Archive for the ‘Textbooks’ Category

• College Textbooks

  Date: | Category: Textbooks | Response: 0

  College textbooks are a growing expense for students. School gets harder for students to afford every time they have to head into the university bookstore and plunk down more of their hard earned money to buy another round of overpriced textbooks. The cost of education is higher than at any time in history – by a significant margin. With the price of textbooks going up even faster than tuition, according to Student PIRGs, students need to save where they can. It’s no wonder then, that they are constantly on the lookout for the lowest price textbooks they can find.

  However, publishers do everything they can to deny students access to the cheapest textbooks by churning out new editions of every textbook every three years on average. New editions mean that students can no save money by buying cheap used copies online.

  Once a new edition is published, and it is adopted by professors, campus bookstores stop selling the older edition. Worse yet, they stop buying back the older edition, meaning that some students are left in the unenviable position of not being able to sell back the same books they bought from the bookstore just a few months before.

  Of course this is of no concern to the publisher. Publishing is, after all, running a business, and like any for-profit company, publishers want to charge their customers the highest prices they can get away with. They want to maximize profits for themselves and the author. If that means releasing new editions so that they can charge students a higher price, that’s exactly what they’ll do.

  To publishers, college textbooks aren’t about learning about the world. They aren’t really concerned about biology or psychology, science, math or English. From their point of view, they are providing a service, one that they don’t intend to give away for free.

  However, none of that capitalistic spirit helps students with the high cost of buying college textbooks. They find themselves trapped between academic requirements to buy certain editions of certain books by certain authors on one side, and sellers trying to squeeze every last penny out of them on the other. With the onslaught of new editions making fewer used textbooks available to them, students have limited options to cut costs. Some professors have a policy of leaving a reserved copy of the textbook at the library for students to browse at their convenience, but this isn’t a viable option for many students, especially those who commute to school and can’t make it to the library every time they need to read their textbook.

  Some students try rental, but have to deal with due dates that may conflict with their class schedules and steep late fees. Many students have found that the best way to afford the multiple textbooks they are required to have is to buy used whenever possible, and to always get as much of their money back as they can by selling their books back at the end of the terms. Many websites make it easy for students to sell college textbooks, letting students simply enter the ISBNs of their textbooks to receive a quote, and a lot of the time even offering free shipping. Using these sites makes it easy for students to leverage the power of technology to lessen the burden of the high cost of education, one ISBN at a time.