Textbooks are such a racket...

[bicentennial_baby]

$257.75 for 3 USED books. :crazy:

[blueknight]

1. the worst part is

when you buy a NEW book, and then use it for one school year, the bookstore will give you like 3.00 dollars for the book, then sell it for 80 or 100.00

[bicentennial_baby]

2. I don't sell them back...

At least, not my Econ ones. I consider them an investment. :)

[ghostsofgiants]

4. I keep all my political science and sociology books.

:D

[bicentennial_baby]

5. Yeah, I've kept my PoliSci ones too

:hi:

[ghostsofgiants]

3. Captive market. Damned if you do, damned if you don't.

[PBS Poll-435]

6. Uggg....I went to sell one of mine back from the summer.....

Sorry...They are using a new edition in the fall. We can't buy back your book.


:grr:

[jobycom]

8. Ebay.

You won't get much, but maybe something. :(

[PBS Poll-435]

13. Good Idea....

Thanks

[jobycom]

7. A little, but they are also expensive to publish, and very limited distribution.

To make a profit, publishers have to charge a lot. And to sell them used, book stores have to buy them back, then store them in the hopes that a professor uses the same book next year. If not, the book store (or publisher or distributor, depending on arrangement) is stuck with useless paper. So they charge more to cover the costs of what they buy back but can't sell.

It depends on the university, too, and how many book stores they have. If they only have one, the book store can set the price. If there is more than one, competition comes into play, and the books may be a little lower over all. If the book store charged too much, the professor could order the books from the publisher and save costs.

Plus, there are taxes. I don't know how it works now, but back in the 90s there was a tax on textbook inventory, thanks to the bastard Reagan. Publishers had to destroy inventory to save higher tax bills, so they had to reprint textbooks rather than storing them. I don't know how that law works out now, but there are still franchise and personal taxes on inventory in most states, so that has to be accounted for.

So textbooks are expensive, but there's not as much gratuitous pricing as you'd think.

[bicentennial_baby]

10. I know that...I work in textbook publishing

:rofl:

It's just a pain, from the student side :crazy:

[jobycom]

11. LOL!

It is a pain. I'm still paying off student loans from grad school ten years ago. Because of textbooks, I ate a lot of beans and rice, and not much else at times. :rofl:

[philosophie_en_rose]

9. Yes they are!

Amazon.com has some good deals for used books, but books are unnecessarily expensive.

[hunter]

12. Electronic books would save a lot of trees.

And quite a few textbooks could be open source.

My kids' algebra, geometry, and calculus books were essentially the same books I had when I was their ages. There's no reason these books couldn't be maintained by teachers and given away electronically for free.