Yes.

It should be against university codes to profit from royalties on required texts. It's a complete conflict of interest, and one that is frequently abused. When that happens, these custom books will disappear.

It's a scam now how some college textbooks release "new edition" books every year, forcing the student to buy them for 100 bucks (or more) instead of the cheaper, used version.

Perhaps I am odd, but I still have every one of my college texts. True, after 25 years some of them are rather amusingly outdated, but in another 25 they'll make an interesting comparison, I'll wager.

I don't mind when professors make packets because they tend to run $10-$30 which is much cheaper than a lot of other books that I need. I just recycle them after.

"I have no problem requiring students to keep those textbooks,"

In the meantime, I once lived ten days off of free cereal samples a company recruiting on campus gave away.

This lady needs to trust US that the $30 made from resale can be a big friggin deal.

Yes, because textbooks are already a scam. For the custom textbooks the professors are paid royalties but for the regular textbooks professors are paid "consulting fees" for the research on the books in exchange for making the new editions required.

That these custom textbooks forces the students to buy from one store and prevents them from selling the books later takes it beyond the level of "scam".

Someone ought to make a site documenting the various scammy practices that specific colleges and their employees engage it. I bet people would like to know how much a college or university hates their students before applying.

I have used customized textbooks at a "for profit" technical school that frequently advertises on TV that I won't name. I actually would have liked to keep the textbooks after graduation for reference materials if they were actually accurate. We usually found mistakes and conflicting information in them on a weekly basis. Also the textbooks were usually so general that they would not have actually done any good as a reference material anyway.

In all fairness to the school, towards the end of my time there, they were beginning to switch to regular books that would have been great reference materials after class. Too bad it didn't do me much good after using the customized books for a year and a half.

Ugh. Even regular textbooks are a scam.

I remember spending > $500/semester just on books when I was in college, and that was a few years back. It's really quite a racket. Some books are more than $100 new, and new editions come out pretty much every year so no used books are available.

What's even worse is the newer editions are almost exactly the same -- except the exercises and questions have all changed. So you still need to buy the new editions or risk not being able to complete assignments.

One thing that helped was some of the "textbook warehouse" resellers on amazon who had identical "international" versions of the books (not supposed to be for sale in the US). Usually these were for about half price or less. Perhaps this is ethically questionable, but whatever -- I certainly never felt guilty about it.

Short answer: Yes
Long answer: Hell Yes.

I keep my textbooks because I don't want the college to get any more money from it. I paid $90 for it, sell it back to them for $5, and they resell it for $70. Racket.

It wasn't until my last two years of college, but I gave up on buying new textbooks. If the brand-new edition was $125, I'd go to Amazon and buy a used copy last year's edition for $10. Most teachers didn't really care, and if there was a new chapter, you could always borrow someone's book to make a copy (our library carried the textbooks too). This, of course, doesn't work well for any texts that have assignments in them (think math books).

I even had a few professors that would say "get either edition" and then when talking about a particular subject, he would say "New edition, page 126, old edition page 142."

I never had the pleasure of a customized textbook.

@adrock75: I always resold mine through Amazon - look up the book by ISBN and click "I have one I would like to sell" - and then I always listed it about 20 cents cheaper (when reasonable) that the cheapest used book listed. Mine always ended up selling....

I believe that at least a few teachers jump on the Customized textbook bandwagon because they think that it will end up saving their students money. I over heard a textbook salesman pitching customized text books to a teacher last year. I just had to laugh, "not only will you be cutting cost for your students by removing topics not covered in your class, but you'll also be generating revenue for the school because this book will be exclusively sold through the college.

Luckily none of my teachers have gone the customized textbook route yet. I buy most of my books off of half.com . between buying used books and getting the previous years edition for subjects like early american history, I only ended up spending $45 for all my books last semester(including shipping). The bookstore wanted over $400 for they used books they were trying to sell!

Lets see. I won't be using my Calculus textbook again, but I will probably need my GIS/ArcGIS books for references when I grow up and get a real job. My history textbooks are biographies, primary text collections, and cliff-note histories which form the basis of my professional library.

