As the new semester gets underway, the task of finding the cheapest textbook for your class is becoming our generation’s version of the panty raid. Instead of vying for some co-ed’s unmentionables, students scramble across town to the various bookstores to find the cheapest book they can find. Then there is the fight for the used books, which we all know and love.As a na’ve high schooler first learning about the college system of buying your books, I wondered why anyone needed new books anyway. In middle school, I used a spelling book that had been used by my brother just a scant decade before. I figured college kids must be uppity and only want the newest and best or something. Little did I know the seedy truth.
When I was a freshman I got my syllabus and immediately streaked to the bookstore to buy my textbooks. Now I go to class a good week or two before buying the book. In the past, I’ve shelled out a few hundred dollars on books I never used, repeat, never used.
What I guess has spurned my newfound hatred of the book (black) market is my geography class. Our teacher has encouraged us to buy the latest edition of the geography text. Also, the book is in its 13th edition, which has just come out conveniently between semesters.
So, last semester whoever bought the 12th edition new got hosed just as those of us this semester are getting it again because we can’t buy used. Barring the dissolution of the Soviet Union a short 18 years ago, the world map hasn’t really changed a whole bunch, so why so many changes?
This roused my curiosity, and I started digging through the vast reaches of the Internet to research the fleecing we get at the beginning of each semester when buying books.
I found out some interesting things, which show that the book publishers themselves purposefully work to keep book prices high and assure their obsolescence once finals are over.
In cahoots with said publishers evidently are professors. I read one account about an English department at a college in the Southwest getting a new golf cart for its professors to zoom around in from a book publisher.
The producer price index on books far outpaces the PPI for other finished goods, according to a study conducted by the Board of Regents for the state of Georgia. In 2002, the PPI for textbooks was 6.5 percent, while for most goods it was 0.1 percent. Also, textbook prices have risen at double the rate of inflation for the past 20 years.
I’m left wondering why in the hell book prices have risen out of control. Simple, those doing the buying mostly aren’t doing the paying.
College students are the new market, vast untapped resources abound for corporate greed to come in and take. We should demand used books and more online resources, but wait, that cuts into the profit margin. Damn.
Whether or not most know it, independent college bookstores are in direct competition with the publishers. Publishers make money off of new books and bookstores make money off of used books.
So, the publishers are angling as best they can to nullify the used book market and – if not void used books – still get something. For example, how many of you remember buying a 45-dollar card with the MyMath Lab code for college algebra?
Corporate greed is so user unfriendly. Instead of charging outrageous prices, why not let companies place ads in textbooks to offset cost. Or, God forbid, you offer textbooks online at a greatly reduced price.
If books were online, there would be no such thing as obsolete editions, just a simple update of the online product. For example, The Reflector is a totally electronic document until it is printed as a final product in Tupelo. So, if a bunch of college kids can manage such whiz-bang technology, why can’t McGraw-Hill?