One interesting note: According to the link, student spending on course materials has actually declined by as much as 43.6% over the last 10 years.

I’m assuming it’s due to digital text. So, we still pay a lot, we just don’t own the material any more.

Textbook updates are a scam. In some cases, little more than the publication date is updated. Professors will often try to avoid them, unless they’ve authored the books. 😉

I'm not sure why we have to drag Bobby Brown into this.

Anecdotally, when I was in college in the 80s, I spent generally about $150 to $200 per semester on books. My kid just started his fourth year of college and literally spends about that same amount on books. I know this, because I pay for them.

that's about how much effort they put into each new addition as well. 12% as much as the last one

library Genesis

Education has become a total scam in this country.

The publishers have put themselves in a self-defeating position. If the textbooks were $50, people would grumble and buy them. If they're $400, people are going to do everything in their power to not have to get that book. Download a PDF and pay $100 for the dumb online homework key? Still better than paying $400 for the book that'll wind up being used to line the bottom of a bird cage because it's worthless once the shrinkwrap is off.

> unless they’ve authored the books.

Of course, because you are totally getting ass blasted and robbed ... unless it is their book.

It's OP's prerogative

Of all the things he is known to hit, books aren't one of them.

Let's just say where i am from there is no textbook in higher education , the professors try to accumulate most of the textbooks / literature into a ppt and they share it or we print it , that's it.

Anything else , you download it or go look in the library , if i wanted for instance to buy textbooks for the subjects for the three years i spent in higher education , some of the books cost a month of rent ....

So most of the time it's piratebay/ libgen /t411 ...etc , long live p2p , without it a lot of us wouldn't have access to the most basic of data, and seriously thank god for those youtube lectures , greatly helped .

A&P 1 and 2 they required a different textbook. It's like... dude what the fuck changed in the human body in 12 months?? Fuck all that noise with charging hundreds for books when you can get information online for free.

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Because 90% of the time you never need to buy the book.

Wait till you hear about how college is a fucking scam

Pdfdrive is great too

I only bought one book my last 2 years of school. Most of my classes either didn't need them or I was able to find them other ways.

Sadly education much like Healthcare, is a business at the end of the day.

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Textbook publisher LPT: Always make sure you put out a new edition every month, especially if it's something that never changes like calculus.

When I was in college, I tried to buy the previous edition as often as possible. It's practically identical to the new version and costs a lot less.

An anecdote fornyour anecdote, when I was in college around 20 years ago, I was spending 150-200 per Book, aside from some texts for literature and history courses, so your kid either has good teachers that know how to choose low cost course materials or they're taking courses that just don't have the typical textbooks.

I will say that I occasionally had a professor who knew we weren't going to use most of a book and just provided us photocopied excerpts from it instead of having us all buy a copy for 2 chapters and an appendix.

I spent about 500$ in all on books this semester.Ive only used all but one of them just to answer homework questions.Also the university requires we buy THEIR 90$ uni 101 textbook for a uni 101 class WE have to take

20 years ago, most of my courses after year two of university, the professors insisted that the newest edition of the book was required, as well as the three supplemental books that were necessary, even though they would never be directly referenced during the class.

I'm sure it was purely coincidental that they were the authors of the books. We were free to take up any complaints with the department head (who was the instructor), or the ethics committee (which included the instructor.)

While I'd hope that kind of shit has gotten better, I'd be shocked if it has.

The other explanation is that they're pirating most of them like any good college student

Just pirate the shit, geniuses.

What a racket

Yup. I bought a textbook prior to class exactly 1 time. The registration office flat out lied to me and told me it was required to buy all books before the start of the class or I'd be marked withdrawn on day one (my grants counted withdrawn as failed, so if I got dropped from a class or even tried to change classes, I'd fail out and lose all my funding).

Day one, I pull out the book only for the prof to say "don't buy the book, I know they tell you it's required but we won't use it except for 2 assignments and I'll print out the sections of the book you need for them." Never paid for another text book until after the class had started. In 4 years, I only actually needed 4 textbooks and 1 of them was a "you can't get the access code to the site that 100% of your assignments are on unless you buy the textbook" shills.

As many books move into digital territory this just becomes more and more absurd.

Went aren't they all strictly online?

I literally stopped by textbooks in college, we never ended up opening them, and if we did, which was maybe once in the whole semester, I just asked for pictures from someone who did have the book. Also with things like Mathlabs or whatever it's called, there really is no need for textbooks

I remember having to require spending $150 on an e-textbook, not even a physical book. If we don't get the book and show it as proof that we bought it, we fail the class. The only place I can purchase the book was in my college's bookstore and I bet they put that arbitrary $150 on it just to fuck with our already empty pockets. What's even funny is that the ebook expires within a year, I don't even get to keep it.

