Who is making the bills off of college textbooks?

Question

New? Used?

Answer 1

It gets divided up pretty evenly. The bookstore has a lot of overhead, including rent, staff wages and utilities. There are costs for packaging and shipping the book. The publishers, editors and authors also need to be paid. Then the printers need to be paid, and the marketers too. Nobody is getting rich off your textbooks.

Answer 2

I agree with jetgirly. In addition, you must consider the volume, or in this case, the lack thereof. The volume of a given textbook produced is small. It's in the thousands rather than the millions. Its not cheap to bind a 400 page book with illustrations and colored pictures. This also includes teacher guides, which are produced in smaller volumes. In addition, each author/publisher has to support a wesbite for additional help and information.

As for used books, that is a total potluck for the school. They buy the books back at the end of year. Do they know which book the professor may used next year? More than likely, "no." They take a gamble when they buy back books.

In fact, many schools have gotten out of the buy back business. There are companies that go around to various schools and do it for them. These companies resell the books to any university of college that wants them.

Answer 3

Directly: bookstores, publisher, author

Indirectly : Universities (get kickbacks often in the form of donations for allowing the bookstores to operate without competition on campus) This is why prices are so high.

TIP: Use Textbook411.com to buy and sell back your books, you will save atleast 50% , the site is amazing!!!!

Answer 4

The college bookstores. The college bookstore at the tech I used to attend NETTED $1.5M/yr.

For the less accounting inclined NETTED means that that's how much the bookstore made after expenses.

Answer 5

You are. You are going to be rich!

Answer 6

dont know??????????///////