Every year, without fail, college textbooks always burn. Not literally of course, but in the financial sense. Textbooks are a substantial and costly investment for the typical college student, and a visit to the Boston College Bookstore at the beginning of each semester brings along an unshakable sense of foreboding as to how much one's books will come to this semester. It is indeed disheartening to view the total of your semester's books on the cash register, and you then, bewildered, hand over payment; a simple swipe of your credit or debit card, and you are left frustrated at the hole these textbooks have burned into your account. Recently, it seems as if everything has been increasing in price: first the costs of gasoline, groceries, and now even textbooks have not escaped this economic trend. While the others can be attributed to the current weak economy, can the same be said of college textbooks? Why do they cost so much?
Somebody must be to blame for the outrageous prices. The truth is that textbook pricing is much more complex than one would be led to believe. Nowadays, there are numerous options for students to obtain their reading material for classes that are more cost-effective: used textbooks, books on-reserve at the libraries on campus, and systems such as WebCT or Blackboard Vista to which professors post readings and articles rather than having the students purchase a particular text.
Dale Herbeck, professor in the communication department, whose course Communication Law discusses issues concerning college textbooks, alludes to the problems that are plaguing publishers in today's society, where the used textbook market may be having an effect in increasing textbook prices.
"In some ways there's this ominous parallel to file-sharing with music," Herbeck says. "The problem is that publishers are businesses, and they have to make money. The way it works is that a company such as Nebraska Books will take a book that sells for $80, they'll buy it back for a quarter of that, usually $20, sell it to the bookstore for $40 and the bookstore sells it for $60. So now think about it: You're my publisher, Communication Law is a large course, and they've never sold a book to BC. They're not selling BC books because of the used market, people are putting copies of books online, and professors are using WebCT. How do publishers respond? They up the prices on the books because they know they're only going to sell them once, and they bring out editions more often."
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