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Ripoff 101: Gouging Students for Textbooks
Brad Lucier writes "The San Jose Mercury News covers a report by the California Student Public Interest Research Group entitled "Ripoff 101" about the high, and increasing, cost of university textbooks. The story notes several practices that force students to buy new books instead of used and quotes yours truly about how universities are insulated from the costs of books. Is electronic textbook publishing the way to go?"
I bought two text books this semster. 1 for Calc2,and 1 for microeconomics...
how much in total? $250. Crazy. Crazy. Crazy.
That always really annoyed me. I mean, I agreed with a lot of what they did, but the idea of the university acting as the bill collector for a lobbying group, and doing it in such a way that most students ended up giving money to these guys without knowing the first thing about them, always struck me as somewhere between rude and corrupt.
And now they're blowing the whistle on unnecessary costs for university students! Pot, kettle, black.
It's a monopoly racket, it always has been and it's going to take something dramatic to break it up.
- Book publishers and authors don't want there to be used textbook competition, they only get paid when a new copy is sold. Therefore, they'll gladly do anything in their power to force a new edition, even if it's simply changing a few image sizes so the page numbers change in a ripple effect with no meaningful content change.
- Professors don't care. In fact in some cases they are paid to select the more expensive of two options by bookstores who offer them a kickback based on a percentage of the sales. (Just face it, what's standing in the way of a professor including an Amazon.com affiliate URL on the course's website, knowing that at least a few students will by the required book that way?) And, often the professor is the author of the book, so every student in their course equals a textbook royalty coming their way.
- Universities often either own the bookstore, or at least own the building that the bookstore operation is renting. Therefore, anything that's good for the bookstore is good for the university.
Unless students vote with their feet by boycotting classes that require overpriced textbooks, and threatening to switch schools or majors if a required course requires the overpriced textbook, there's never going to be any change. So long as new books are required every year, and the publishers can keep it that way, the market for used textbooks will dry up.
I get my textbooks from a classmate who is from India. a 133$ CDN electro magnetics textbook here goes for 20$ CDN there. it actually costs more to get them shipped (30$/each) then the book itself.
they are soft cover, black and white and thinner paper, but the content is the same and the savings are rad.
I am never buying another textbook from the university bookstore again.
Many universities have the same textbooks in the library, and with a roll of coins or an evening at Kinko's you can make your own coursepack.
As an American student, book prices are absolutely ridiculous. A quick example: Physics: Principles with Applications, 5th Ed from Amazon.com costs $131 while the same book from Amazon.co.uk costs 30.09 pounds or about $55.
"Ripoff 101" could also describe Public Interest Research Groups.
Application Fee $100.00
Due at time of application
Tuition Per Credit:
Due two weeks prior to start date of each course
Undergraduate $440.00
Graduate $545.00
Nursing Undergraduate $385.00
Nursing Graduate $430.00
MAED Graduate $430.00
Military Undergraduate $352.00
Doctorate $620.00
check out the site wikibooks.org to see a free, open-source wiki textbook site we have already set up.
It's because the old ones are out of print, and they can't guarantee old copies magically showing up out of nowhere. My stats prof currently acknowledges this scam and gives the textbook question numbers to the old textbook that are the same, but have just shifted down due to a lazy reorder of the questions. Only 1/5 of them are reordered anyway. Scam scam scam cram blam zam... damn ADD.
A similar story was posted at another site today, and here's what I posted there, slightly edited for different context:
I have worked at the college bookstore here, and will relate how we do it. First off, our standard markup on new textbooks is 25%. Not great for the students, but also paltry compared to markup on the other stuff we sell (clothing and gifts is like 75% markup at least). However, if a book comes with the price printed on it, we price it at the printed price, even if it's at less than 25% markup. Some stores don't do this, resulting in an obvious rip-off. Of course this depends on the person who receives/tags the book checking each one for a price so it can be set appropriately. I always was very conscientious about this, but at big stores with hundreds and hundreds of books coming in a day, it would be easy to skip this step.
