Back when I was still in college a few years ago (grad 2006), I would always buy my text books from amazon.co.uk. They were the exact same editions, and even with the currency conversion they were half the cost.

Yay! I hope this happens before I grad in '10!

I think its absolutely ridiculous that I can't find out what book I need for class until the first day of class, then an assignment is due the next day. Sorry, I shop online, and you can kiss my ass, bookstores.

Even better would be the colleges & the profs learning about ethics!

The profs need to stop using books they've written as required textbooks for the course & the schools need to get some balls & stop the profs from doing that!

The schools are complicit as they own the bookstores that sell the books & make a huge profit from that practice.

Then the companies need to stop making minor changes to the books which causes them to become "outdated" & thus can't be used by the next class.

And before I hear from outraged history majors, I'm not writing about textbooks on contemporary history.
This is about more basic stuff such as lit or math.

The "new edition" trick manufacturers use is really ingenious in a way, because at my university many of my books so far have been the "newest edition" and therefore, the professor requires those as the class text, and no old editions will be supported. It pretty much forces everyone to break down and purchase. If a required book is an older edition, there are so many good places to find deals online. And although I know that books are expensive, most colleges include some figure (eg. $500-$800) in a total cost breakdown of attending before anyone even applies or accepts enrollment offers. So in a way, students have a reason to be complaining, but also, the cost of books (on average) was plainly stated before we even enrolled.

I had a professor put a text book online chapter by chapter. Probably wasn't legal but I liked it.

I also loved how one of my professors pointed out that our $130 text that was required was bringing in about $55,000 of sales for the publisher. A bit mind boggling if you think about all of the other classes going on at the U, let alone all of the other U's around the country.

I'm not for price controls, but it will take a revolt of both students and staff to have anything happen in a good way. What prof is gonna turn away a kick back though?

It's not entirely the textbook publishers. I had a case where I class I taught adopted a different text (a customer one) which was actually about $20 net cheaper to the bookstore. The campus bookstore kept the old price, while a privately run bookstore off campus reduced the price. We also adopted the practice of listing a recommended text on our syllabus along with an "acceptable" text (meaning the older editions).

Our course has gotten into the habit of checking to see where the book is cheaper and sending out an email to all enrolled students prior to classes starting letting them know of the difference.

@Greasy Thumb Guzik: My dad's a professor and he writes the coursebook for his course himself, since it's a high-level specialized science discipline. He then distributes printed copies made at the university print shop, and has a password-protected PDF (it's a reprint-rights thing; he can't make it publicly available) available for them to download on his website.

He does a really good job, too -- he uses LaTeX (which he can typeset by hand in a text editor, just like I can write HTML by hand, but we both use WYSIWYG editors to make it faster).

He does refer students to books but those can be had in the library, I'm pretty sure. (His course is way over my head).

Too bad more profs don't do this.

@Greasy Thumb Guzik: That always pissed me off. Having to buy the textbook written by the teacher in the class. Is it their job to teach me that material anyway? Why make me pay twice?

Also bundling textbooks with crap workbooks, etc is a huge ripoff. Most of the time prof don't even use that material. So why should you have to pay for it.

Colorado already did this. It was only earlier this week that it was signed into law, so I can't talk about how has been working. http://dailycamera.com/news/2008/apr/08/ritter-signs-textbook-bill-law/

Its awful. Some book bundles are good, but the majority are useless. I do think that publishing the book list as you choose classes would be pretty useful.

The first comment on the NYT blog is great. "Students spend money on alcohol, so high textbook prices aren't important" -- yeah, I don't really follow the logic there. The point is that students without large amounts of disposable income are the ones who suffer most from high textbook prices, and they're the ones who need the help. Just because some students have a no-limit account at the Bank of Mom and Dad doesn't mean they all do.

Besides, if we give poor students the chance to buy their textbooks at Half.com, they can spend their extra money on booze, thereby bringing freedom and equality to the college experience.

Most undergrad classes (and a lot of grad classes as well) are not cutting edge courses with material that is changing as we write.

(think about it, Newton's laws have not been overturn in the past week, the work of Eulcid is not being updated any time soon, Shakespeare is dead and the War of 1812 was almost 200 years ago).

Therefore, the basic text books should be available BEFORE the course is started. I would expand the statement to "the basic text books should be available the THE YEAR before the course is taken".

In hindsight I would have love to have prepped for my college classes well before the start of the class.

If this measure forces colleges to offer books well before the start of the course I am fully behind the measure.

It's terrible; I teach at a CC and many of my students pay more in books than in tuition. I've already cut optional texts and moved minor texts to "optional" as much as I can, but these books are ABSURD.

The only perk WE get are a free copy of the latest edition of the class text, which the college pays for. (We do get sent lots of review copies, but they're mostly pretty useless, and our textbook purchasing process is way more complicated than a single prof getting to say "use this book.")

