Why are textbooks so expensive to purchase, and resale on them is a joke.?

Answer 1

Its a scam.

Answer 2

There's two markets going on here - a pre-semester purchase, and post-semester sale.

The prices are so high at the start of a term because:
1) There's usually no competition at a school's bookstore (unless you count Half.com, overstock.com, etc), which means there's a monopolistic supplier.

2) There's an absolute demand for these books - the bookstores have access to school records for enrollment, and so know how many to order (except when you have a large number of students sign up at the last second), and you NEED these books. You can't get through the term without them. Hence you'll pay whatever is asked. Hence, we have inelastic demand.

At the close of the term, we have a very different market:

1) The demand for these textbooks by the bookstore is small because a) new books come out all the time and supplant what you just bought, b) there's no guarantee this book will be used next term, c) there's no guarantee that class will be offered next term, d) Anything used is worth less than anything new, especially if there are CDs or such involved. Hence we have very elastic demand.

2) The students, as the source of supply, have absolutely no use for most of these books (intro to sociology doesn't help a CS major, although progression courses like Calculus or literature are usable in several classes and may be kept for reference afterwards), and so are willing to accept cash for less than what they purchased. We therefore have an inelastic supply that exceeds optimal supply, thus the price falls.

Some student bodies have set up unofficial textbook bazaars. For a fee (usually $8 to $10 each) students can enter the bazaar with their armload of books, each goes to a respective subject area (Agriculture, Physics, English, Arabic, etc) to buy whatever book they need and sell whatever they don't. The price is not rigidly set, but rather determined by what each is willing pay or receive. I'm told that you can find some true bargains about half an hour before these close down (sheer desperation). See, in this way, the buyer pays less for the book than the bookstore charges, and the seller receives more than the bookstore pays. Voila. You should do this, seriously you'd make a good chunk of change.

Answer 3

Textbooks are generally sold at the campus book store who sell them to you for list price. Why? They are a monopoly. Why is the list price so high? These books have small print runs and the fixed costs of galley setting, editing etc. have to be spread over a limited print run, generally under say 5,000 copies and in some cases less than that. By contrast, a 2 million print run of Stephen King's latest means that the fixed cost per book comes to, oh say 75 cents leaving lots of room for discounting off a 19.95 list price.
Now the other problem is that in academe, knowledge changes quickly and therefore these books are likely to undergo revision every couple of years or even sooner. This means that the tome you shelled out $80 is now obsolete. No wonder the resale is so low.
The best thing to do is to see if you can buy the book on line from Barnes and Noble or a similar company and see if you get a better deal. You may save a couple of bucks but don't hold your breath.
The best thing that you can do is to take comfort in the knowledge that your degree will earn you a higher paycheck and that you will see a definite return on your investment.

Answer 4

A lot of textbooks are written by professors teaching that particular class. There is only so many published and who knows when it might become out of date. They get money while they can. Same goes if it's a publishing company that has written the text book. The resale is a joke. With the way they go out of date so quick and also they find new and better material it's a wonder why students get any money back plus, the book stores only want so many used books back because they make more money off a new ones.

Answer 5

There are several reasons why textbooks are expensive.

I am a college bookstore manager at a small college. We do not receive as big as a profit as you may think. On average after shipping, we only mark up four to five percent. The publisher charge the bookstore based on quantity. A larger school ordering in large quantities is paying less per text and thus making a bigger profit.

The big publishers, Thomson Learning, Pearson Ed, and McGraw Hill supply instructors with liberally with free desk copies and Instructor materials. The cost of these materials often gets passed on to the consumers. Factor in marketing, publisher rep visits to campuses and luncheons to promote schools to adopt their texts on top of the research and development and writing of text books-- the costs sky rocket. People with multiple PhD’s don't spend a year putting together a textbook for chump change. Knowledge is an expensive venture. The textbook market is a very competitive business.

Publishers are now updating and changing editions regularly to hinder the used textbook market. It is sort of a gamble to pay premium prices to buy back used textbooks. So students are thrown five or six bucks for a text that then spent $98 on. In the use resale market's defense, there is no guarantee that the edition that they are buying back from you will still be in use for any specific time.

