The Online Degree Dorm Room

Engineering Degree Online | The college textbook ripoff - continued

Posted by bposton on November 10th, 2006 — Posted in engineering degree online

OK, I’m rested now and ready to finish my expose on the college textbook scam…

Again, to recap - it’s a 6.5 billion dollar business. The costs have risen 186% since 1986. The average student book bill is 900 per year…

ahrgggg….

Here’s another thing. Publishers are saying they have to include more and more material to serve as many people as possible, and that’s why they costs keep going up.

Of course, that also means that the darn books get stuffed with so much “stuff” that it’s impossible to go thru it all during the course!!!

double ahrgggg!!!

Here’s another thing. since these publishers are bundling disks, workbooks, and website access into a textbook, they’re not playing fair with the textbook resellers. That’s because once these type of bundles are opened, like courses with DVDs inside, they can’t be resold. So these publishers are doing everything they can to end the used book market

Yeah, I know. theres alot of reselling options on the Internet. For example there’s the every popular ebay, half.com and even independent outfits like varsitybooks.com and ecampus.com. But you know what? their slice of the business is a small fraction of the total textbook market. A 2006 report by the NACS found that 23 percent of students buy their books online and of those online sales, a third are from the websites of existing campus bookstores.

So what’s a student to do?

Write your congressman…

Seventeen states have recently proposed legislation to help curb the rising costs of books, including the requirement that schools post the international barcode number of each of the required texts so that students can shop for them online. The new Connecticut law also even require publishers to tell professors what the books cost before the professors assign their students to buy them. I guess that might make a different.

In my next post, I’ll tell you about a student who took matters into his own hands…

Ben