The latest edition of the ethics textbook we use in all the ethics classes is a little 200-page paperback they're charging FORTY-TWO DOLLARS for. This is a $6 book, tops. I was absolutely appalled. I'm going to start buying old editions cheap on amazon and RENT them to my students (just to be sure I get the books back). I already generally let my students go 1 to 2 editions "old" (though they're responsible for not being assholes and saying "the reading said "chapter 3 pages 116-128", and chapter 3 is on pages 140 to 154, so I didn't read anything and you can't test me on it now!")

One serious problem is that our college bookstore has to stop selling the old editions when the publisher comes out with a new edition, INCLUDING used books students want to sell back and have the bookstore resell. I've been thinking of, again, with these texts we use year after year in my department, seeing if we could make an arrangement with a local used book store that wouldn't be constrained by the textbook publishers cancelling contracts if the store has the temerity to resell the last edition used.

how about a campaign to reduce congress screwing with crap they have no business screwing with?

Colleges should require students to buy ebook readers when they first get to school. Then the teacher can assign random articles, ebooks, rss feeds, etc. as reading. Electronic textbooks should cost no more than $20.

Oh also what pisses me off is many schools have their own editions of books that are bundled with little books or cds. That way you can't look on the website and get the UPC code and purchase it elsewhere for cheaper. Plus they are are laminated together so you can't even see some of the books fully until you purchase to open it.

@dirithmir:

My thoughts precisely.

@Eyebrows McGee: You're not the only one who does this; I've had a significant number of teachers in the community college circuit who let students use books that are an edition or two behind.

In fact my calculus teacher actually carried two books to class - the one the bookstore sells, and the one the bookstore sold last semester - so he could assign the right problems to the folks who bought used from other students/Amazon/ebay/wherever.

It's nice to see the teachers get the students' back sometimes when it comes to the cost of these books.

@Eyebrows McGee:

The book is expensive because of the limited distribution, captive audience, return books

(yes, some publishers and distributors take the excess books back from the schools)

and to make up for the lower profit margins of mainstream books

@dereksea: The new edition scam is the one that really ticks me off.

For example, I was taking a course in conversational Spanish and they were already up to the third edition. What happened, did Spanish just change a lot? Or was the original edition such a piece of crap they had to quickly come out with two new editions to fix it? Maybe a new edition every ten years to cover changes in modern usage.

New editions of modern history? OK.
New editions on modern physics where new things and theories are coming out regularly? OK.
Languages? No.
Ancient history? No.

The Problem is that sometimes those excerpts from a variety of books end up costing a bunch.

My readers or history classes usually cost anywhere from $40-$100. They're usually non-returnable because the professor changes things ever semester and I get saddled with these crappy excepts from a bunch of sources.

@evslin: This is kind of a repeat of another of my comments.

Were there some new innovations in the field of calculus that required a new edition of the book? NO! Maybe for a doctoral student.

@StevieD: I know WHY they cost more, and I don't object to a "fair" profit, but this is NOT one of those books that's cutting edge. It's not even truly a "textbook." The changes between editions are miniscule, and it'd be a $4.95 book as a mass market paperback. I think $20 would be fair considering the whole small-run (although in fact it's so popular a text it sells more copies than many mass market paperbacks). $42 is absurd.

ok and what about stopping schools and professors from buying the newest editions of books in subjects that never change? why are they allowed to force you to buy a new edition while at the same time denying you the ability to sell back or resell the book so you can actually AFFORD to buy the new one. i can understand tech classes, history, and upper level classes needing new editions every year or two. but nothing's changed in english since the great vowel shift and the dropping of the letter U in america. math hasn't changed in AGES to any degree where the average bs/ba student would need the latest and greatest, nor has most science. until the leaps and bounds of most subjects actually stick around long enough to be included in a text, colleges should stop acting like businesses that just HAVE to have the newest thing to gouge out more money that a lot of people don't have. universities should be prevented from having the bottom line be the greatest motivator for "improvements" in curriculum. it won't hurt the students.

Professors have to publish to get tenure and advance their careers.

I suspect that a Calculus text from 50 years ago would be adequate.

Just check out an old text book from the library and read the corresponding chapters.

@dereksea: um, i dunno about you, but i sure was shocked one year when i had a $1300 book bill. that was quite a bit more than that rough estimate they show you in the tuition plan layouts.

@ColoradoShark: Hah, no joke. And that was Calculus I too... not even like it was bleeding edge material or anything.

@katylostherart: "ok and what about stopping schools and professors from buying the newest editions of books in subjects that never change?"

We're not allowed to stay with the old texts. Some professors don't give a rat's ass, but many of us ARE sensitive to the price pressures students face, and there's a lot more awareness of this in the last few years as prices have skyrocketed.

The bookstore is frequently prohibited by its contract with the publishers from continuing to sell older editions. And since these publishing conglomerates are HUGE, if you get cut off by, say, McGraw-Hill for selling the last edition of a supplemental ethics text, you might lose your entire science department's texts too.

Colleges don't make profits out of moving to the newest edition. (Frankly it's a pain in the ass; I have to rework my entire syllabus and carefully reread a textbook I've already read six times to make sure nothing gigantic that's on my final exam has been removed or changed.)

