Price controls on college textbooks

[Kidlicious]

Here's one market where I think price controls would be good. My textbooks are $600 this semester. I'm not paying for them, but that's how much they are. I'll copy my friends at that price.

The producers have a million excusses for the price they charge, but I'm sure they could easily get by with charging half that. Quality would probably decrease a bit, but there definitely wouldn't be a shortage. They probably wouldn't come out with new additions every year. Besides that they would be about the same. I'm sure students wouldn't mind.

[Japher]

they could just remove the spines

hell, halfway through term none of mine ever had spines anyway!

[Wycoff]

I love how the printers include a useless "free CD" with the text book, then jack up the price an extra $30.

[Japher]

if they put the book on that CD I bet they could save a lot in printing costs

[Imran Siddiqui]

Good professors find ways to get around it (ie, letting you use older editions or getting permission to copy parts from the textbook and distribute the copies to the students).

[Kidlicious]

Or they could put the whole thing online and just make you pay for it when you sign up for they course, but supposidely they've surveyed students and found that they wouldn't like that.

[Kidlicious]

Originally posted by Imran Siddiqui
Good professors find ways to get around it (ie, letting you use older editions or getting permission to copy parts from the textbook and distribute the copies to the students).

None of them are the business profs I've found. The're the least sensitive.

[Arrian]

The producers have a million excusses for the price they charge, but I'm sure they could easily get by with charging half that.

You're sure of this... HOW?

I could ask my father. He ran the McGraw-Hill International operations for a while in the 1970s. McGraw-Hill publishes a lot of textbooks and other technical works. I know from experience that a (new) textbook (from them or any other) can easily cost $50-$75 nowadays.

As for the editions... depends on the subject matter. Sometimes you really need to update things. In the case of, say, a Geography textbook. Soviet Union falls... oops, need new maps!

The key, I think, would be universities making a concious effort to re-use textbooks that don't really require updating yet. Ok, History 2.0 is out... but 1.0 is fine. Let's stick with that until we have a compelling reason to switch to the new one. Students can buy the books used (I did this a lot in college... we had to buy tons of books for the history/literature classes, but they were almost all used).

-Arrian

[Wittlich]

My text books came to just over $900.00 for this semester (for just 5 classes)...and most of them are paper-backs!

[Arrian]

To clarify:

The professors have a major role to play in this, because they must decide on their course curriculum. If it was impressed upon them that the cost of books was out of control, perhaps they could make a concerted effort to help with that by reusing older books (or copying sections like Imran says - I had a couple of classes where we did had lots of handouts of a single chapter of a book).

-Arrian

[Arrian]

I think my worst semester was $600. I graduated in 1998. I remember buying 10-12 books for a single class (again, all used paperbacks, but it adds up).

-Arrian

[Last Conformist]

Originally posted by Wittlich
My text books came to just over $900.00 for this semester (for just 5 classes)...and most of them are paper-backs!

That's obscene - I never paid more than $200 for a semester's worth of books.

[Kidlicious]

Originally posted by Arrian
The key, I think, would be universities making a concious effort to re-use textbooks that don't really require updating yet. Ok, History 2.0 is out... but 1.0 is fine. Let's stick with that until we have a compelling reason to switch to the new one. Students can buy the books used (I did this a lot in college... we had to buy tons of books for the history/literature classes, but they were almost all used).

But the university and the profs just aren't sensitive to the expense because it's the students who pay for them. That's the problem. I've got a lot of experience as a student. I've got about 300 semester units. Gradually I've seen that the updates in new additions more and more don't justify making students buy new additions. On top of that they add on costs for these digital things that students really don't need or even want.

[Seeker]

There is also a clear Arts non-Arts discrimination here.

An Arts major can usually find his books cheaper elsewhere, or even just borrow in class, saving hundreds of dollars over university rapage.

But the sciences major is in a less enviable position. Often, for something like Biology, you actually do need the latest edition.

[Wittlich]

"Obscene" would be putting it nicely...