The price listed on Amazon.com for a new copy of any college textbook is almost NEVER correct. Amazon is geared almost entirely to *trade* book sales, and almost always screws up the markup on ’short discount’ books (i.e., textbooks and university-press monographs). If you’re attempting to find a more accurate *new* book price for a text you’re considering, go to bn.com. Because they run some of the nation’s college bookstores, they generally know what a ‘net’ price is, and mark up textbooks at a rate within the range listed above.
This bill may help textbooks to be distributed at lower prices. We hope this will help improve textbook pricesCheck out cheap college textbooks at DavesCampus.com.
As the sales curve for new copies of a book asymptotically approaches zero, the per-book cost to the publisher to print and bind the new copies rises considerably. Small print runs=high unit costs=very low profit.—Every major college publisher offers low-cost options in most subject areas, and ebook versions are widely available across the curriculum.
—Despite the availability of these options, and the aggressive publicity campaigns to promote them, very few professors choose to assign an ebook, almost no students buy them, and most low-cost print editions significantly undersell their full-featured, full-price cousins.
This is a great video documenting what goes on in the textbook industry. It shows how old college textbooks contain the exact information as new textbooks, but students are forced to purchase the new versions. Is school faculty involved in this scandal? That is messed up!
The textbook business is more like a racket than a business. The changing of a few words and page numbers, to make a “new edition” is a farce. Very little or no new content is added. This is done to kill the sale of used textbooks and force the student to buy a new book at an unjustifiably high price. In most academic subjects, there really isn’t a need to have a new edition every year.
I am currently taking three classes (Summer session) and I purchased the required textbooks online for about $200 (with shipping). If I had purchased these same textbooks at the university bookstore, the price would have been double. I’m sure the online sellers are making a good profit, so the university pricing is pure price gouging of a captive market.
Some years ago, I took a course where the required textbook was written by the instructor. Not only was the textbook pure crap, but it was outragiously priced. And it was a medium-sized paperback.
If textbooks had to compete for sales like other books, none of this would be happening. However, the collusion between the publishers, the universities and the professors, keep this extortion racket going.
The only recourse that the student has is to see if he can find the textbooks online. Even there, he usually has to buy the expensive “new edition”, rather than a perfectly good used book.
Our governments investigate businesses like Microsoft, phone companies and satellite radio companies over concerns about monopolistic practices, price fixing and dirty deals. What about taking a look at the textbook industry?
Each copy of a text is sold by the publisher exactly once. A well-managed college bookstore will sell that same copy at least 3 or 4 additional times as a used book, at a much higher profit margin (for the bookstore) than the new book.
It is a well-known yet little-discussed fact in college publishing that “committee decisions”—in which a select number of faculty members in a large department convene to choose a text for all sections of a course—frequently end in the faculty committees demanding considerable incentives, kickbacks, freebies, and commitments to underwrite specific campus events. This wheeling and dealing has become standard practice among faculty who supervise text selection for large survey courses, and very few of them show any compunction about it.(The most egregious, and ridiculous, example I have heard of is a quid-pro-quo acquisition by a publisher of a golf-cart for an English department at a state university in the southwest in exchange for a very large textbook adoption.)
Cheap textbooks used to be something that college students were looking for, but now that there are a lot of people who are homeschooling, there is an even bigger need for them. Textbooks that are brand new can be very expensive, and this is why so many people will buy used ones, even if they are worn and full of doodles and notes from previous owners. There may even be an advantage to this that you may not have thought of before now.You can find cheap textbooks in college rather easily. There are always graduating students who are willing to sell their books to underclassmen for a very good price. They either don’t need them any longer, or they have bought a newer edition to keep with them as they move on to work or perhaps while they are continuing their education. These cheap textbooks are good as long as the classes they are for are still using that edition of the book. Make sure you have that information before you buy used, cheap textbooks.
You can find cheap textbooks online in almost the same manner if you are homeschooling your children. You may even want to start a community sharing program with those living near you who are also homeschooling their children. When you do this, you can pass the books around for little or no costs. This is one of the best ways to get cheap textbooks, though they must come from somewhere to begin with. These book won’t do any good if they are out of date though, so make sure you have what you need and don’t buy anything that has been considered obsolete or even information that has been disproved. This can be a problem in both history or science books, but usually not so much in math or English.
Cheap textbooks that have notes and scribbles in them are a bonus. Though you may think you want a clean book, remember that the notes in the margin or the stuff that is highlighted is actually what you need to learn from that particular book or lesson. If you have a cheap textbook with the notes inside, you will have a strong indication of what you should be studying in that particular book or chapter, and this may give you a leg up when it comes time to attend class or study for your exams.
Because of the rising cost of college textbooks, a congressional advisory panel is pushing a proposal that would store content from textbooks digitally.
The panel believes some students are being priced out of college by the cost of textbooks. Under the proposal, professors could use the system to create their own textbooks that students could print out, view on a computer, or download on a PDA. Then students would not have to buy an entire book they may not need.
USF Sarasota-Manatee student Aaron Wiseman said he spent almost $600 on books for four classes one semester, but he doesn’t think digital is the solution.
“Personally I wouldn’t like a digital textbook,” Wiseman said. “I like to have a tangible item in front of me, something I can highlight, write and read in. Staring at a computer screen is not my idea of reading a textbook.”
Congress wants institutions and publishers to act on their digital marketplace recommendations voluntarily. Otherwise, legislators may pass a federal law to implement the idea.