I would recommend that all student hold on to the textbooks that pertain to their major for future reference down the road. I know the sticker price for your books is hard to swallow and I have been in your position myself

Answer 6

They're expensive for a couple of reasons. First, there are a lot of text book authors for any given subject. Therefore, the cost of printing and distributing a textbook is very high, because they are generally done in smaller runs. Also, textbooks have high overhead costs, such as researching the subject, fact checking, etc. The resale is so low because textbooks generally become outdated very quickly (due to new editions, etc.), which means that there is some risk in buying back used textbooks that is compensated for by offering a low buyback price - in most cases schools or outside companies will buy back a book, regardless of whether it is going to be replaced by newer edition the following semester.

Answer 7

Textbook Publishing is one of the biggest rackets of all time. Here's how it works, a company publishes a textbook (Marketing 2005 for example) and sends a free copy to every professor in the nation that might possibly teach that subject - no joke, and the professors are not allowed to resell those free books. To recover the cost of this kind of marketing, it charges an arm and a leg to the students. But here's where the business gets sweet for them, the first year a book is on the market, the only choice the student's have is to buy the book new. Second-year students, however, will have the chance to buy used books. So what do companies do to keep students buying new books, they purposely make their books obsolete after one year! They publish Marketing 2006 (with only minor changes from 2005) and cease all production of Marketing 2005. The professors get a free version of Marketing 2006, so they don't have to worry about buying full-priced books. Professors who do care about their students finances may still be stuck because they can't find one source that will guarantee that every member of their class (maybe 200 students) will find Marketing 2005. So they make Marketing 2006 the required text for the course. That is why their is no market for used text books. The only way to beat this trend is to go to a small college. Small enough to care about the student's needs and be flexible with different students reading from different versions.

Answer 8

They are expenseive because all textbooks are small publishing runs (they print just a few). Every college wants to use books written by their own professors (as much as they can). Academics live in a "publish or perish" atmosphere. If they don't get things published they don't get tenure. So, many professors write textbooks that have already been written by someone else. Resale is a joke because their is no real market for them (except the next semester students). College bookstores don't need to offer more than they do, because no one except other students (small in number) want the old books.

Answer 9

For much the same reason as anything else.... profit!

One reasonable scenario is: Bookstores at colleges and/or educational departments at colleges have a business relationship with book publishers, where they are provided free or reduced teaching materials for the faculty/staff/department in exchange for consideration of the publisher's text as the curricula for the class/dept. Schools see this as a cost saver and readily accept.
The caveat is that only the most recent version of the text can be used. So each year/semester, the colleges faculty/staff/department agree to receive new materials, thus pushing the older materials for the students into a state of obsolescence.
Long story short (too late), the materials you buy this semester are no longer the current materials for next semester, which means that your resale value is nil. Also, because of the new requirement, there is no used market for books to drive down the prices and no competing factors to keep prices down (i.e amazon doesn't tkae a book waiver or your scholarship form). This means that the only option for you to buy your required text book is to pay full price for a brand new one.

You gotta love free enterprise!

Answer 10

Textbooks are expensive because of demand for them. Most professors require them for classes, and also require the latest version, therefore students have no choice but to purchase them no matter what the cost. As far as reselling your books, if a newer edition is out or about to be released, no one will want to buy your older version. Many colleges will offer little or no buyback for a book that will not be used soon (the class is only offered once a year or something like that), or if the book is for an obscure class that many people don't take. Also wear and tear on the book comes into play. Bookstores who participate in a buyback have to consider how much they will be able to resell the book when calculating how much to give you on the buyback.

Answer 11

Textbooks are so expensive because they don't sell a lot of them. You can get a Harry Potter book for $15 because they sell millions of them. To make a profit, they have to sell the textbooks for an arm and a leg. However, for the bookstores to make money, they buy your books back for $5 and sell them for $70.
I've given up on selling textbooks back to the school bookstore. I put them up on Amazon.com or half.com now. I don't make a profit off the sale, but I may only have a loss of $10-15 rather than $50-60.