The Captive Market

You know how they charge an insane amount for refreshments at the movie theater? Or how a cheap, lousy cup of beer like PBR or Bud Light at a concert or sporting event costs about twice what a six pack would run you at the supermarket? Welcome to the college textbook market.

College textbooks are a lot fancier than they used to be. Some are complete with colorful supplements and computer software.

They're also a lot pricier, rising at more than twice the rate of inflation. A new report blames the price hike on those flashy new add-ons.

A Government Accountability Office report finds the average student spends nearly $900 on textbooks and supplies.

At a typical public four-year college, that's 26 percent of annual tuition and fees. At two-year colleges — more likely to attract low-income students — the bill comes to 72 percent of tuition and fees.

Publishers say their new products aid learning and help overworked teachers. But critics say publishers are gouging students by "bundling" on unnecessary add-ons. They also accuse publishers of undermining the used textbook market by updating editions — even in subjects that change little, like Latin.

It's a short article, that could have easily been expanded to include recent efforts by Congress to eliminate price gouging in the textbook market. As a recent university grad, I'm pretty much an expert on this.

I took numerous courses in my five years in which I decided early on not to buy the textbook. Here are just a few.

My Biology course last term

Computer Science 101

Lifetime Fitness

Human Sexuality

Roman Empire*

Intro to Political Thought**

Interestingly enough, in many of these classes I did better than I did in courses where I bought the book. For example, I got a B+ in Lifetime Fitness, and a C+ in General Psychology, which I did buy the book for. (I think I spent at least sixty bucks on it; the professor was kind of a hippy nut job, and it was my first term in college, so go figure.)

And, like the article says, the textbook industry absolutely adds bells and whistles that have nothing to do with learning the material, and the frequent new additions absolutely undermine the used textbook industry. Since when do they need to issue a new Calculus textbook? Astronomy I could understand. But a new English literature survey? Trust me, folks, there has been nothing written worth reading in a textbook in the last ten years, and there has been nothing discovered about Don Quixote in two hundred years that is of any interest to sophomore literature students.

So, if you're a student, what can you do? Well, you can do a couple of things. The first is to do what I did: be selective, and don't bother buying books that you know you won't use. It may take a while for you to figure out what you do and don't need, but if you pay attention to the syllabus, you'll have a better idea of what you do and don't need.

Here are a couple more tips for screwing the textbook companies.

If one of your mates is in the class with you, or took the class before you, borrow or share their book, including the cost. It takes some coordination, but if that coordination can save you twenty or thirty bucks, it's probably worth it.

If you can, avoid the campus book store. There are alternative sources of textbooks, such as Half.com, Amazon, or Overstock.com. If you use the latter, you encourage them to make more commercials starring Sabine Ehrenfeld, who is gorgeous.

Unfortunately, there are going to be professors out there, many of them self-important jerks teaching general education classes, who will make it impossible to do well in their class without the precise prescribed book. In that case, you're going to have to suck it up and buy the book. Fortunately, I encountered very few of these professors, and I've even encountered professors who make it as easy as possible to get inexpensive textbooks. Professor Benstein, who had written a short textbook on the Holocaust, even had it published through the Anti-Defamation League, and made almost nothing on its sale because he knew that students pay so much for textbooks.

Normally I don't like to encourage people to stick it to the man, but to paraphrase a line from Apocalypse Now:

The textbook industry is out there operating without any decent restraint, totally beyond the pale of any acceptable human conduct.

The solution? OODA Loop the hell out of them.

* I later bought this book for $10, which was about seventy dollars off the cover price, at a used book shop.
** I already had a copy of 1984 by George Orwell, and you can read any of the Socratic Dialogues for free on the Internet, so that probably saved me about eighteen bucks right there.