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Lowering the cost of college textbooks
June Kapitan, owner of Quantumbooks, stocks a shelf with textbooks in Boston.
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Tess Vigeland: Parents paying for their kids' college know the drill. You pay the tuition, room and board, and stock up on all those dorm room essentials. Then your kid gets the semester reading list. Textbooks can add hundreds of dollars to college bills. The average price of new textbooks has gone up 7 1/2 percent the past two years in a row according to the Labor Department. That's many times the rate of inflation. Well, a new law took effect this month that aims to soften the blow. From the Marketplace Education Desk, Amy Scott reports.
Amy Scott: Michael Spinelli studies drama at New York University. He'll be a sophomore this fall. Standing outside the library, he recalls one class that required 22 books.
Michael Spinelli: A lot of them were like over $100. It ended up being almost a thousand dollars in textbooks last semester.
The average college student spent more than $600 on textbooks last school year. That's according to consumer research group Student Monitor. The new law forces publishers to "unbundle" books so you don't have to buy the DVD and study guide with your psychology text. It asks colleges to give students a list of required books when they register for classes. That way they'll have months, rather than a few weeks to shop around for the best deals.
Nicole Allen: Students can literally save hundreds by shopping around online for used books or renting. So at least the savvy ones are gonna get a huge advantage from that.
Nicole Allen is textbook advocate for the Student Public Interest Research Groups. She says the law also makes publishers tell professors how much books cost. Before, they had to ask or hunt for prices online.
Allen: What they'll have now is the information on the table right in front of them. So having that information will make it very easy to consider cost on behalf of students.
And if they do, Allen says that could pressure publishers to lower their prices. But will professors really change their reading lists?
Mark Tuckerman: Probably not that much.
Mark Tuckerman teaches chemistry at NYU. He says he'll continue to assign what he sees as the best books. His favorite runs $173 at the university bookstore -- more if you throw in a study guide and student access kit. Whatever that is. Tuckerman would rather see publishers offer students different versions -- cheaper digital editions or loose leaf rather than bound.
Tuckerman: I wouldn't be put in the position of having to think about the price, which I don't want to. Right? I want to choose it based on content.
Textbook publishers say even before the law kicked in they were offering lower-cost options. Students can now buy some books online by the chapter, or rent books for as little as half-price. Bruce Hildebrand is with the Association of American Publishers. Even though new book prices are rising, he says students actually spend less today than they did four years ago.
Bruce Hildebrand: They're finding bargains online. They are buying more used books, frankly. And they are beginning to purchase the digital e-books in particular.
Plenty of them aren't buying books at all. Michael Spinelli, the NYU drama major, says last year he and some friends got creative.
Spinelli: We had the same class, and we all shared textbooks. Things like that. Like my roommates and I, we all shared textbooks. Just because it's so expensive.
At least they did the reading. Studies by the college bookstore operator Follett have shown that 15 percent of students don't buy the required books or access them at all.
In New York, I'm Amy Scott for Marketplace Money.
If you’re looking for cheap college books, you have to check out http://www.cheapesttextbooks.com/. I used to buy used from one of the stores at UDEL until I found this site, they had every textbook I needed for this semester for like half the price. Then, you can sell them back to the stores for the same price. Can’t beat it.
I'm a student at Bard College, and all of my friends and I are definitely feeling the frustration of overpriced textbooks. Most of the students I know buy their books online instead of the bookstore, but having to look them up one by one online is a major time drain. Annoyed at how long this takes, two of my friends studying at Tufts University and I just launched our own web site (GetchaBooks, http://www.getchabooks.com) to try to make the whole thing easier.
Instead of other textbook comparison sites that make you enter the ISBN for each book, our site lets you enter what school you go to and what courses you're taking. It up the books you need, and then does price comparisons between the school bookstore and a bunch of other vendors. Our goal is to make buying textbooks online both easier and cheaper than buying them at the overpriced school bookstore.
We're only operating at a handful of schools this semester (mostly small liberal arts schools), but we have high hopes. In this day in age there's no reason buying textbooks should be so expensive or time-consuming!
