Every year, without fail, college textbooks always burn. Not literally of course, but in the financial sense. Textbooks are a substantial and costly investment for the typical college student, and a visit to the Boston College Bookstore at the beginning of each semester brings along an unshakable sense of foreboding as to how much one's books will come to this semester. It is indeed disheartening to view the total of your semester's books on the cash register, and you then, bewildered, hand over payment; a simple swipe of your credit or debit card, and you are left frustrated at the hole these textbooks have burned into your account. Recently, it seems as if everything has been increasing in price: first the costs of gasoline, groceries, and now even textbooks have not escaped this economic trend. While the others can be attributed to the current weak economy, can the same be said of college textbooks? Why do they cost so much?
Somebody must be to blame for the outrageous prices. The truth is that textbook pricing is much more complex than one would be led to believe. Nowadays, there are numerous options for students to obtain their reading material for classes that are more cost-effective: used textbooks, books on-reserve at the libraries on campus, and systems such as WebCT or Blackboard Vista to which professors post readings and articles rather than having the students purchase a particular text.
Dale Herbeck, professor in the communication department, whose course Communication Law discusses issues concerning college textbooks, alludes to the problems that are plaguing publishers in today's society, where the used textbook market may be having an effect in increasing textbook prices.
"In some ways there's this ominous parallel to file-sharing with music," Herbeck says. "The problem is that publishers are businesses, and they have to make money. The way it works is that a company such as Nebraska Books will take a book that sells for $80, they'll buy it back for a quarter of that, usually $20, sell it to the bookstore for $40 and the bookstore sells it for $60. So now think about it: You're my publisher, Communication Law is a large course, and they've never sold a book to BC. They're not selling BC books because of the used market, people are putting copies of books online, and professors are using WebCT. How do publishers respond? They up the prices on the books because they know they're only going to sell them once, and they bring out editions more often."
Now here's an idea that begs closer inspection: The used textbook market and other alternative, and cheaper measures may just be killing the new textbook market, and publishers are forced to compensate in order to turn a decent profit.
Herbeck's analogy to music file-sharing puts the problem in a much more understandable context. "It's not that I want to be an apologist for the publishing business," Herbeck says, "it's just having watched this process now, though, I kind of see why the publisher, every year, charges more for the book. It's because at some point, there's some fixed costs, so that someone has to go through and edit the book. You pay a flat fee for the pictures, so you've got some cost that you've got to get out of your book."
The new management of the BC Bookstore, the Follett Higher Education Group, provided a further explanation of complexities of textbook pricing. Cliff Ewert, vice president of public and campus relations, says in an e-mail: "Publishers either set at retail price or sell them to us at a cost to which we add our margin, which is industry-standard pricing. The average industry profit margin on new textbooks is 22.5 percent, and the average profit margin on used textbooks is 33 percent; these numbers help cover all of our bookstore's operating expenses." He says that one of Follett's goals is to "increase the availability of used textbooks, which will save students 25 percent over the new book price. Ewert continues, saying "In addition, we [Follett] can offer 1,000 textbook titles as eBooks, which are around 40 percent less than the hardbound version. Through our faculty newsletter, Acumen, we communicate with the campuses we serve on how publishers, faculty, and the bookstores can work together to control prices."
Despite these assurances, textbook prices have driven BC students to locate other sources that will not be so harsh on their pockets. Victoria Farrell, a French and history major and A&S '11, admits that she hardly ever goes to the Bookstore anymore because of how ridiculous prices have become. "I don't spend more than $100 on textbooks, that's when I go online. I go to the Bookstore and get the ISBN numbers, and I take on-reserve course books out of the library all the time," she says.
On the flip side, many students buy textbooks from the BC Bookstore simply out of convenience. Rohit Joshi, CSOM '12 and a possible finance major, didn't really explore any other options, but he's open to doing so in the future.
"I went to the Bookstore for textbooks, and I went about half-and-half for new and used," he says. "I think I spent close to $500, I think it was something like $440. In the past I've bought all my high school books online because there just weren't that many, but here there were so many books and they were already laid out at the Bookstore. But if there was a place where I could get them on campus or online, for cheaper at least, I would definitely do that. Electronic textbooks would be a bit awkward for me, just because I'm so used to having textbooks, but I think eventually that's what it's going to come to in 20 years."
Unfortunately for BC students, textbook pricing is part of what Herbeck termed a "vicious cycle" where there is no "easy solution because everyone blames everyone else. Publishers blame the bookstores and the used book sales; the Bookstore I'm sure is going to tell you it's those darn publishers who charge so much; students are going to say I don't know who's doing it, but why does this book cost so much?"
Students also are lost as to a solution to this problem. "I thought the Bookstore was just profiting a lot, but someone told me they're not, so I don't know why they're so expensive," Farrell says. "The system just seems screwed up because every book shouldn't have to come with a CD, a workbook, and everything you're not going to use. I want to find those people who are file-sharing; I want in on that."
Other students don't see an alternative to the high textbook costs. "I mean I guess it's unfair how much new textbooks cost," Joshi says, "but I don't really know what else they can do about it. I think the economy's to blame for how high textbooks are priced."
Ewert says that "textbook inflation for the past 12 months has been at 6.2 percent, which is consistent for the past five to six years. The slow economy has not affected the price of books. According to the National Association of College Stores, the price of a typical textbook (as reflected in the costs paid by the college stores to publishers) has increased by an average of almost 6 percent a year over the last six years, another factor adding to the concern about textbook prices."
Who knows if there is an immediate solution to this problem, just as there seems to be no immediate solution to the lagging economy.
Ultimately, it's up to each and every student where they choose to get their textbooks from, but these alternatives may just be complicating the problem even more.
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