College Textbooks Make our Blood Boil!!!!
Three weeks ago Steve had a conversation with a woman who works at our local high school bookstore. He asked her how often high school math and English books come out with new editions. She pointed to a shelf full of math books and said that they were close to seven years old. Hmm, seven years huh?
What new information do students get in College Algebra, Trig or Statistics that is so earth shattering that the publishers constantly need to update their editions every year or two?
Is it because most college students borrow money to pay for school and are less concerned about the cost? Or, is it that students rarely complain about the cost of text books? Or, is it that schools are profiting from this business and don’t see any reason to protect poor college students (their customers).
Who is allowing publisher can get away with this scam!?
Their newest ploy is to make custom editions for each school. This concept prevents you from selling your books as easily on eBay or Half.com. What a racket! We've discussed this issue with the head of the math department at our local community college. He's aware that we're watching.
We all ought to demand that they stop forcing students to pay ridiculous amounts for unnecessary editions. Keep the old books for a few more years and supplement with online addendums if there are major mathematic, English or scientific discoveries.
We don't want the "government" to do something about it, this is a battle that we have to fight — start making a ruckus!
If you want to save on college text books, read this comment from a web visitor:
We read about Chegg.com on your site. For those of us with children in
college, the cost of textbooks is skyrocketing. We love that the company
lets students rent the texts they need each semester and then return them
using a free UPS shipping label. The savings are enormous. The firm also
buys books for a higher price than students will get from their bookstore.
We use Chegg.com to rent textbooks all the time and I have a promotional code
that your readers can use to get a discount on their order. They just put the
code in when ordering and hit the "apply" button. For the next few weeks, the
code will give an 11% discount off an order! After that, users can still use
the code for a 5% discount. The code does not have an expiration date so it
can be used at anytime. Here it is: CC123047
I hope you and your readers find this useful.
Regards, J. Stawarz
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Comments
ISBN Numbers
You're right, it's unreasonable. I can understand why a psychology or biology text might need to be updated every 10 years or so due to new discoveries, but not why an algebra textbook needs to be updated every 3 years.
I think part of the problem is that professors are simply clueless about the cost of books. The textbook publishers send them free sample copies without prices, and the professor selects the book(s) he or she likes best. When I took a few night classes, the professor was shocked to learn that students were paying $100 for a 400-page paperback text. She had no idea the book was that expensive.
College bookstores are also overpriced. Illinois recently required that the course syllabus be available in advance, and include the ISBN number of every text, so students can buy it on half.com or from another source. In prior years, students had almost no choice but to play inflated school bookstore prices.
Some universities request that professors stay within a specific budget for books. At one private college nearby, it's $75 for humanities and $150 for science classes. That's the total, even if more than one text is required. It's not dirt cheap, but at least there is a limit.
Naturally, a lot of it is the consumer credit mentality. If you are borrowing $30,000 for a year of school, what's another $3,000 on the credit card for books?
But thanks for the info on Chegg.com! I found an $85 book I need for a work assignment on Chegg. I can rent it for 60 days for $32, instead of buying it from half.com for $45! Since it's a book I will never use again, that's a great deal!
(P.S. Wish you guys would right about budget travel more! I just finished your book and it's all good but the travel tips are GREAT!)
This is really difficult to
This is really difficult to dealt with
in terms of one's purposes in revising most of the books and leaving
the old editions behind. We are a lot of spending some money and
producing a lot of wastes. But in order to explore and learn new
things many people are into dealing with new books because they say
we continue to discover a lot of answers. But we are all going into
stage that we cannot handle things on our own. Like we should have
our retirement plans because we don't know what lies
ahead of us.
More about Chegg Discounts
Jean Stawarz wrote back and added:
I forgot to mention that readers will also receive an extra $5 when they sell their used textbooks to Chegg and use the code. CC123047
We asked her how we others could get the discount code too. She said, "Frequent purchasers can apply for one through Chegg. It helps them to get the word out about the company."
But it is totally legal for anyone to use this code