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/