This is an interesting article from 1999 on textbook adoption, and whether it's 100% true or not, it points out how much it would help to not officially adopt a single textbook at all.
If the material were being taught capably, the textbook itself would be secondary, students could choose either by price or by style or by whatever criteria they chose.
State and federal legislatures are on the move attempting to lower the cost of college by attacking the price of textbooks. Jim Minatel has a different take on how to help students save on the total cost of college. He has a nice breakdown comparing the effects of inflation on college tuition compared to the effect of inflation on textbooks. He comes to this conclusion...
So yes, while both college and textbook costs are rising faster than inflation, and certainly faster than my wages or those of anyone I know, if you want to do something real about the money being stolen from you to pay for the cost of entry for your kids into the "real world," attack the elephant in the room that costing you $4000-$15,000 a year over what "the real world" says it should. The few hundred a year you might save if textbook costs were held down to inflation rates are chump change in this equation, or beer money for our beloved, departed Tommy's Silver Dollar Saloon.
A bill that won final legislative approval Wednesday will require publishers to be clearer about prices and options for college textbooks, the cost of which can burden students and parents.
Senate Bill 365 repassed the Senate on a 17-11 vote and heads to the desk of Gov. Ted Kulongoski. It was requested by the Oregon State Public Interest Research Group and the Oregon Student Association.
Steve Gimbel, from Philsopher's playground has been writing a textbook on "a philosophy of science". He is asking readers to help him answer the question..
So what is it about textbooks that you really hate and what examples can you think of that made a textbook successful? What should I avoid and what should I try to include?
We've worked hard to find a way to make our results available to extend our service in ways we never thought of. So we are happy to announce the immediate availability of our Price Comparison XML API.
The results are the same results from our own site, in a very simple XML format. The REST interface accepts a developer key, and either a book's ISBN or EAN, and that's it! The output is easy as well, with both book information and price inofrmation returned.
We hope to see some innovative and inventive uses of our API in the coming weeks, we'll see how it goes.
To receive a developer key, simply contact us and describe your idea briefly to us.
To see more information and an example of the output, see here.
ebook Search: Focused search that only returns books available in an electronic format including, Audio,CD, DVD, PDF and other popular ebook formats.
Bulk Book Order Search: If you need multiple copies of the same book this search looks for booksellers who can fulfill orders of the same title in quantities of 2-25 . This is especially handy if you bulk order textbooks. By buying from one vendor you can save lots of money on shipping.
Both of these searches, like our whole site are ever evolving and improving. Please let us know any additions/improvements we can add to make your book finding life easier. Contact us
The sheet compares the publication cost of two books, an unidentified Chemistry book and Thoreau's: Walden.
The number of free samples produced was impressive. In this example Prentice-Hall.
provides the production costs for a 30,000 copy run. For each 30,000 books produced they have an estimated 6500 free samples. That is a healthy chunk of change going to providing something to professors for free. Of course these costs are inevitably passed on to the student while often the professor sells the desk copy back and makes money. Publication cost comparison Prentice-Hall
Steven Dutch, Natural and Applied Sciences, University of Wisconsin - Green Bay, provides these Top Ten No Sympathy Lines (Plus a Few Extra) which is a list of his answers to common student questions.
A good one from the list...
Do I Need to Know This?
You can survive without the things you learn in college. People survive scrounging out of dumpsters and sleeping in doorways. If you want to talk about quality of life, we need to be a bit more demanding.
An Inside Higher Ed article on the New Federal report that covers the "rising cost of textbooks"
People have provided many good comments on this post with different insights on why textbooks cost what they cost.
A sample from screename UCprof
It’s interesting that the GAO report showed a 6% yearly rise in the cost of textbooks between 1986 and 2004, compared to a 7% rise in tuition and fees. One wonders why congress isn’t investigating those much larger and more significant increases.
is having a tuition and textbooks sweepstakes, and the grand prize is a year of free tuition!