I have had to buy an economics textbook which was written by the head of the department, yes very suspicious, but the guy was an authority in the field. So teachers/colleagues of teachers profiting off my required textbook purchases doesn't bug me too much.

On the other hand, if this textbook "has pieces from different books sewn together" then hurray! The prof is saving me a ton of money by not making me buy all these "different books." Some profs have tried to save us some money by using older editions or by, ahem, being quite liberal with the copier; I appreciate the effort.

Ugh. We had "course packets" where I went, and they could easily be 100-200 dollars. Granted, maybe cheaper than buying the books individually, but also maybe not with used prices being pretty damn cheap.

Course, none of my professors ever had their own writing in them (hell, I don't think I ever had a prof. use their own textbook), so less of a conflict of interest.

I so hated buying textbooks. I'm sure it will be so much more fun in law school.

I'm a textbook buyer for a college, and I hate custom editions. They do end up costing students more because all the reasons pointed out before: there's no buyback at the store, there's no used copies available, there's no way to buy it from other sources. Most custom books have production delays so we get them the day before classes start and the price usually changes at the last second. As a student, I would much rather pay a hundred dollars for a book that has some value somewhere rather than a cheaply produced custom book that's only good for recycling after four months.

I do know that where I work at, the professors are state employees are aren't allowed to directly profit from the books that they write for their own classes. They typically give the profits either to the department or university endowment.

My university did these, but they were in packets that were sold for the cost of printing. The real scam was the Econ 110 professor who required his students to buy his own book ($180!). He didn't use the university press (which would have required him to print the book as a $5 packet), and put a "unique" code to a website with additional content. Because of the electronic access, none of the books were eligible for exchange. All the "unique" codes were identical, by the way.

So, $175 profit per packet times 1,000 Econ 110 Students = $175K profit (on top of his salary).

I would first like to say, fuck you lady. Customized text books are ridiculous. Am I not learning if I'm not reading a text that my teacher created? Half the time these specialized text books are not even written by a single professor at my school. And why, on God's green earth, would I want to keep these books? Do you not realize that I have to pay for rent, groceries, utilities, tuition, and your fucking precious specialized text books?

@c26nyc: Try just a couple of months. For an intro Microbiology class we had to buy a brand new book for $175. Well, I figured I would get at least $50 back. I was very wrong. They publishers forgot to add a chapter. So, not only was one entire chapter missing, I couldn't return the book. This was about 6 months ago and I'm still pissed about it. Eating cup of noodles for weeks on end isn't my idea of "healthy nutrition" that my school is trying to push on us.

@Rectilinear Propagation: If you'd like to hear about a scammy practice, my Into to Art teacher told us the first day of class that we needed the 7th edition for our book. Two weeks later he started telling us that we needed the 8th edition or we basically wouldn't be able to pass the class. The return policy for my school is 14 days. So, he was basically trying to tell us to pay another $100+ for a book or we "wouldn't pass." One lady went to the dean and complained (thank god) so we wouldn't have to do that.

@deeness: Preaching to the choir.

Sorry for such a long post.

I'm taking a class that's using customized textbooks. It's a department-wide decision for the intro class to the curriculum. It IS a subject where the information changes fairly frequently so textbooks do require updating. However, the customized text is $30 cheaper than the full text. The bookstore DOES buy them back at the end of the semester and DOES resell them used. And the professors encourage students to buy used (either full text or customized) and take the 30 necessary seconds to help people with other editions get on the same page, as it were.

In this case, I LOVE the customized textbook, and it's awesome to have a text that goes right along with class.

I wish that I could create a customized text for the business ethics class I teach; the text we use is CRAP and I haven't found a better one. On the other hand, the intro course I'm TAKING is taken by 300 students a semester or so; the business ethics class I'm TEACHING only maybe 50-100 students a semester take it. That obviously makes a difference in reselling and in how many used book will be available.

