The Reasons Behind Rising College Textbook Prices
College textbooks are increasingly representing a bigger and bigger share of college students’ expenses:
A Government Accountability Office report found that in the past two decades, college textbook prices have increased at twice the rate of inflation. In academic year 2003-04, students and their families spent more than $6 billion on new and used textbooks.
According to the GAO, the average estimated cost of books and supplies for a first-time, full-time student in 2003-04 was $898 at four-year public institutions. That was about 26 percent as much as the cost of tuition and fees.
[From an article by Michelle Singletary at washingtonpost.com]
I have long suspected the textbook industry of marketing games ever since I was unable to sell back a psychology textbook because they were using the new edition the next semester. My friend took the same class the next semester, so we compared the new edition with the old one and weren’t surprised to find that they were virtually identical. The cover had changed, and the order of a few paragraphs in some of the chapters had changed, but the content was almost exactly the same. We didn’t scrutinize it extensively, so it’s possible the author had interjected some essential new, front-line information, but it wasn’t enough for us to notice - or apparently for the professor to notice, because the curriculum of the class stayed the same
It turns out I am far from alone in getting caught on the short end of things, and that printing new editions is just one weapon in the arsenal of publishers to inflate profit margins. The state Public Interest Research Groups conducted a study on college textbooks (as cited in the article above, and found HERE) and found some interesting statistics. The study was called “Rip-Off 101: How the Publishing Industry’s Practices Needlessly Drive Up Textbook Costs.” A short excerpt follows
:
Textbook prices are increasing at a fast rate.
* Textbook prices are increasing at more than four times the inflation rate for all finished goods, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics Producer Price Index. The wholesale prices charged by textbook publishers have jumped 62 percent since 1994, while prices charged for all finished goods increased only 14 percent. Similarly, the prices charged by publishers for general books increased just 19 percent during the same time period.
New textbook editions are costly and limit the availability of used textbooks.
* The most widely purchased textbooks on college campuses have new editions published every three years, on average.
* New editions of the textbooks surveyed cost, on average, 45 percent more than used copies of the previous edition.
* When issuing new editions, most publishers raise the prices of their books. Of the textbooks surveyed, new textbook prices jumped 12 percent on average between the previous and current edition, almost twice the rate of inflation between 2000 and 2003 (6.8 percent).
* Three-fourths (76 percent) of the faculty surveyed in our 2004 report said that they found new editions justified only “half the time†or less.
Bundling drives up textbook costs.
* Half (50 percent) of the textbooks in the survey were sold “bundled,†or shrinkwrapped with additional instructional materials such as CD-ROMs and workbooks.
* When a bundled book is available for purchase unbundled (without the add-on materials), the bundled book is, on average, 10 percent more expensive than its unbundled counterpart. Some bundled textbooks are substantially more expensive. For example, a Thomson Learning chemistry textbook was 47 percent more expensive bundled ($223.75) than when sold as a separate textbook ($152.00).
* More than half of the bundled textbooks surveyed (55 percent) were not available for students to purchase a la carte, in which the textbook is available without the add-on materials.
* Two-thirds (65 percent) of the faculty surveyed in our 2004 report said that they used bundled items “rarely†or “neverâ€.
An article written previously on Consumption Rules shows the breakdown of college textbook prices, and how the pie is divided among its beneficiaries (college textbook prices). Also, R Kennedy runs a website called textbookpower.com which provides similar information on why textbook prices are rising as they are, but more importantly, provides a lot of help for finding book exchanges and other resources to help you find your textbooks at the cheapest prices possible
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July 15th, 2006 at 4:16 pm
1. High prices encourage piracy: I knew college students in Argentina who get their textbooks by borrowing their friends book and photocopying the whole thing.
2. My biggest beef with expensive textbooks is when the professor directs us to buy them and then doesn’t ever use the book in class and it is more of reference if we ever want. That should be clear in the professor syllabus that it is only a for reference and not required.
Thanks,
Samuel
July 15th, 2006 at 9:53 pm
Also, professors many times get perks from textbook publishers for using their books.
I know a professor (a relative of mine) who refused a publisher’s insistance that he use the new edition when, similar to your psych story, very little had changed from one edition to the next. And this was a science textbook! I marvel at how new editions for subjects like math are pumped out with any frequency at all.
July 18th, 2006 at 6:21 pm
[...] I was cruising around R. Kennedy’s website after he commented on my textbook pricing post, and found lots of interesting stuff. I especially liked the link to the Consumption Rules blog, where the following breakdown for textbook pricing was discussed: [...]
August 15th, 2006 at 2:48 pm
Thanks Laura. Yeah, I keep on trying update it and encourage people to vote on the resources they’ve found the most helpful so let me know if you find anything else..
October 17th, 2006 at 12:46 pm
Used book buyers and used book companies, along with professors who sell their desk and review copies to book buyers are the real culprit here. The publishers need to have a 1, 2, or 3-year edition cycle just to stay in business, because if they did not, no new books would be published, due to the resale market. The fact is, there are a lot of college instructors out there who *sell* their unused review copies — which they received free of charge — to used book buyers, who in turn send them back to their massive, Wal-mart-like warehouses, where the review copies are inventoried as “new” books… and then sold to the bookstores as new. So a publisher sends a prof a calculus textbook for them to review and consider. The prof sells it for $10 or $15 to a used-book buyer, who makes a commission off that purchase by sending it back to his used-book company… who then puts that book they bought for $10 or $15 on their inventory shelf until it is ordered for $80 or $100 by the college bookstore, and sold to the student for that plus the bookstore markup. End result: the publisher gets NOTHING from the sale, except the expense of printing and shipping the textbook. The bookstore makes their normal profit. But the prof who sold his book makes $10 or $15 cash, and the used-book company makes ALL the rest of the profit. Their only cost was hiring the used book buyer and inventory/shipping of the books they get.
That’s where the real crime is, in all of this. Bookstores are not to blame, publishers are not to blame, and instructors who refuse to sell their textbooks are not to blame. It is the profs who sell their books, and the used-book companies themselves who make the majority of the profit from this. Ask your professor if he/she sells their unused books to book buyers. If the answer is yes, they are contributing to the higher cost of college textbooks.
February 8th, 2008 at 1:21 pm
Eric must work for one of the major publishing companies who would like to make everyone think that this is true. His reasoning that the publishers need anything to like that “just to stay in business” is completely false. These publishing companies are multi-billion dollar companies, personally, I’ve never been to a college bookstore that is a multi-billion dollar company. There is also no crime involved in buying review or otherwise unwanted copies from underpaid college professors. In fact the vast majority of books that are bought from professors are not sold as new books, because they have usually been reviewed, written in, or are otherwise in used condition when they are purchased. Buying these books does not raise the price of the books, like the publishers propaganda would have you to believe. It in fact lowers the price because it introduces used copies of the books to the marketplace (which are sold at a discount).