As for the buyback, this is probably what most people don't fully understand. As far as I know, most colleges do it similar to this. We contract book buyers from a used-book company (in our case, Nebraska Book Company, but there are others, depending on location). They come in and are the ones buying the books, not bookstore employees. The bookstore receives textbook orders from professors and puts together a list of books that the store will buy back directly from students. These books will be bought back at 50% of the new price of the book and put on the shelves. If you had bought a used book (we price used books at 75% of the new price) and sold it back for 50%, that's not great, but it's also not terrible. However, if you bring in a book that is NOT on the bookstore's list to buy, then it is the used book company that is buying it, at whatever it's worth on the wholesale market. At that point you are the lowest peg on the book totem pole and should NOT sell your books! They'll buy it for a few bucks, and then ship all of their purchases to their warehouse. They then mark it up and sell the books back to bookstores, who then mark it up again and sell to students. I'm not sure about the percentages in this, but it's not like the bookstore buys books for $5 and sells them right back for $100, at least not at my store. What is more likely is this: say you buy a book for $100 new. You go to sell it back, but the store hasn't received an order for that book yet, so the book company buys it, for maybe about $30. Then the store receives an order for the book and buys some from the used book company for about $50-55 and sells it for $75. The numbers aren't great, and again I'm not sure if they're right, but it's probably something like that.
Finally, even though I work at the store and can get a 10% discount, I've only bought a couple books there the last couple semesters. I've bought them online and saved 36% off what I would have paid, even counting the 10%, so I saved about 42% off what "normal" people would have paid.
I bought my books like the day after classes started. I only have 3 classes and only needed 3 books. Went to the damn bookstore, paid $202! For 3 books! And one of them, my Honors Calculus 2 'book' was only $13 cuz it's just a cheap plasic bound stack of paper. My CompSci book was $86 and my Physics book was $93. Did I mention that I got a used copy of the Physics book? Today I got smart though, I went online and I found my CompSci book for only $49 shipped to my house, and my Physics book for only $63 shipped to my house. So I ordered them and promtly returned the ones I bought at my friendly campus bookstore. I saved $67! That just goes to show how bloated the prices are at least here. When it comes to selling your books back...well...i equate it with bending over and letting the university stick their proverbial cock up your ass just a bit farther. Last semester I just bought my books at the campus bookstore (not knowing better) and spent about $250. I got $47 back when I sold them. All my book buying is going to be online from now on unless it's something I can only get at the bookstore like my honors calc book was. For those of you who also need to buy textbooks, try BigWords.com. It searches a whole bunch of online book sellers and calculates the lowest possible price including shipping for you. I even got a promotion code from them to save an extra $5 on my CompSci book that I ordered from Barnes and Noble.
Don't buy the book.
Seriously. At the start of the semester, ignore the books entirely. Buy the book the day you first need it. I started doing that a couple years into college; for the rest of my time, I think I averaged one or two books a semester. Most classes didn't require the book at all. (Often you could pick between reading the book and going to class; doing both was redundant.)
For classes that did require the book, I was often able to get away with borrowing it from a friend a once or twice.
How well this approach works probably depends on the discipline you're studying; I'm certain not everyone could do this. Give it a try, however--you might be surprised.
(Ripoff #2: School meal plans. One day, I calculated the per meal cost of my eat-as-often-as-you-want plan, and realized that I could eat out at a restaurant for every meal and spend less money. After that, I stopped paying for the meal plan and started paying on a per-meal basis at the cafeteria.)
here is a link to a news story that came out yesterday on this very same topic. http://www.komotv.com/stories/29552.htm
Natural-Selection Be
God you people all act like the Internet doesn't exist! Unless the textbook is written by your professor and not used anywhere else you should be able to find an online retailer like half.com or cheapest textbooks or any of a dozen or more other sites that buy and sell textbooks that will give you money for your old books.
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
This would probably be a good point to provide a link to Richard Stallman's short story The Right to Read. Originally written in 1997, it's scarey how close it's getting to reality. If you haven't read it, please do so.
This isn't always the case. In fact my software eng. class used a book that specifically was hard to find [e.g. not available on amazon, etc]. It was listed as 80$ [out of stock] on all the sites we found....
Our school sold the book for 140$...
And like many posters.... we read maybe 10 pages of the book [that is... details required for our analysis project].
Tom
Someday, I'll have a real sig.