I think for customized textbooks NOT to be a scam, you DO have to have department-wide commitment that ALL 101 classes will use this book, etc., so there will be a healthy resale market.

@Jesus On A Pogo Stick: Oh, that was complete and utter bullshit! Good on that lady for complaining.

(Young) physics professor here. Using your own textbook means the textbook supports the sequence and the notation you are going to use in class. If I taught things in a very different order from the textbook I was using, I would confuse some students, and their reading would be made more complicated by references to material we hadn't covered yet. I haven't written a textbook myself, but I have had to say "Well, the book says this, but we're doing it this way instead" many times.

If the textbook in question is not any more expensive than equivalent textbooks in the field, and if the textbook gets ample use during the semester, why should it be an ethical problem?

(Now personally, if I ever write a textbook, I'll probably try to avoid the major publishers to save my students some dough...although you do get the nice hardcover binding that means the book will last beyond a semester.)

Interesting - when I was in college, the professors were prohibited from receiving any royalties on sales of their own textbooks to students.

It's not just students that dislike customized textbooks; college bookstores do, too. I worked at the on-campus bookstore during my college years and I remember the textbook manager hated when professors would order custom titles because that meant there would be no possibility of having used copies.

Used textbooks are the cash cows of the college bookstore industry. The profit margins on new textbooks are suprisingly slim.

The new trend is including on-line access codes with textbooks that are one-time use only. The codes are used to access additional notes and exercises that most students never even bother looking at. It's planned obsolescence, but in an exciting, "Web 2.0" way.

I think it totally depends on the class. If you're taking a philosophy class, it's a lot nicer (and cheaper) to buy a cobbled together packet of essays and excerpts from other full works rather than buying every single original source (I mean, do you really want to buy five essay compilations because you need one essay from each book?)

As for the professor being an author, well, they're professors - writing textbooks is actually part of what they do anyway, and there's a lot to be said for taking a class from the guy who literally wrote the book on the subject. Several of my law professors were distinguished enough to have popular textbooks in their subjects (meaning widely-used; these weren't vanity publications) and they weren't priced any worse than other textbooks.

This isn't to say that there aren't bad professors (or universities) who screw the students and crappy situations involving new editions so you can't return the old one, but that's been happening ever since schools and textbooks have been around I imagine.

Again, depends on the course - for something like cultural studies or literature a customized design makes a lot of sense. Chemistry or biology 101? Not so much.

the only time textbooks are necessary are for classes like accounting and economics, where the teachers usually assigns problems from the book, and the chapters that the problems come from teach you the logic in solving those problems and what not.

everything else you can just google in my opinion.

@Rectilinear Propagation: I've never heard of these "consulting fees," and I teach at a university. Sure, textbook publishers try various tactics to get me to require the latest books (which I don't, by the way), but AFAIK, money doesn't change hands.

My personal favorite was the Networking + cert book that I needed for a class that was 39.95 printed on the bloody book and the college bookstore was selling it for the amazing price of 59.95. When questioned about the 20.00 difference I was told to a retail bookstore if I didn't want to pay their prices...

I think it depends a lot on what course you're taking....I majored in art history, and the books I had to buy every semester would probably add up to the value of a small economy car by the time I graduated. One of my professors put together booklets for his classes using color plates (we still had to buy them from our bookstore) but they only contained the images we used, and no text. It kept us from buying a book that honestly, most people have sitting on their coffee tables - and it kept us all on task. That was almost 15 years ago, and now he's doing all his work online. Saving his students even more money. (Bear in mind, these booklets had no text, and he was technically not an author. Simply an editor, and they were only used for one class at one college.)

Later I took a psych class at a larger university, and the prof used his own text for the class. $200!! And that was a undergrad - freshman level class. Highway robbery.

I can see how customized textbooks can be a scam or a good deal, depending on the context. For the most part, two things are certainly true: 1) textbooks in the US are hideously overpriced and 2) textbooks are often frighteningly wrong. I started teaching at a university last year, and it is amazing how many textbooks (which seemed insightful when I was an undergrad) are just wrong, or only portray a very superficial representation of the field. Prime examples are neuroscience textbooks that make no mention of neurogenesis and clinical psych books that make no mention of the Rosenhan study (see [exeterra.blogspot.com]). A good teacher/professor can make an excellent course without the need for any textbooks. I always try to use as many peer-reviewed journal articles and self-made resources for students as possible.

