Later on I encountered an accounting professor (who was a great teacher, regardless) who was using a text written by a personal friend of his. I didn't see the text, but I did have to install throughout the lab, and support, the accompanying software. If the text was as bad as the program that came with it, it had no business in any classroom.

And then there was the woefully inadequate Simmons calc text that helped me fail Calc II. 50 percent heavier and 50 percent more expensive than the far superior Thomas & Finney it had just replaced at my school. I suspect it was selected for the little sidebar history lessons rather than its actual instructional qualities.

There is no market in textbooks. A book would have to devote a chapter to personally insulting every academic in its field in order to be rejected, even if it had no value whatsoever as an instructional aid.

oops...edited that down and forgot to fix the beginning.

I wish this was my instructor. We just had a discussion regarding our textbook last night, which is 5 years old, and insted of publishing a new edition you are forced to buy the $75 dollar text book plus a suppliment to it. The instructor said he could not find any better text book and hates the book himself.

Besides being old, it lacks even the basic information that should be in this book. It is a network security class by the way.

I wish my professors had done that. Some of them even wrote the books that we had to buy... greedy bastards.

My state resident tuition cost: $2175 per semester
My book costs: ~$400 per semester
Average salary for a Comp Sci major after graduating from my university: ~$70000

I agree that text book prices are out of control, but I think I'll be able to live with it in the long run.

Hooray for Professor McAfee!

I just wonder what the textbook publishers are going to do to make this guy miserable.

Probably attack the quality of his book, I assume? Get some people they have paid handsomely to say only the big publishers have the resources to [blah blah blah].

Good for Prof. McAfee, but I'd like to point out that he's far from alone in this quest. It is becoming increasingly common for textbook authors to negotiate for free online access in addition to printed books. More freely available books by Caltech authors are at [caltechbook.library.caltech.edu]

Are the days gone when you could take Economics 101 and use the Samuelson textbook edition from 3 yrs ago and it would still get you through the class?

@OolongCaloophid: I always wonder about people who say this... if you professor is supposed to know his field, and he writes a textbook about that field, and then he uses SOMEONE ELSE'S textbook... what does that say about his knowledge of the field???

This professor is awesome.

He's also the exact opposite of the professors I had in law school, who self-published their books in flimsy spiral-bound form and then charged upwards of $100 per copy, making sure to shuffle around the chapters each year so the page numbers would be off for anyone who didn't buy that year's edition.

I'm lucky that the college I attend self-publishes modules for nearly every course. $30 for module tops. Usually it's only around $10. There are the occasional classes where there's an over-priced text, but they're rare, and they're either easy to sell, or the kind of text that you WILL actually use.

Textbook prices are so frustrating. Especially when the publishers come out with new editions every year, so you're forced to upgrade instead of buying an older, cheaper edition. I even had one professor tell me that the college encourages them to change the book every year to generate more revenue.

I made up my mind to just stop thinking about the prices, because it just drives you crazy to think about all the money you're wasting for information you could probably get for free online.

I had a professor who didn't require a textbook, just gave you notes and tested you on that. I learned more from those classes than any other. There's too much information in textbooks anyway.

I wish I had a professor who did this! I remember a few quarters that I spent over $700 on books that I never used again. They also changed additions the next quarter so the bookstore would not buy it back.

Its a good way to rip off poor college students money..

@thnkwhatyouthnk: Huh? Your semester book cost is only $400. That is nothing to complain about..

Back in the days of finger and telnet , when I was in school (late 80's) my book costs were $300 per semester.

@OolongCaloophid: I work at a college bookstore and (most unfortunately) I see this all the time. The worst example I've seen of this was some kind of statistical analysis book, which was literally about the size of your average novel, written by the professor teaching the course. The price: $250.00

I felt so sorry for the girl buying the book.

@Micromegas:

I had a law prof do that, but she only charged $30 for her materials. When most law textbooks are over $100, I appreciated her efforts.

The whole college textbook market is such a scam. The professors know it, the students know it, the university bookstore knows it. In some cases the professors and/or the universities are colluding with the publishers. And the students don't have the leverage to force a change. "I didn't think it was physically possible, but this both sucks and blows."

Yeah, I'm bitter about how much I pay for textbooks.

Thankfully, most professors in my college truly understands the (inflated) cost of textbooks.