I go to school at University of Phoenix, using the online curriculum. We are given a choice between traditional textbooks and ebooks. The ebooks cost just as much as textbooks, and when the class ends, if you hadn't downloaded it, you no longer have access. I've taken to purchasing used books when possible.
I've had books I never even took out of the shrinkwrap (if it came in it) or opened for classes that where "mandatory." Then a new edition would come out and I couldn't even sell them for even half their cost even with them being brand spanking new.
Any sufficiently advanced influence is indistinguishable from control.
A textbook of mine was about $115 CAD this semester; I ordered a used copy from Powells for $12 USD; I included a few other books and got free shipping. It cost me $72 CAD for four books instead of $115 (plus tax) for one new one. To sum: Powells is wonderful, esp. for Canadians, as they charge GST at the source which doesn't hold up customs.
ABEBooks is another great place to shop - they're a collection of used booksellers across NA and Europe and as such usually have everything you could ever want. You really need to watch some booksellers on shipping - one seller in Cali wanted $15 USD for shipping on a book that should only cost $3-5 USD (media book rate int'l), for example, but if you're careful you can still save a bundle.
Finally, sometimes Amazon or Barnes & Noble or other large retailers have better prices than the uni's bookstore, important for when you absolutely need that 17th edition.
To put all this into perspective: if I had bought all my books new this semester at the local store, it would have cost about $350 CAD + 13% tax; as it was, using the above methods I spent about $125 CAD total.
One final note: to do this properly you need to talk to your future profs about a month and a half before the class starts (i.e. as soon as you're registered) to get a book list, as some booksellers can take longer than others, esp. if you need to order internationally. Keep in mind that big sellers (even powells) usually ships within 24 hours. Good luck! Hope this saves you all some cash!
Condemnant quod non intellegunt.
The last lockdown on Concordia seems to have succeeded. The copy place no longer sells last time I checked, and neither do the backup places I knew. However, though things are looking down, a lot of these places have phone numbers you can call behind the counter of people who sell books, if you ask properly.
Good luck with your pirating.
I don't buy a book until either a: the syllabus lists required reading or b: it is referenced in class.
I buy about half of the books recommended each term.
I live in a giant bucket.
Students have complained, and God knows why the college hasn't fixed their policy. They're normally so wise with money, and they don't overcharge for anything else (except the food, which they should pay us to eat).
As the owner and operator of a small college bookstore in the U.S., I can tell you that customer service is at the top of my list as long as I will not lose money in the long run on the endevor.
I know that the impression of "Gouging" in the eyes of the student (whether true or not) sours students away from my store - usually permanently. News of honest and fair customer service travels fast; news of gouging and dishonest/unfair business practice travels even faster.
For example, students who buy a defective book in any shape or form (as long as they bought it from my store, and are not trying to pass off on me an on-line purchased book; that's why they have to have a receipt) will typically get an exchange with little or no questions asked.
I agree with you completely on the sentimnt of "gouging." When selling back used textbooks, I usually find it best in the long run to give students the information they need to make an informed decision. When your college bookstore offered you $16.00 for a $120.00 textbook it was probably because of one of two circumstances:
1) the book was not on course for the following term (no demand for the book at your school)
or
2) the bookstore already had as many copies of your book as it needed for the following term, so they weren't going to buy a book at an on-course value when the likihood of selling your book to another student is low. If they don't sell your book to a student next term, they can't return it to you later - so they won't assume the risk.
When a book is not "on-course" most college stores (including mine) typically sell these "wholesale" books to a wholesaler (in my case MBS, Missouri Book Services). The wholesaler pays us what we pay you, plus a 20% commission on the sale. So in your case, we would have made $3.20 on the sale of your book. Your book then sits in a very large warehouse until another college bookstore calls them up and says "We need book X" (your book) and they sell it at a profit to that store, which sells it as a used book.
I can tell you that at my bookstore if your book was "on-course" you would have gotten 1/2 the new value (in this case $60.00) and we would have re-sold it for $90.00 used (25% off the new price), regardless of whether you had bought the book new or used. The ideal scenario for me is to buy back books at their "on-course" value because we make money and the student is happy with the good compensation. Unfortunately this is not common because books are usually not "on-course" (though they tend to be more often at larger schools because of frequently repeating/rotating classes).