(Also, while I realize Shakespeare has been dead for 400 years, SCHOLARSHIP on Shakespeare moves forward. You don't need a new textbook every few years, but it's a little silly to suggest we could still be using textbooks from the 50s. An edition of the PLAY from 1950, sure, but not of the commentary.)

I got my textbooks for relatively low price by checking them out of the school library (which always had its own copy, frequently copies, of textbooks for the upcoming semester); anything I wanted/needed, I photocopied. That was because I was one of those poor students with little disposable income and needed to be creative about resources :P

Buy a combo printer/copier (about the same price as one textbook, nowadays) and you don't even have to pay to get the copies.

And it's all legal under fair use.

I'm reminded of my Hebrew Bible class, where the book the professor used was last published in 1986...and was $64 used.

College bookstores themselves are a massive scam. Most are owned by a subsidiary of Barnes & Noble or one of about three companies and operate on college campuses. This is why you see the new edition every year and $60 paperback books. They are there to make money, not to help the students. If you want to blame someone blame the school for letting these third party companies run their bookstores.

@katylostherart: New additions every year and things like CD's sealed in the back of books rendering them un-resellable once you use said CD are a calculated scam to prevent students from reselling books.

Colleges aren't responsible for the cost of text books. Often the books I choose for a given class will be publisher priced at $50 - $70, the bookstores (all of them) then add a minimum of 50% to 100% markup on the book!

It has driven me mad with frustration - to the point where I am developing my own lecture notes, online pod/vid casts that I will keep updated - and no books to buy. That's the goal - so far I'm about half way there, the time it takes to do this is extensive - and all on my own time too.

Blame the publishers for some of the cost, blame the bookstores for the rest. And then blame the college that complains when a professor uses his own electronic text!

In my experience professors are very aware of the cost of books and they do what they can. When I was in college, professors would try to cut costs by making course packets with only the relevant chapters copied into them. These were still usually $50-100 because of all the copyrights.

If most college students were just a leetle bit smarter, they might realize that there are some pretty easy ways to make your own course packets at low cost. For example, if you have access to a free photocopier, you can get a textbook from the library and copy the chapters you need. Then you can distribute said copies to your friends and neighbors. Legal? Probably not...

@Phipps6505: At Temple in Philly, the professors in the know never used the bookstore, not only because it was a scammy expensive store, but because they were unreliable. Instead, they told everyone to go to a frightening looking ghetto Philly hole in the wall that always had the right books for the best price.

Pittsburgh U had the same deal, except it was in the back of a convenience store. You gave them your schedule and picked up your books at the front of the store. There was even a dumbwaiter involved.

@Eyebrows McGee: so it's basically collusion to strangle every penny possible out of students.

good to know. i'm in favor then of professors insisting that their students can only work from handouts and raping the university in print out costs. one $65 class fee is better than $300 in books for that same class.

if the majority of professors really wanted to, they could make it easier on their students wallets than they think.

add your own apostrophes, i apparently can't.

@StevieD: I always emailed the professors and asked for book info. I told them title, author, and edition was all I needed, but if they didn't mind sending the ISBN, that'd be great too. Almost all of them got right back to me. Most professors are poor intellectuals; they're happy to help poor students.

It really sucks when you get into higher level classes, where the books you're looking for are much rarer.

There are a few things everyone should be doing:
Plan ahead. Email professors a few months before classes, politely asking if they know which book they'll be using. Most of them do.
Check half.com and amazon regularly, before a few months before classes start. Deals pop up and disappear faster as classes draw nearer.
Compare tables of contents for different editions online. If they have identical section headings, chances are the content is exactly the same, too.
Look for international editions (usually paperbacks). I saved a hundred bucks buying a used version of a book that happened to be from Sri Lanka. The text was exactly the same.

I've managed to cut my semester book bill from what should have been about 600 dollars to a little over 100 for five different textbooks. Not bad.

@Greasy Thumb Guzik:

The only time I ever saw that happen, the textbook was some softbound 15-20 dollar thing from my university's own press.

Now professors using expensive (and sometimes utterly terrible) textbooks written by their friends...that happened often enough to be disturbing.

Amazon and half.com for the things you'll need regularly, the library for the things you'll only need once or twice. I agree that textbook prices are outrageous, but like anything, a little research before you buy will pay off immensely.

College bookstores are rarely owned by the colleges. They are owned by Barnes and Nobles, Folliet, etc who lease the space at the college.

I had a professor/friend who did one of those custom edition bullshit books that you can't sell back. He made quite a profit off of it. Money didn't go through the school but straight into his pocket. Same with the study guide. I had a great time calling him a capitalist bastard. When a friend of mine took the class, the book had been returned to normal and the study guide was on reserve at the library.

For my multivariate analysis class (class roster: 1), we used the book the professor had written. It was great.

Textbooks are more expensive than trade books because:
*academic and accuracy reviews -- not unlike the review process for scholarly journals, except textbook