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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?"
For a $100 textbook, students sometimes pay $5 per page they read during the semester.
Ceci n'est pas une signature.
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.
"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.
I bought an economics textbook for $85.
I sold it back for $15.
I got some mixed signals from that class
Yes, but think of all the fundamental changes in Calculus that take place each year that you are funding. The book has to be expensive if they want to keep up with ever changing subjects like calc.
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.
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.
I'm probably beaten to the punch already, but it was always amusing (in a hopeless sort of way) how our Calculus 101 textbook would change every two years. I'm sorry, but I'm pretty sure that the introductory field of Calculus hasn't changed at all over the last 100 years.
All the bastards do is introduce a few new questions at the end of the chapter and call it a new edition.
"The market alone cannot provide sufficient constraints on corporation's penchant to cause harm." -- Joel Bakan
how much in total? $250
So, you failed your first little microeconomics test then.
And your degree isn't worth the paper its printed on. Or do they give that to you in PDF form as well?
Douglas P. Price
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.
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.)
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.
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
I worked 2 years in publishing and sales representation to the academic market.
:) Seriously, be polite but firm, and be prepared to reiterate- some have been so high up in their ivory towers that oxygen is sometimes rare. The publishers can put out a new edition every 3-4 years only with the complicity of the professor.
*Advice on bringing down the prices of books appear below the rant*
[rant]
So there's a few things I'd like to set straight, especially for the whiny bunch (you can't bring prices down if you don't know who's responsible):
-trade stores buy books at 60% of the cover price
-university bookstores buy at 80% of the cover (a 25% markup)
-print runs on all but the most popular books (think 1st year intro) are ridiculously small
-professors are lucky if they make 10% of the cover price. Even if that amounts to $5,000, a tenured professor would expect to make more money than that for a few hundred hours of work. (It's not the money: it's publish or perish).
So, the university bookstore is obviously not making massive amounts of money, nor is the author(s). So, the publisher makes a killing, right? Well, sometimes. The guys cranking out a new edition of that $120 first year text every 4 years is making entirely too much money, as are those that bundle materials or otherwise force you to buy a new copy.
Smaller publishers that can't get professors to publish that big first year textbook with them generally aren't doing so well. Publishing any book cost several thousand dollars. Printing is not the biggest expense, and goes down fast as print run size increases (per unit, obviously). Editing and layout eats up most of the budget, then you have to add sales and distribution.
Yeah, there's a few people that think we could let professors write things on a wiki, and not bother with editing. Sometimes, you're right: there are some professors that can actually write. Let me be blunt: we reject 90%+ of manuscripts, and the other half can be unreadable without major editorial adjustments. Editors have to be highly educated, and it is not uncommon for them to be PhDs- and that doesn't come cheap.
An index also cost money and you can't just use a software package to tell you what words are on what page, as that's pretty useless.
Having spent a good part of my time in the sales side of things... do you realize how many books we have to outright GIVE to professors so they will consider the book for their class? They're only a few dollars a pop to print, but having to meet professors, find out what they are teaching the following year, mail them books once printed... all that costs a lot of money. In upper-level classes with small enrollments, you can be giving out 2% of the books, and some free copies for TAs (up to 1 per 25 students).
And don't get me going on the price of an ad in an academic journal, or sending sales reps to their conventions.
Moral of the story: it cost an awful lot of money to put out a book. There are profiteers - the first year textbook sellers that put out a new edition every 3-4 years, and the folks that would give you $4 for that $120 book.
This is not the music industry. Publishers -especially the smaller ones- are nerds that want to put out good books.
[/rant]
To get back to the prices though... as I said, there are profiteers: resellers and big publishers.
The resellers ought to be put out of business. Use eBay, whatever it takes, but don't sell them books.
There is another player in this market that has enormous power to set things straight, but is often overlooked: the professor.
If your professor wrote one of those fat 1st year texts which comes bundled- lobby them. Tell them you find such practices appalling, and that you would much rather spend money on beer.
If your professor asks you to buy those expensive books, ask them to complain to the publishing house. A couple professors that tell the sales reps they won't use the text again unle
Information: "I want to be anthropomorphized"
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