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.
We just listed our first Textbook Buyers Guide on ebay. The list is composed of 50,000 ISBNs that are curently selling for $25.00 on amazon marketplace. The list is compiled from different sources including our own site.
The minimum bid is $100.00. The list has been very valuable to us. We use it for research, PPC marketing and much more. We are testing how much demand (if any) there is for a list of popular ISBNs that are primarily textbooks and in demand NOW.
The whole post is worth the read. This snippet provides a summary of the results.
The quick answer from this experiment is that we saw no definitive correlation, but there is little sign that the free downloads hurt sales. More than 180,000 copies were downloaded from Jeremy's mirror (which is one of five!), yet the book has still been quite successful, selling almost 19,000 copies in a year and a half. This is quite good for a technical book these days -- the book comes in at #23 on our lifetime-to-date sales list for the "class of 2005" (books published in 2005) despite being released at the end of September.