It is true that no bookstore will knowingly buy back a book that has gone into a new edition (or will soon be doing so). No bookstore that wants to stay in business for long will buy a book they can't sell again, and you're right to be put-off by the fact that new editions come out so frequently. Publishers do this to thwart the used-book market, which you wanted to take part in (and yes, I know frequent new editions do annoy just about everyone except the publishers).
You certainly did the right thing to sell it on your own for $50.00 This is, in fact what we will recommend to students who have an on-course book that we already have enough of.
Although this kind of direct re-selling thing hurts my business I would be *very* reluctant to complain about it because of the tremendous negative impact it would have on the goodwill I need with the student body and the college community to stay in business. Students like you are, in my opinion, reacting to textbook (and higher-ed tuition) pricing that is increasing at a pace that exceeds that of other commodities in society. College Tution costs so much nowadays that after students like yourself are done paying tuition (or, more likely, taking out yet-another-college-loan), they have less and less patience each year for the cost of textbooks and bookstore explinations for them, whether the explination is legitimate or not.
uR iGn0ranc3, Their Power
Here are some links I dredged up last time this subject rolled through.
Wiki Textbooks
Light and Matter: Open physics textbooks.
An open math textbook
Project Gutenberg, for all the English majors out there.
There are also a lot of books out there which are freely downloadable, but not modifiable. Has anyone here used a free (in either sense) textbook as their primary learning tool in a college class? If so, what was your experience?
You want the truthiness? You can't handle the truthiness!
No, calculus does not change that much. While the applications of it (real-life examples) may change over time, there are no fundamental advances in the field that require a new edition to come out every 2-3 years. Keep in mind I am speaking about general first year and second year undergraduate calculus. I realize that senior/graduate level material under goes changes. But calculus does not undergo major changes at the undergraduate level like programming in computer science does.
If publishers/schools put out a new textbook every 4-5 years, it would not be so bad. But it gets pretty bad, when you have them changing textbooks on the class almost every year, and in some cases every semester.
If your introductory calculus course allowed you to use such technology, you probably didn't learn anything. As for teaching methodologies, teachers can teach however they want without book support.
True story.
A huge list of math texts.
David MacKay has posted his book Information Theory, Inference, and Learning Algorithms on his website. (This is despite it being a recently published work available through major bookstores.)
The classic, Numerical Recipes in C, is available online for free.
Some more math texts.
Another grab bag of online texts (mostly math).
Yet even more math and CS stuff.
Ohio State charges 10 dollars per day for recalled items, and 5 dollars per hour for reserve items.
Yep. This semester I bought all my books ($350 retail) for about $100 through used on Amazon. Zero complaints.
"Time flies like an arrow; fruit flies like a banana." --Groucho Marx
Control fairly impossible to enforce. They could lock the copiers, but there are other copies around. Furthermore, a 3-megapixel photograph of an open book is pretty much legible - you can borrow both the book and the camera, or a friend - even from another university - can do a service for you and then mail or ftp you the PDF or a set of JPGs. (Which, as added advantage, is much easier to keep as reference for years later.)
That practice works if you're the only one doing it. Otherwise the book you want is invariably gone by the time you need it. I tried that one semester and vowed never to do it again. Fortunatly the Library had one copy left and my butt was saved for the mid-semester project.
I read the internet for the articles.
While its arguable that PP&B is not the primary cause of textbooks being expensive, it is safe to say that their 33.2 cents per dollar figure for editorial and PP&B likely is correct.
Let's run some numbers using the figures you gave above, and assume a small, 1,000 book print run:
Dividing the editorial costs across 1,000 books yields an editorial cost of $20 per book. Adding this to PP&B yields a total cost of $24.50, including the author's royalties.
Multiplying by three (since 32.3/100 is about 1/3), we get $73.50, or a price cheaper than many of my engineering textbooks. Therefore, at least by my crude analysis, the "32.3 cents per dollar" figure is justified.
The text for one of my MBA classes was $140 so I went looking for it online. I found the version which is sold in India for $50, brand new. The only difference was that the Indian version was paperback. I could never bring myself to buy from a college bookstore. Last semester, the total for my books from the bookstore was $320. I found the same books online for $160. Doesn't take an MBA to figure out which is better.