On a completely unrelated note, do we agree that Pirates of the Caribbean was a fun movie?

When I was in college in the late 00's, they had just started going all-in on the new books coming with a code for some tiny sliver of digital material that you absolutely had to have as a course requirement.

Just another grifting scheme.

Unless it's one of the really good professors that makes their own material that gets spiral-bound and sold for $20 or less.

I always checked the course syllabus, got the ISBN number for the book, and searched online for the international version, which was 99% the same textbook, at a fraction of the cost. About 75% less.

They don't even need a new edition to jack up the price each year. The exact same math book I bought freshman year for $40 (which seemed OUTRAGEOUS at the time) was selling for $100 four years later. Same edition.

I'm not giving advice to today's students, I'm not even saying this is a true story. It's about grad school, but could be applied to undergrad as well (not that I'm saying it should.) In grad school (at least in my program) you have to read a LOT of books in the x years you're there, and then you're given a comprehensive exam covering those books. I think it was like 30 titles maybe. Each one could easily top $50 as a cover price, sometimes much more. It sure would be interesting if, say, one guy in your program got a part-time job at a print shop like Kinko's, you know, to make ends meet and help pay the bills. And if all your classmates got together and each one bought two or three books, they could then lend them to the guy who worked in a print shop. If that guy then spent time after hours (or not, if he had a boss who didn't really care), he could lay each book down on a photocopier, page by page, and make a copy of that book. Then he might just drop that copy into the machine and make enough copies for everybody in class. Could even perfect bind them or comb bind them or something. And then everybody could get all the books without being completely fleeced by the greedy greedy academic publishers. You probably shouldn't do this. It probably never happened. But it's an interesting concept.

Of course, nowadays there are online resources for finding free versions of expensive textbooks. You probably shouldn't seek them out though, and definitely shouldn't take advantage of them.

They basically priced themselves out with greed. Even $50 would net them nice profit per book but they just wanted to squeeze as much money as possible from students and ended up destroying their own business in long term.

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I had a professor in college who sold his textbooks at around ~$60 each and said he was getting $30k a year from it. He co-authored it with someone else and I'm sure the platform he was using took a big chunk of the profits, but even so, $30k is still a fuck ton of money. Professors who force students to buy their textbooks at several hundred dollars are absolute greedy scum.

When I was in grad school, some idiot copier sales rep put a machine into our building, “try it for free for a week.” We had a faculty login within the hour. It was the beginning of the semester and I think that machine was running 23.5 hours a day for that entire week.

On the flip side I luckily had a good professor and he encouraged his students to buy older used versions of the textbooks required for class, even going as far to bring out the old and new textbooks and flip through them to show us that they literally had the same material, just that the "updated" more expensive version had the same chapters put on different pages. Had a lot of respect for him.

Over half the books I bought in college were singularly bought in order to open up an envelope inside the cover, read a code, log into a website, and then maybe use the book ONCE after that. The books were anything from $100-$500 each, and they'd give you like, $30 when they bought it back.

Another part of the scam was the fact that you could only get your student loans a month or two after classes had started, so if you needed books, you HAD to buy them from the college bookstore, where they were massively marked up. They would take the total out of your student loans or grants before you even got them. Everything from $2 bookmarks (a sliver of paper.) to $100 hoodies with nothing but a small IU logo on them. Packs of 5 pencils for $8, you name it.

They made sure to delay student loans so that when you borrowed materials from the college store, you paid an insane markup. The poorer student obviously get fleeced the worst.

I remember professors required lab manuals that they had written and spiral-bound exclusively available in the school library. $95 each, for the same list of a dozen exercises that were in it the last 10 years. Like, when the book costs $0.95 to make, and hasn't been updated in a decade, you can't upcharge 10000%, that's ridiculous.

I always buy books in paper form so i can use them and resell them back at lower price.Someone else gets a cheaper textbook and i get some of my money back

In the spring of 2021, I took an anatomy and physiology class at the community college nearby. My textbook came with a password to an online learning module. It cost more than $600. I was shocked by the price and the realization that, while a student could buy an earlier edition of the paper book, the online material was required for the class making the new book purchase a requirement. By comparison, the computer class I took at the same time was almost totally online with a password purchase costing less than $100.