You stand in a line for 30 minutes with your hands full of heavy college textbooks. When it’s finally your turn, you walk up to the cash register and plop all of your books onto the counter. The exhausted cashier scans each book and places them into a bag. Then, they push a few buttons on their register and give you your total.
“These books cost $450.50. Will you be paying with cash or credit?”
College is not cheap. And to make matters worse, students must pay for their own textbooks, which will cost them about $900-a-year. That is a big price to pay for words on paper, especially when some of these books are rarely used at all.
There are many factors that come into play when determining how much your college books will cost each semester. First, your professors must decide which books they want to use in their classes. If you’re lucky, you’ll be able to find some of these textbooks at your school bookstore at a cheaper price because they’ve already been used. Or maybe you could even save 80% by renting some books online at Chegg.com, a popular textbook rental website. But with some professors, you’ll find that they want to use four or five books in one semester, and many of them will be recently published, so you have no choice but to buy them new.
Professors are better off creating custom textbooks for their students. They can select chapters from multiple books to create one book. The custom book will be cheaper than buying multiple textbooks for a few chapters from each. In Catherine Groux’s article for U.S. News University, she writes about Professor Daniel Flint of the University of Tennessee at Knoxville, who used a service called AcademicPub to create a custom 100-page book for his students. The digital version cost $14.95, while the paperback copy cost $27. This is a significant difference from buying five textbooks for quadruple the price.
Another way to soften the blow of expensive college books is to pay for them periodically throughout the semester instead of all at one time. Although college students are still paying the same price in the long run, they will not be as financially burdened at the start of each semester. Students who fall behind on their payments may end up with monetary penalties, thus making the book loaning operation more costly.
When it comes to the distribution of college textbooks, everyone but the college student ends up with a profit. Robert Carbaugh and Koushik Ghosh say in “Are College Textbooks Priced Fairly?” that U.S. publishers sell their books to foreign wholesalers who purchase more textbooks than can be sold to foreign students. These foreign wholesalers then reimport those extra textbooks to the U.S. and make a profit by selling them to American college students at a higher price. Granted, buying textbooks from foreign wholesalers is usually cheaper than buying straight from the U.S. publishers, which can be helpful for college students everywhere. But U.S. publishers have caught on to these reimportation tactics and are fighting against them. The cover or content of the textbooks are modified. Contracts with foreign wholesalers state that they cannot sell to American used-textbooks distributors. Even the sale of a new book is sometimes delayed in foreign markets to stall its entry in the used-book market.
College textbooks are too expensive. Though students try to save money through renting, buying custom books, book-loaning, and buying from foreign wholesalers, the prices for college books are still burning holes through people’s pockets. Getting money for college is hard enough. Paying for textbooks should not be exploitive.