One of my Chem professors put up his well-written, Chem reader as a supplement for us to download on Blackboard. Other professors go out of their way to put books on reserve at the bare minimum, to give us equivalent problems on older editions of textbooks, etc.

I suppose they are well in-tune and sensitive, especially since they have to budget around tight funding that CUNY gives them. Either that, or they're young enough to remember how much textbooks cost themselves.

In any case, my salute to you Professor McAfee and the other professors all around the world doing their part to aid learning on a budget. Double props if they can lecture well and provide effective help during office hours too!

@AdvocatesDevil: That professor just might be one who actually cares about his/her quality of teaching. Sometimes, others can simply explain concepts/examples/etc. much better than you can.

I have a professor who requires us to buy an eBook this year. My only complaint is that the book is browser based (probably so we couldn't re-use a PDF) and it's killing ME! It's only $30 for one semester of access but I'd gladly pay more for a dead-tree book that isn't a pain in the ass to use. Plus, it's an early accounting class, so I'm sure I'd re-use the info.

@emilymarion333:

I could NOT stand the changing editions/no buyback thing. It seemed like every single book I bought went through that...Had to buy it new because it was a new edition and then at the end of the semester suddenly ANOTHER new edition was coming out.

Guess what textbook publishers...things like general chemistry, calculus, and the Revolutionary War pretty much don't change AT ALL.

Attention Mr. McAfee:

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I had a physics class in college where the professor had published the text that we were using. Copies were available at the bookstore for average text prices, but we weren't required to buy them, the professor kept several copies in his office for students to use during the course.

The bookstore at my college was HORRIBLE. They would publish lists of the required books for each course on their website during the summer before classes began in the fall, but would intentionally put the wrong ISBN #s with them making it almost impossible to purchase the books for cheaper through another source. Half the time the books they put up weren't even the ones you needed. People would show up to classes on the first day and the professor would hand out a list of texts that looked nothing like the one on the website, of course that meant that we had to wait several weeks usually to buy our books because what the bookstore had in stock was what they listed online.

Someone needs to regulate the prices on textbooks, or something. It's getting to be ridiculous.

@thnkwhatyouthnk:
$400 for books a semster!?!? Holy crap. I'm going to a Community College for my basics, and they run around $800 a semester. I'd love to know where you get your books. Please, enlighten us D:

Every year, someone rewrites maybe a few words in a book, moves around the pages and makes this a new edition. The bookstores stop selling the older ones because they're "out of date". I don't understand how laptop manufacturers can put out new laptops every month, yet though I feel I live under a rock, I have yet to see some kind of portable, light weight (less than 3 lbs.) electronic textbook that updates itself. The textbook publishers scam us students and there is absolutely nothing we can do unless a prof. like McAfee speaks up or we drop out of college altogether. And the government sure as hell isn't going to do a thing either. Our education system is shot in Texas and the only way to learn is to read books outside class. I don't know about the rest of the country, but the combined weight of the apathy and the money toilet that is sports here stymies educational progress. Not many want to learn here in this "great state" and the publishers make it worse.

There's my rant of the week. Thank you Consumerist for the channels that my rant pervades.

I took this one class, the teacher said this is the book but get into one of my groups. He did not teach from the book but gave tests from the book. Long story short if you where in his group, you had the answers.

Sweet. I had a Math professor who once assigned us just a $10 workbook. In a computer science class we used the free Java Docs from Sun. Those classes were nice on my budget.

@shanoaravendare: Someone needs to regulate the prices on textbooks, or something. It's getting to be ridiculous.

Don't know that I'd say regulate the price but if professors would just be smart about what they assign and if many stores could sell them the price would go down.

I mean honestly, how much has Calculus changed in the last couple hundred years?

I had one English professor for two semesters that never used the books that were mandatory to purchase. I mean, she CHECKED to see if everyone had a copy of the book each class period and then NEVER used them. I was out about $300 just because of those stupid classes, and, of course, the new editions came out so I couldn't sell them back to the bookstore.

Better yet, this semester, the campus bookstore forgot to order latin textbooks for al of the latin classes on campus. Wtg, guys.

I WISH I could find a resource like that in my field. Upper level courses can usually get away with mostly pdfs that are available on the databases our university subscribes to... That doesn't work so well when you're teaching a 225 person intro level survey course.

