Now that we’re a week into the quarter, most people have bought all the books for their classes. I don’t know about you, but these costs tend to rack up for me. New editions are constantly coming out to replace their cheaper, older versions, virtually useless software is bundled with books and even seemingly cheap course packets can add up to dozens of dollars a piece when copyright laws are added in. It seems like a lot of unnecessary things are contributing to the high price we pay for our education.
I felt especially screwed this quarter when I bought a used book for $102. It was used and two-thirds the price of its brand-new, shrink-wrapped equivalent, so I was pretty excited to save $50. That is, until I got it home, cracked it open the first time, and noticed the $99 price tag on the old label the store had crossed out with a Sharpie. This book had clearly been sold and used several times, and the last college book store had charged less than I got it for a year or more later.
This trend alone seems to pretty consistently disadvantage students and advantage the book stores. Luckily, we now have a variety of venues to sell amongst ourselves thanks to the Internet. But many students still are not aware of these venues or think they won’t get a reasonable amount back on their books. Or more often, they can’t find buyers for their used books because a new edition is required for the class. As a result students constantly buy high and sell low – the exact opposite of the economic ideal. This adds up not just to poorer students, but richer book sellers.
For example, my textbook was originally bought brand new for $150. If it had only been owned once, the original owner would have only gotten $75 back on it. And then I bought it for $100. To add that up briefly, we students together spent $175 – 116 percent of the new price. Perhaps I will sell it back for $50, and another student will buy it again for $100. At this point, the bookstore has made $225 – 150 percent of the new price. This percentage keeps rising as people sell their textbooks back to the store for another incarnation. Instead of proportionately lowering the price of each book according to its age and condition, the stores appear to just be raising the prices.
In 2004, textbooks accounted for almost one-seventh of the total of all publishing revenues in the U.S. What’s more is this revenue is dominated by four publishers: Pearson, McGraw-Hill, Reed Elsevier and Houghton Mifflin. Not surprisingly, these companies are all in big-business, and the first three are all on the New York Stock Exchange.
The State Public Interest Research Groups published a book in 2004 called “Rip-off 101, 2nd Edition: How the Publishing Industry’s Practices Needlessly Drive Up Textbook Costs,” a report on the conditions that have led to the ever-increasing prices of college textbooks.
A few interesting facts from the study include figures revealing massive inflation. Between 1994 and 2004, inflation on all finished goods in the US rose 14 percent, while all non-textbook books rose 19 percent. Textbook prices, however, increased a whopping 62 percent in those ten years – and they haven’t stopped. Part of this is because the new book prices are raised almost 12 percent every time a new edition comes out, which is usually every three to four years. In contrast, the State PIRGs reported that the inflation rate for everything else between 2000 and 2003 was only around 7 percent.
Add in to all this inflation that three-quarters of all surveyed faculty admitted new editions were justified less than half the time, and two-thirds admitted they rarely or never used the materials bundled with their books, and you have an almost entirely unjustified rise in price. I don’t have figures for surveyed students, but just among the classes I’ve taken at OSU, I’d say 90 percent of students never use the bundled materials. So why aren’t these books and materials available a la carte?
As far as I can tell, it’s all about marketing. The textbook industry itself recognizes that a relatively huge 16 percent of the cost of textbooks goes directly to marketing. Publishers send free copies of their books everywhere, and their attempts at courting university professors are so earnest you might think they are about to propose marriage or something. But my big question is, why spend so much on marketing?
The thing is, textbooks are about learning. They should be written and formatted in ways that will help as many students as possible learn as much as possible. When a professor selects a textbook, it should be based on academic merit alone. It shouldn’t be influenced by all the free stuff that professor got from the publisher. Would it be impossible to leave one part of industry free of greed and full of knowledge?
My suggestion is to send the industry a message by buying as few new textbooks as possible. In fact, don’t buy used textbooks from the stores either. We should always try our best to buy old books directly from each other. Prices are high enough, so let’s just help each other out.
Elizabeth Thomas is a senior in
anthropological sciences. She can be reached at [email protected].