For those who are students in the US, try shopping around at Amazon.co.uk - you can sometimes get the same new books for much cheaper, even after the extra shipping - though the exchange rate is not exactly at its best right now.

Meg, other posters! Please, get real! I took my first undergrad class in 1971, that's how old I am. Then as now, teacher-authors requiring students to buy THEIR ENTIRE BOOK has been going on at least that long if not more. Some of you are squirming that you have a teacher-publisher require you to buy a loose bound cheapie? In my Diff-II class, circa 1982 (second degree) I paid $115 for a 80 page book. Of which we used exactly 1 chapter out of it. It had me so mad then, I still have the book to this day. So you guys are getting off light with what they publish now.

But I do agree that books cost too much. I teach now and I do respect my students financial resources. In today's environment, a book should be on a CD and the total cost should not be more than $10. The teacher-author can self publish and the big print houses are out of the picture. In fact several instructors could collaborate online to author it and split the effort for even greater effect.

But be respectful willya? There many of us who have gone before and paid much more for a lot less.

College textbooks: too expensive.

Back in 1984 (when I was at a JC) I took a music appreciation class. $25 for a spiral bound book. Teacher raved about how great the book was....and at the end of the semester the bookstore was paying $1 for it since the teacher was switching books.

Most of the "new" editions are the same as the old; I've gotten away with using previous editions for a few classes and saved big $$.

Not all custom school edition books are bad. For a speech class I took the book cost $90 new and $57 used. You had to have the book to complete assignments. The next semester my friend took the same class, had a custom College edtion book for our school. The custom book was the same as last semester's only on cheaper paper and no color and was $35...cheaper than what I gave for my used copy. Some school's do care about their students rather than cutting a fat hog in the ass.

@schwnj: I didn't mean to imply that this always happens. It was the topic of an investigative report I saw a few years back.

I just had to purchase a custom book for my Marketing class for this semester. Had to buy it from the bookstore, and they only had used copies for $69. So... not sure what is up with that.

...or, you could just do what I did and become an English major.

Checked out out most of my required texts from the library and saved a few hundred bucks a semester!

@JohnMc: Yes but the cost for actual tuition has skyrocketed adjusted for inflation since then. That is not including other expenses. If you look at total cost for college adjusted for inflation the difference is nuts. So if textbooks have stay relatively the same they will eat into the rent/food/textbook fund way more especially when 2/3 of the time they are unnessesary. Hell most of the time I never bought the book until i ran into a situation that I needed it, saved tons that way.

I am sorry but i do not have a link to back up these claims maybe a later poster can back me up. I believe I came across these facts in another NPR story which also briefly covered textbooks. In fact I believe the story spent decent amount of the time addressing the fact that professors will make the same claim you made and not realize this fact.

hmmm.... doesn't seem like that big a deal - i had classes where i had to buy 3 text books at 75 - 100 each - it might have been nice if they could have made it one text book. And why wouldn't you be able to sell it back? Unless the professor isn't teaching the course anymore, they would be just as likely to reuse this, as they woudl to reuse a different text book...

Textbooks are definitely a scam, but there are many ways to get around it. I graduated two years ago from a college in a metropolitan city and 80% of the textbooks we were assigned were at the library, either at my school or at one the city's public libraries.

Also, many people share. As in 3 or 4 people chip in for the cost and since you're generally assigned numerous books for one course (as a history student, I was generally assigned 5-8 books per course), you really only use each individual book for 2-3 tops. So sharing is not inconvenient at all if you do your cards right.

I only bought a customized book once. I had no option. Sometimes my professors went out of the way to help us not use the campus bookstore (only freshman do that) and find cheap prices on Amazon, Half, or any of the many book swapping sites. One even photocopied the book for us...for FREE. That was sweet.