My personal favorite is addall.com, which searches several bookstores for a particular book and gives you back the lowest prices (including shipping). Incredibly handy.
I teach (among other things) first-year engineering physics; we use Halliday, Resnick, Krane, and have for many years. Our department does NOT upgrade the course text requirement every time a new edition comes out. Right now, I believe we are one edition behind.
As for me personally, every quarter at least one student will ask if it is "okay" to use an earlier edition. My response is along the lines of, "Well, the physics and the presentation is pretty much the same, but some of the homework problems I assign are not going to be in your older book. So, 'officially', I recommend you get the assigned text; unofficially, I suggest you make a friend in class who has the required edition, and work on homework with him or her." They seem happy with that, and having students work together on homework generally increases both their grades.
FWIW.
"Don't blame the log for the fire." --Andrew Ratshin
The amount I study isn't directly related to UoP vs, say, Washington State Univ. I looked at the courses, and the subject material was very similar. I wouldn't have to study for 90% of the material at either place -- other than reading through it once.
I obtained an A.A. degree from a local community college many years ago. I am just finishing up my last two years of credits.
In both cases, UoP and WSU, I had many years experience in the core courses needed for my BSCS or BSIT. I've *taught* many of them to engineers at Fortune 500 companies. The only reason I didn't CLEP (test) out of most of them is because of school policy -- you can only CLEP so many credits. Junior and Senior level courses in programming, database administration and LAN/WAN management aren't going to do me a lot of good. Yes, I would learn some stuff, but not enough and probably nothing I'd remember after not using it once class is done.
The *main* reason I took UoP over a "traditional" school is time. UoP, I can do 90% of it online (and it takes about 2 hours a day, 5 days a week). With a family and full time job, there wasn't any other University that I looked at that I could have actually finished. They didn't offer the needed credits via night/weekend or telecommute classes.
I would like to continue with an advanced degree at a later date (when I have the time), and UoP *IS* accredited and acceptable at "traditional" schools.
As far as comparing notes and studying in as much depth as you. In my field (computer networking & network security) I've probably gone a hell of a lot more in depth than you have -- just not in a classroom. Have you ever had to analyze network management traffic on a global ATM/Frame Relay network? Ever had to take 10 Gb of raw DSL provisioning logs, spanning a full week of traffic, and reverse-engineer them to figure out why 10% of all provisions failed -- after the team that wrote it was laid off and replaced with a new team in India who wasn't yet up to speed on the code. How about then taking that data and creating a modeling and reporting tool for near realtime analysis of future DSL provisioning traffic? Analysis of multi-gigabyte database performance on an 8-way 64-bit system? Creating a model for properly scaling such a database to terabyte+ size on a 24-way 64-bit system?
I've never had a class at UoP that taught to the test. And I *don't* bitch about underqualified CS students out there. I know damn well how hard it is to get real-world experience. I bitch about people who think a degree is a REPLACEMENT for experience as opposed as a supplement to it.
Don't blindly knock UoP. Like any school, you get out what you put in.
Learning HOW to think is more important than learning WHAT to think.
Although the situation in the UK doesn't seem to be anywhere near as ridiculous as some of the horror stories revealed in this thready, UK students can find a decent selection of textbooks from Smelly Student. All the books they sell are priced at 13.50!
The only reason I have to dislike them is that they severely reduced the resale value of my set of textbooks. :)
Sounds like the service I used all through school (which saved me around $70/semester, which I immediately blew on several cases of Mt. Dew): http://www.bestbookbuys.com/ - they also have links to the current "new user" codes at buy.com, etc. I think I've used probably used 20 new throwaway addresses at buy.com... :)
The Crucible is obtuse because it's really about McCarthyism but Miller can't criticise it explicitly. RMS isn't going up against an authoritarian regime (yet) so he can be more direct.
The Grapes of Wrath is putting a (fictional) human face on the statistics of the Depression -- the target audience is people who know the information but are not swayed by it alone. Perhaps if things continue to slide, and therefore people are not convinced by The Right to Read, someone will write a dystopia of novel-length.