College Guide
Blog
Many people—college officials, students, and consumer advocates—have bemoaned the high price of college textbooks. Apparently the average college student now spends almost $900 on textbooks in an academic year. Apparently Ohio is trying to do something about that. From an article by Jason Lea in Northern Ohio’s News-Herald comes the information that:
State Representatives Matt Lundy, D-Elyria, and Matt Patten, D-Strongsville, introduced the Textbook Affordability Act in March. The bill has not even been assigned to a committee for discussion, but it has started conversations. The legislation suggests several ways to control textbook costs:
Publishers would need to offer e-book versions of their textbooks that are used at public state and community colleges. This includes e-books that can be used by those with physical handicaps. According to the bill, it would be the responsibility of the chancellor for the Ohio Board of Regents to negotiate for the electronic books.
The chancellor would also start a bulk-purchasing plan for the most commonly used textbooks.
Other schools have tried the electronic textbook plan and offering textbooks for rent.
While the bulk-purchasing plan is perhaps somewhat novel (wait, don’t bookstores already buy books in bulk?) the efforts at reform in Ohio doesn’t seem to go very far at all to address the structural nature of the problem, in which publishers and many college bookstores make gigantic profits off textbooks due to a lack to competition and heavy markups.
The trouble is that so often the proposed solution to overpriced textbooks (their price has apparently increased 10 percent a year since 2006, according to the article) has to do with coming up with alternatives to textbooks. Books are good. Books are, in fact, the foundation of colleges. What we need is a real way to drive costs down.[Image via]
Facebook
Twitter
mirele on April 09, 2010 9:35 AM:
Students have been complaining about the cost of textbooks for literally decades. I worked as a textbook buyer in the 80s and early 90s for a college bookstore. The joke was that you really hadn't experienced being a buyer until a person had thrown his or her textbooks at you after being told the buyback value of that expensive biology textbook was zero.
As for those "gigantic markups," let me LAUGH. On new textbooks from the big publisher, the markup was twenty (20) percent. (Example: The bookstore paid $40 PLUS POSTAGE for that new $50 economics textbook.) The money was in used textbooks, but that was a huge crapshoot. If a professor changed her mind about the use of an expensive textbook that you'd just paid half price on for 30 copies, you would have to wholesale those books at a fraction of the cost. If a new edition came out, the copies you had in your backstock that you'd bought from students would be worthless unless the prof decided to use it for "just one more semester." I remember when there was a change of management at the bookstore where I worked. The previous manager had built up a basement full of books that were used occasionally--but he also wholesaled on the side. The new management saw those as a waste of space and a source of some sort of tax writedown. We filled up a long dumpster with perfectly good books being tossed.
I could go on and on about the pressures then. I can't even imagine managing a college bookstore today. I would suspect that the money would come from selling "soft goods", i.e., licensed school t-shirts, rather than selling textbooks, since you can get the textbooks from literally anywhere today.
Tom on April 17, 2010 7:52 PM:
"the efforts at reform in Ohio doesn’t seems to not go very far at all to address the structural nature"
wtf? if you re-read this sentence out loud before you posted it, no way does this get by without re-edit.
Joel MacMillian on August 11, 2010 6:55 PM:
I agree 100% that the cost of textbooks has gotten out of hand. eTextbooks are the future. That is why we offer FREE online flashcards at http://www.crushthattest.com.
All subjects are covered and the online flashcards help the student study faster, retain more and Crush That Test!