Some instructors/professors do take cost into consideration. For the class I'm teaching this semester, I went with a bare-bones textbook that was $65 on amazon (more like $75 at the university bookstore). Realizing that most of these kids are only in there to fill a gen ed requirement, I think that is way too much, but it's still half the price of the ones the pushy textbook salesperson was pushing at me.

On the other hand, some profs are more focused on what they can get for themselves. If I had played nice (I HATE pushy salespeople so avoided him like the plague) with the salesperson, I could have gotten several free books for myself to "evaluate" if I wanted to assign his more expensive text. One of my colleagues did just that in choosing a text for this term.

Luckily, online services like amazon, half.com, etc. are helping somewhat... In many cases, bookstores won't buy back the book because it's not being used the following semester -- not because everyone is switching to a new edition, but because a new prof is teaching and chose a different book. Now you can just hop online and sell it (often for a better price) to someone far far away who will be using that text...

I had a professor who wrote his own book, on the first day of class he asked "Who here went to the bookstore and picked up a copy of the text?" The people that had raised their hands and he said something like "here is your first lesson, I know this an e-commerce class but here is a free economics lesson, return it this week while you can still get all of your money back, then buy it on half.com for 25% of the price; we won't be using the book for 3 weeks so you have plenty of time". Consequently he was by far the best professor I had in college.

Should look at Dover press. Those guys print textbooks that cost like $20-30, which is very reasonable for an academic text. My Topology (kind of like geometry, but infinitely "squishy") professor wrote the book we used, and it was dirt cheap:

[www.amazon.com]

At my college, the student government (which I was a part of) had this awesome plan--set up a buyback program in which all students could "sell" their books to the buyback program, pocketing a hundred percent of the profits, and the program would turn around and "sell" (for no profit) them back to other students. It was just a middle man, a way to get all twenty-five thousand or so students to collaborate.

I've heard that they've since started charging a small fee, something like three or four percent of the cost of the text, to cover costs of renting a space to facilitate the exchange, but it still seems like a good deal to me.

@thnkwhatyouthnk: Some of us are unfortunately paying almost 10x as much in tuition. It makes the textbook prices sting a bit more :-(

So far I've been able to buy all of my texts online for a fraction of the cost of the bookstore. I talked to a girl today who recieves financial aid and she told me that the aid money goes straight to the bookstore after tuition is paid and she has to buy her texts from the school bookstore. I think it is such crap that they do this. I'm not sure why it is set up this way. The way it is set up the policy benefits the school more than it benefits the student.

@OolongCaloophid: Just because your professor wrote the book doesn't mean he/she was earning money off of you. Many universities require faculty authors to give up royalties for texts sold at that campus, the money often gets donated to a scholarship fund or something of that sort at the university.

The biggest villains in this are the textbook publishers. They are the ones who really push the constant updates and new editions. I have a friend who wrote a successful textbook and she is to some degree a slave of her publisher - she has to do a new edition when the publisher demands one or she forfeits her rights to the book.

Couldn't the professors just list the topics covered in more detail and say buy a text that covers these subjects.Isn't that sort of the idea of education anyway:the study of different ideas on the same subject.

I also heard that high school text books have gotten so out of hand the many school districts are not aload to buy books with engraved or embossed covers-basically nothing but text and pictures.

@TWinter: And many publishers are corporate owned.It makes you wonder if these schools choose certain books because certain corporations make big donations or have alumni on the school staff.

How can you trust an university with your education, that crams these new text books down your throat at prices that are confiscatory? Haver there been any significant advances in undergraduate study in the past 100 years? Computer Science comes to mind. Anything else?

Oh, I just remembered this video I watched for my marketing class. It was a propaganda piece put together by the textbook industry, attempting to defend their prices and related practices.

It went on about the cost of producing a textbook, and all the places where the money goes. They mentioned the cost of graphics and photos. They showed a page with graphics and photos on screen.

The only problem was, it was not from a textbook. It was from the April 1991 issue of Popular Science, the article on the YF22 vs YF23 competition. (The 2 dollar April 1991 issue of Popular Science, I might add.) I wonder if they actually paid to use it.

I can understand a graduate level textbook in an obscure subject with a print run of a few hundred copies costing hundreds of dollars. But that's pretty much it.

