Are college textbooks over priced? If yes who is to blame?

Question

Who jacks up the cost on the books?
The publisher?
The Author?
The bookstore?
Someone else?

Answer 1

Most textbooks have a very limited publication run and then there is the cost of marketing them to professors and teachers. Also many of the books are resold so new ones are not ordered and then when the books are changed, the publishers and bookstores are left with a lot of unused inventory. Also authors don't work for free, but never earn the kind of money from their work that a popular sci fi writer would.

Basic economics.

Personally, I would like to see them all on E-books which would save money and trees.

Answer 2

Publisher is mostly to blame since they feel a need to release a new edition every 1.5 years because they dont make money if schools are using a lot of used books. So they try and sell as many books as they can by releasing a new edition every 3 semesters.
Bookstores also jack up the price to "cover costs" which I think is b.s. I started buying all mine on half.com and my textbooks are about 1/3 of the price that I would have paid at the campus bookstore.

Answer 3

Oh, hell yeah. I spent $1,000 on books one semester in grad school, and that was after a 20% alumni discount.
Its probably the fault of everyone:
1) The publisher - based on supply and demand. How many books of a particular title are sold in any given year? 100? 500? maybe 1,000?
2) The professors - Because each professor has a particular preference, they influence the price through supply and demand by choosing their preferred author instead of choosing widely published authors.
3) The authors - why from one semester to the next did the edition of my Operations text book change? Was there that much extra knowledge available over the course of a semester in the field of Operations Management that a new edition of the textbook was necessary to capture all that additional knowledge? I doubt it.
4) The bookstore - Hell Yes. They are the only ones (other than maybe an online resource) that will carry every title and every edition required by every class offered by their faculty that semester. They know they are the only game in town and milk it for all its worth.

Answer 4

text books are over priced and it has to dso with all listed above. The publisher raises the price because every few years there needs to be a new volume of the book eventhough it hold the same information as it's predecessor. The author helps with the price because they get paid on the amount of words they write. The book store with their mark up so they can make a profit, and the middle men like shippers, truckers, suppliers of raw materials and so on.

Answer 5

No they aren't over priced. Considering what you are getting for your money. These books tend to be better made (meant to take abuse of being carried around and written in) than the average paperback book. If you buy your books used you can get a better deal, but look through the book to see how written up it is first. Some people put good notes in the book, others just write (like one of my sisters she wrote her boyfriend's name all over the place).

Answer 6

I think it's hard to deny that the university bookstores jack up the price some because they are so conveniently located.

Answer 7

Hell yes!
I'd say the all of them plus the colleges!