You can also check out www.DealOz.com , DealOz compares 200 bookstore prices
and free discount coupons too. Their coupons are valid and have saved
over $500 on my textbooks
There exists blatant abuse of text book pricing. For example,you can not buy a used book if the new one has an a minor change. Students can not sell the books back for a fair price.
Different books are being sold for the same course but a different section.
No matter how it is explained, it is pure and simple robbery!
Your story about college textbooks overlooked one cheap, exceptional source! As a student of information science this seemed obvious to me, but apparently word isn't out to everyone: libraries! Most schools keep copies of textbooks chosen by instructors in their library collections. I was fortunate to be studying at the University of Pittsburgh, where I could use the collections of a half dozen other institutions in the metro area, too. I also made use of inter-library loans (for which you may be asked to pay a small amount for shipping costs when borrowing from other colleges). - I was a poor student who never had a car, a microwave or many other things that seem to be "the norm" these days - but I did have the smarts to avoid paying for books. I'm a librarian now, and happy to share this secret with others who are struggling financially.
I am a professor of English and creative writing who, like most of my colleagues, has dealt with this problem for years. Whenever I have the option to choose texts for a course, I go for trade paperbacks, books that have their price printed on the cover, above the barcode. These are always much cheaper, even when new, and also readily available used. Of course, if I were in the sciences I would be compelled to assign those costly texts that break students' budgets.
But some English courses (especially composition and other writing about literature courses, surveys, etc.) have texts pre-selected by the department, and all sections of that course must use those texts. Then there is creeping gigantism—textbooks have been getting larger, more comprehensive, and of course, more expensive, with each edition, such that the textbooks turns into a doorstop that weighs several bricks, endangers student's spinal alignments, and contains far more material than could ever be covered in the course for which it's assigned. In that case, I try to choose less expensive compact editions (if available), I make the textbook list available well in advance, and if possible, I have the department make a copy of each text available on reserve in the library for student use.
When I can, I explain to students the secret of discerning textbook prices: if a book has a "90000" printed above the barcode, it is a textbook for which the bookstore can mark the price up as much as it feels the market will bear. If it has a "51495" above the barcode, the retail price for a new copy of that book is $14.95. For the "90000-coded" books, students can visit the publishers' web sites to look for the suggested retail price, visit Amazon and the like for discounts, and then compare with the campus bookstore's marked up price.
The other game publishers play to protect their profits is to issue new editions of textbooks every two years, with just enough changes to render older editions unuseable / obsolete. This is to beat the used-book market, which cuts into publisher profits, of course, and helps to cause the jacked-up prices of future editions. This has turned into a sort of cat-and-mouse game between textbook publishers and their monetarily stressed customers; but as a writer, I know how much we need publishers! They need to make enough profit to stay in business. And I agree that students ought to share textbooks. . . and make sure they actually all read them ! The excuses that students give for not accessing their required reading materials are legion--if all that energy could be employed in actually doing the work, these students would excel . . . but that is subject for another story !
Where can we learn more about this law and exactly what it specifies? The graduate school I now attend does not reveal what material is required. Instead they send us brand new books by mail two weeks prior to each class. I understand publishers must make money but the choice to purchase used books/older editions must rest with the student.
This is quite a one-sided presentation. Certainly the price of texts continues to increase beyond the rate of inflation. So do tuition costs. Please publish a story addressing the reasons for this. I'm sure it will be discovered that the reasons for this are also not all-encompassing and are as complex as the reasons behind the ever-increasing costs of educational tools.
This article leaves the question unanswered--why should publishers be so fond of e-books, and any measure taken in efforts to recover costs incurred in producing the content? Why the need for all this reinvention? Who, if not the publishers, are gaining? Perhaps it is the bookstores, who are able to profit multiple times from re-selling products they incurred zero cost in producing. The publisher, on the other hand, can sell it only once, yet they invested all the resources in creating them.
Publishing companies are probably very much accustomed to being the whipping boy for this overplayed record. It would be more creative if readers and listeners would hear more facts from more sides, and not continue to opinionate on this issue merely on assumptions alone.
Perhaps students would appreciate another lesson their instructors could provide: why they should use their textbook. Maybe then they could see value in it, regardless of what manner they read it in.
