2008 Woodie Awards
Textbooks are big business
Joseph Kunkle
Issue date: 3/10/05 Section: Opinions
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With sleazy business practices, the publishing industry is openly ripping off RCC students and if you want to learn, you have to pay, and pay, and then pay some more. Are we powerless to stop this?
Not entirely.
The big three textbook publishers, Pearson, McGraw-Hill and Thomson Learning have literally nothing to stop them from demanding beyond-inflated prices for textbooks. At current prices, college students will spend an average of just under $900 a year for textbooks.
In "Ripoff 101: 2nd Edition" a national survey conducted by the Public Interest Research Group (PIRG), American students will pay Thomson Learning an average of 72 percent more for textbooks than do students in Europe, Africa and the Middle East. Corporate booksellers like Barnes and Noble will also use some slightly underhanded ways to gouge you even harder.
Some of these tactics you will probably recognize, such as shrink wrapping bundles with one book you need and some weird book or CD you don't. The Bookstore in many instances won't carry the book unbundled and don't even bother to ask them to unwrap one for you. The chances are good that your instructor won't even use these extra materials. PIRG findings indicate that 65 percent of instructors used these items rarely, if at all.
Another shady practice to boost sales is shuffling the pages on a virtually identical textbook in order to issue it as a new edition with a correspondingly new, higher price. Up to four times the rate of inflation according to the PIRG survey. The publisher will add a few graphics and a new cover and presto! A new edition! Most textbooks are released in new editions on average every three years, and many of these have only minor cosmetic changes with limited new content.
The sellers will try to limit the availability of used books. The RCC Bookstore is run by Barnes and Noble in an agreement with RCC and despite the posters offering "up to 50 percent" of value for your used books, you will be lucky if you get a fraction of that. You see, new books are more profitable than used, so it is not in Barnes and Nobles' corporate best interest to offer to buy back the books. If you try to sell your used books to other students in the store, you might get kicked out, permanently. If you try to sell them outside the bookstore, the management and/or employees will stop you.