Slashdot Mirror
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?"
"We will give you 3 dollars wholesale for that book, we have enough."
I would rather burn this 72.50 book for warmth in the middle of the summer stuck in the fucking sahara desert than give it to your for 3 bucks.
---I later sold it for 40 bucks to a girl buying the same book in line. Everyone wins, sort of.
Neck_of_the_Woods
#/usr/local/surf/glassy/overhead
Following advice from this website, at the beginning of this semester I bought books online, and they were quite a bit cheaper. Even with the overseas shipping and conversion rates I ended paying at least a third less for my books. Whats ever better is if you can buy last semesters books from someone. I find lurking outside of the bookstore at the end of the semester quite effective for picking up used text books from students who know the bookstore is going to screw them on their buy-backs. :-)
There are C textbooks out there that are $100 and not nearly as useful as "Teach yourself C in 24 hours." Admittedly, that's not a great example since those books are so common, but here's a better example. I'm taking a software testing class that called for two textboooks: one was an "actual textbook" that runs about $120, but it's half the length and half the content of the $40 "Managing the testing process." It's crap.
Crappety crap crap, as a matter of fact.
Think $100 is bad, I had to spend over $300 for a set of books for my signals & systems class. The books were mostly useless because the professor handed out her own homework assignments rather than take them from the books. Turns out I couldn't even sell them back at the end of the term because they were going to a "new edition" which consisted of a few new figures and maybe two new pages of info.
Needless to say, the class had one hell of a bonfire to commemorate that piece of shit.
The most infuriating experience I had with textbooks was a book for a class that required the student to enter a registration code from the book into a web page. This was used for some web based quizzes and exercises. Problem was, once you used the code it was invalid so students were required to buy a new book for that class. Plus there were bugs, a good 5% of the codes from NEW books were not being accepted by the website so those students had to contact the publisher or webmaster or somebody.
Online or electronic textbooks seem like they could help with the pricing issues described in the report. However, experience teaches me that there are plenty of ways it could make things worse! Plus most people sell back their books at the end of the quarter or semester. Don't count on that option for eBooks.
You could always create your own used textbook market. Most bookstores that buy used books give next to nothing for them. I always kept my old books until the next year and sold them to the next group of students. I always got more than the bookstore offered to buy them back and the buyer got their books much cheaper than if they bought them new or even used. Plus it cuts the middleman out of the equation.
I agree 100% that Universities are gouging students to make a buck. At the university I graduated from (a medium sized state school) The University owned bookstore charges astronomical prices and always seems to run out all too quickly of the multitude of used books they bought back the previous semester for 10% of the price they resell them for. When an off-campus bookstore opened to provide some competition what did the University do? They moved back the date that financial aid checks were distributed. You could charge your books at the Uni bookstore and have the amount taken out of your change check when you finally got it. So, if you're an average student and dependent of financial aid to buy your books your choices are: 1. Buy the overpriced books at the Uni bookstore or 2. wait for you financial aid and get your books 5-6 weeks after classes start. Guess which one most students choose. The off campus bookstore was out of business within a year. This also effectively rules out buying books online for most students. What a racket!
It's not the college that does the used book thing. The publishers are the ones that force you to buy new bundles by actually not selling the components in the bundles separately. One thing that could be done is require all publishers to sell everything that comes in a bundle separately, and at a fair price (not the same price as the bundle would have been). Then the professors and bookstores can actually choose if the bundle is really what they want, or just the main textbook.
There are usually two types of "textbooks" that professors encourage you to buy. Or, rather, two scenarios.
The first is a book from which the professor will be teaching. He assigns readings from it, references pages in class, sometimes assigns questions at the end of the chapter as homework, etc. Sometimes it's one big book that covers the entire course (and often runs at $60+), but you can't do without it. Here all the rage is appropriate - with the diminishing printing costs why do prices of these books keep climbing? Also, you really *can't* do without buying this book and the professor has all the leverage he needs to make you go and buy it. No real way out - get it cheaper, get it online, order overseas, buy used, steal someone else's, etc.
2. The professor lists half a dozen books to buy for the course, often clicking "required reading material" without thinking. You spend $300 only to find out that it will never be mentioned in class or useful for anything except autodidactic reasons. You're pissed off and try to unload the books to the next class which, to your bitter rage, was given an entirely different list of books that they'll never read. This is a case where you use judgement. Often the professors will say that these books are for you to read on your own to broaden your knowledge of the topic. Simply don't buy the book or at least hold off until the professor assigns you the four pages to read from it. Then go to the bookstore, read the pages, write out the questions, and put it quietly (or not) back on the bookshelf.
A quick personal story: we were assigned a book for a cryptography class which I thought fell in the 1st category (since it was the only book assigned.) It was a small book costing $80. The book was, unfortunately, too advanced and mostly tangent to the topics we were discussing in class. After the class voiced its concern for the horrific waste of money on a book that's not helpful to do the homework or understand what's going on in class the professor explained that, "Neither the book nor the homework will have much to do with the class discussion. Those are for you to go home and do on your own. Please don't come to class with questions about the homework, as that is something that wastes my time as it doesn't pertain to what I'll be teaching anyway."
-s