How the Textbook Industry Rips Off Students

Buying college textbooks is an unnecessarily painful experience. For decades, the multi-billion dollar textbook industry has been ruled by large publishers who generally try to extort students semester after semester.

The internet has brought a lot of innovation and competition in the textbook industry. It has dramatically improved the efficiency of the used textbook market and created new trends such as textbooks rentals. These things threaten textbook publishers because students end up buying fewer new, full-priced books.

However, textbook publishers have responded with various tricks to force students to pay full price:

New Editions

This is the oldest and most obvious trick. Publishers sometimes release a new version of a book every semester. In all but the most cutting-edge fields, this is entirely unwarranted. The underpinnings of most subjects do not change frequently, and publishers know it. New editions often only have altered headings and refreshed dates. Unfortunately, they may also have different page numbers and practice problems, making it difficult for a student to use an older version.

Professor-Authored Textbooks

There are, of course, some cases where a professor is a true expert in his/her field and should be writing his own textbook. However, in most cases there is no legitimate reason for your psychology professor to be writing his own book. Instead, he was offered a deal to publish own book because he has a guaranteed clientele consisting of his own students. This creates a monopoly and the student only has one place to buy the book (the campus bookstore). It also severely limits the resale market to only those students taking the same class after you (if you're lucky and there isn't a new edition by that time).

Class-Specific Textbooks

This is similar to professor-author textbooks, but even sleazier: the textbook publisher offers to create a "custom" book for a specific class at a specific school. They take an existing textbook, and ask the professor which chapters he/she wants to teaching from that book. Then they publish a whole new book only containing those chapters. They knock a few dollars off of the price of the original book, and market it as a better deal. But once again, this forces you to buy the book from only one place and reduces the resale market for your textbook to nearly zero or actually zero.

Textbooks Bundled With Workbooks or other Supplementary Material

Many textbooks now come with something like a workbook either bundled in a plastic package with the text or actually bound to the text. If your class requires the workbook, you will probably be forced to buy the package new, at full price. Once you break open the package, the value plummets and you may not even be able to resell the textbook at all.

eBooks

eBooks may sound like a great idea for students, but they will probably become another mechanism for publishers to exert control on the market. It's not (legally) possible to buy used eBooks nor is possible to resell them, so the final cost may be greater than that of a printed text, even if the list price is lower.