back. I paid around $39 for a book that was $98 at the bookstore. yikes! If I end up wanting to keep a book, I pay a buy price and that's it.
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