*Oh that's 2-3 "weeks" tops.

I always went in expecting to be raped in every way possible when it came to textbooks. In a typical semester, I'd end up buying about five books for about $500. At the end of the semester, I'd be lucky to get $50 back from selling them. One thing that does help that I believe has been mentioned here is going on ebay or other sites like that and buying those international versions. I did that whenever I could towards the end of school and usually saved about 50%. Whether or not it's ethically wrong, we're not talking about an ethical situation here - we're talking about doing what you can to afford to go to school AND eat.

one of my favorite things about doing a grad degree in the UK was that all of the books i needed were in the library. i bought a couple for my latin course, so i could write notes in them and do homework easily. otherwise, all our readings were on reserve in multiple copies at the library. i had to change my study habits (i was used to working at home), but working at the library actually made me more efficient.

i wish more US programs would adopt this method - especially liberal arts courses that require a number of books to be read. it would be hard (but not impossible) to do for maths, languages or sciences.

I hated these kinds of textboks in college. After the semester ended, they were really only good for bonfires.

College textbooks are a scam anyways....save money, buy online.

Textbooks are the biggest ripoff to students that exists.

I took an anthropology course this summer for one month. I bought the book brand new for $92 dollars and when I went to sell it back, they offered me $40 for it. I had essentially paid the school $50 to RENT A FUCKING TEXTBOOK FOR ONE MONTH. It's absurd. I have at least six or seven books at home that I couldn't sell back because they had a new edition, and it's shit I don't need like calculus or speech and communications.

School isn't a place of higher learning anymore, it's a business. The more money they can squeeze out of their students the better.

Just to give an alternative viewpoint on professor published books: Many tenured professors are required to publish regularly, either x number of magazine articles per year or a book every y number of years.

My dad was one such professor, and he felt that the time expended going through the tedious peer review process and competing with everyone else trying to meet their publishing quota detracted from time he could spend actually teaching students. So he opted to publish the textbook for two of his classes (circuit design and Professional Engineering Exam coursebooks) and require them for his courses.

The books sold for about $200 per, out of which he got less than five dollars per unit. Your professors are generally not getting rich off the book unless they are a big name professor. He also gave extra credit to students who found errors in the books (be they spelling errors or factual errors).

As a testament to the quality of his books, they are still required for EE courses at colleges he never had any affiliation with even though the last edition was published 10 years ago right before he died.

Textbook manufactures are screwing themselves actually. My daughters high school school just went textbook-less.

They are offering a cheap laptop and the teachers will release the study material digitally.

Hey Barnes and Noble textbook division. Thats the US school system "handing you your hat. Goodbye."

@jaredharley: What college did you go to? They deserve to be near the top of my list for my kids.

textbook publishers are like major music labels, their standard way of doing business is dying, and they are maximizing what profit they can before it collapses entirely. There has been so much conglomeration in textbook publishers that anymore, there's only 4 or 5 companies left -- lots of imprint names, but only a select few companies.

The need for cheaper texts has been heard. they are out there in larger and larger numbers, but the faculty member has to really search to find them. because they are cheaper, the representatives don't push them and the faculty don't tend to get free copies of them for review. but they are out there. One of my colleagues (in Speech) just cut his students' textbook costs by something like $100 a semester by really searching out lower cost texts that still had the content that he needed.

oh, and those "consulting fees" mentioned earlier are the stipend that you get paid as a faculty member to "review" the textbook for the publisher. They aren't large -- in my experience you have to fill out about 30 pages of comments on various aspects of the text for somewhere between $100 and $200, but it's good pay for a few hours' work. They don't typically require you to then use the textbook once the revised version comes out, but there is typically some pressure to do so.

I just dropped $97 and change today on a textbook for my speech class. I couldn't buy an old version because I needed a "code" for some internet BS program I have to use that's inside the book. The book is "...A Custom Edition for the University of South Carolina". The book will be worth about $0 when I'm done with the course. Can't resell it on Amazon or half.com either.