Our campus library has most books available to borrow for two hours or (ahem..) make evaluation copies of the pages.

If I need to have certain pages on file, I just snap a picture of them and store them on my computer.

I'd be happy with something along the lines of a paperback type military field manual.They are smaller,lighter and tend to get right to the point-especially in math or science.I don't need glossy pictures or fancy graphs.Look at all the subjects covered in the commercial or trade paperback market,why not use that format for academics.

I think alot of professors and administrators are as bad as the consumer who always want the latest and greatest.Some people hear the word old or older and they think useless.If they don't see a new book every year they're in panic mode.

@u1itn0w2day:

They want the latest and greatest...AND THEY AREN'T THE ONES PAYING FOR IT!

You want textbooks to come down in price? Make the instructors responsible for the cost. Give them a budget, and have THEM buy the books for the students out of it. Don't give them incentives to cheap out too much, but make sure that if they want to assign 10 different books (I had a professor who did that...we used 4 or 5 of them), they're paying for anything beyond what they can get within the budget.

@u1itn0w2day: No, I don't think corporate donations play a role. At my university it's individual faculty and departments that choose textbooks and I have no idea who's giving money to the school.

I teach one course that uses an expensive textbook - it's $190 new from the bookstore. I feel sorry for the students in my course and encourage students to shop online for better prices, but I have few other choices. We really do use the book -they are assigned to read almost every page and there's no way they are passing the course without the book. There are about 10 similar textbooks on the market, but they are published by only three textbook publishers and they all cost about the same. The publishers really don't compete with each other on price. I'm not economist, but I do suspect price collusion is at play.

I used to be outraged at the price of textbooks, too. Then I started emailing my professors, asking what books we'd be using, and buying them online as soon as the previous semester was out. Now I spend ~$100 for five or six text books. You can't get paperbacks at B&N this cheap!

To anyone complaining about textbook prices: they're out there, even for obscure courses. There are book exchanges, online auctions, used retailers... go look for them! The thing that will really put the heat on the textbook industry to lower prices is the internet's used book market.

And if they change editions, talk with the professor, ask if you can compare their copy to the old edition. Look up tables of contents, compare them. If they're the same, and the old edition is less than 5 years old, chances are good there's nothing new in there. I've saved several hundred dollars buying one edition back. Usually, once there's a new edition, prices for the old ones fall to the $5 level. A steal!

I once had a high school chemistry teacher who recommended a textbook to use instead of the crap ones he was forced to have by the State. It was Brown & Lemay, 5th Edition. They're up to the 9th edition, but he insisted on the oldest version. Said it had less crap in it. Dirt cheap, too.

I had a professor use her own book for a proofs (math) class. The book was all of 87 pages and was $60. Fortunately, the bookstore didn't have the book in until after the first week of class. Needless to say, we got together and bought one book, photocopied it, then returned it.

The other thing I loved is that at UAkron, a professor cannot use a book for an undergrad class that a grad level class is using that semester. So even though there was an awesome (and reasonable) International Accounting book available that the professor adored and uses personally as reference, we could not use that book since the grad level class was using the book (albeit only the last 8 chapters). Makes sense to me....

@thnkwhatyouthnk:
Are you responding to something in particular, or just gloating?

@thnkwhatyouthnk: Just keep in mind that Computer Science in particular has a huge number of cheap and practical books available that the rest of the non college world uses. In a way it's more horrifying that you have to buy those overpriced textbooks since there is such an obvious alternative.

You could always do what I did at the University of Illinois - check the course books out of the library.

I would go to the book stores (the school didn't publish book lists online - only released them to the campus bookstores) the day that they received the reading lists for the class. I would write down the titles then bike over to the University Library and check them all out. With the generous renewal policies at college libraries I could keep them out all semester. The school usually had a few copies of any required course books available this way if you were quick on your feet (or pedals).

I'm lucky. LUCKY, I tell you. The bill for my books was something like $800 this semester. Thanks to No Worker Left Behind, that's paid for. It only covers classes and books, but I wouldn't otherwise be able to go to school.

@thnkwhatyouthnk: Wow, I'm paying almost $250 in textbooks per class.

The most annoying part is when you are "required" to get a textbook and it is only used for 1 chapter of material.