Overpriced College Textbooks

Quality isn't the issue for most subjects. There are plenty of free and cheap textbooks with perfectly fine quality.For example, when I took thermodynamics in college (in 2001), I used a thermo book from the early 70's which cost me $8 on eBay (as opposed to the modern version which cost $100). I also skipped purchasing many books entirely, and just used free materials online, including this newfangled site called wikipedia.Agency costs and are the issue. The people assigning books don't h

well, it is a textbook after all. perhaps the textbook industry isn't so virulent in your neck of the woods.

my friend (a prof) told me that publishers approach her with new textbooks (the 'new' stuff is really just the changing words, numbers and units on problem sets) ... she ends up using older editions so students can buy usedi remember that in almost all of my math courses (esp the graduate courses) i wasn't required to buy books (the prof wrote pdf notes and post in on his site)i find that no-bullshit courses tend to less corrupt

The thing is the cost of text-books can vary a lot. Very often you can get a used text book, or even a new one for cheaper than advertised by going online. Students can and do share textbooks. So publishing a total price is very impractical, and if you care that much the required texts are often listed next to the course for you to look up yourself.

No idea why this is downvoted, same thing here.Ripping off students through overpriced mandatory textbooks is not a worldwide phenomena. Through CS Bachelor and Master I too have never had to buy a coursebook. The few books that were needed for extremely standardized courses like math 1-3 were available in sufficient numbers in the library.It takes two to force students to spend so much on books, a publisher can price their books anyway they like if there isnt a university forcing their st

Really, textbooks aren't that big of a deal. There's other sources to get textbooks.The bigger problems, IMO, are "homework systems" or "virtual labs" where you are required to pay a superfluous charge to a textbook publisher because professors are too lazy to grade homework. So you either buy a brand new copy of your intro algebra book for $130 and get a 'free' "MyMathLab" code, or you can just buy the code for $115. (e.g.: <a href="http://ww

Don’t teachers get rewarded for requiring latest edition of expensive textbook?

It's worse than that: many textbooks are actually subscription services.

As a student, I don't really like textbooks at all, printed or electronic. I consider them --and the supplemental materials like lecture slides provided by the publisher-- to largely be a crutch used by professors who either can't or won't tailor their instruction to the class and necessities at hand. That's not to say textbooks can't be useful when you're on your own learning a subject, but I've had far better experiences in-class with either online articles and tutorial work (think LON-CAPA) o

I completely agree with you: it's a scam.But we, the profs, don't have a lot of choice in the matter. Problem 1: we need to assign a text which is available to all students, and I can't guarantee availability of enough copies of the old editions.I'd love to use this book (http://store.doverpublications.com/0486457710.html) costing $20 for calc, but that brings up problem 2: I have to use the book the department