At the beginning of this quarter, I ‘crashed’ Philosophy 4 Intro to Ethics. When I finally was officially enrolled in the class, I walked down to the Isla Vista Bookstore to pick up the required reading. As luck would have it, they didn’t have any copies left and told me to check back later. Last week, a few days before the midterm, I decided I needed to get the books but IV Books still didn’t have them. I reluctantly made my way over to the UCen in a last ditch attempt to get the texts. Sure enough, there were no used copies so I picked up the shrink-wrapped paperbacks and made my way over to the cashier. I examined the books: a 218-page essay by James Rachels and an accompanying 305-page reader. Together, the two five-by-eight inch paperbacks cost $91.53.
It’s really annoying when you have to buy something and you know you’re getting ripped off. You feel so helpless. If I had realized the books would be so expensive I would have definitely looked for them online. I figured they might be costly but I never imagined the prices would be downright insane ($90 for 500 pages?!). As soon as I got back to my room, I pulled all the paperback books off my shelf and checked the prices; the average price for a single paperback book of similar size, length, and quality was around $14 – not $50! And yes, the irony of the greed-driven publisher selling a book about ‘doing the right thing’ is extremely painful.
McGraw-Hill has made a powerful enemy. Seriously, they are going down. I was quite surprised to learn from a Washington Post article that “textbook prices almost tripled from 1986 to 2004″ and that “60 percent of students nationwide choose not to buy all the course materials”. This is unacceptable. Luckily, something is beginning to be done. An alliance of Public Interest Research Groups has released evidence of publishers driving up textbook costs. The group has also started a campaign, Make Textbooks Affordable which aims to help students put pressure on publishers. The American Association of Publishers has begun to get angry about the effort *muahahaha*.
In addition, the student PIRGs have started a non-profit book exchange site. The site doesn’t handle the sale of books but helps buyers and sellers find each other.
The site is school specific (transactions are meant to be done in person to eliminate shipping costs I suppose). There are currently 168 books listed on the UCSB page. The site does cut out the middle-man reseller of used books but doesn’t help with the problem of expensive new books. It is a neat idea though.
Of course there’s always Wikibooks, the volunteer effort to create free, open-content textbooks (from the people who brought you Wikipedia). I truly believe that someday, through projects like these, information will be free. Until then, we are forced to be pay $91.53.
UPDATE: RENT TEXTBOOKS! http://www.chegg.com/