04-13-2008, 11:05 PM
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| Junior Member
Join Date: Jan 2008 Location: Ohio Gender: Male
Threads: 28
Posts: 168
| Why Do Textbooks Cost So Much?
Via Minding the Campus: Quote:
Why Do Textbooks Cost So Much?
By Charlotte Allen
You've just started your freshman year in college, so one of your first stops is the campus bookstore to pick up your textbooks. You signed up for Econ 101, where your professor has assigned one of the top-selling basic textbooks in the field: Harvard professor N. Gregory Mankiw's 936-page Principles of Economics (South-Western/Thomson), now in its fourth edition. The price: $175.95, or if you want to throw in a study guide to help you ace the course, $209.90...
... A General Accounting Office report in 2005 noted that textbook prices rose 186 percent in the U.S. from 1986 to 2004, compared to only a 3 percent rise in other prices over the same period and a 7 percent rise in average college tuition and fees. The seemingly out-of-control price increases have prompted laws in six states and pending bills in at least four others - plus a measure passed by the House of Representatives on Feb. 7 - that aim to regulate the way in which textbooks are marketed so as to lower costs to students...
...Other enterprising students, and even a few commercial entities, have discovered that many popular textbooks sell for less - sometimes a lot less - in licensed versions in foreign countries; they re-import the international editions from abroad and sell them for considerably less than their U.S. prices to classmates and other willing buyers. Of course, such maneuvers can violate U.S. trademark laws and subject sellers to liability for damages, warns James Grimmelman, professor of intellectual property law at New York Law School. "The [trademark] law basically enables price discrimination," says Grimmelman.
That may be, but the pressure on textbook prices by the combined strategies of enterprising students and used-book websites is likely in the long run to bring those prices down without government intervention. Eventually some publisher, major or minor, will figure out ways to give students and their professors exactly what they need for far less money - and at that point the textbook market will move quickly to correct itself, all by itself.
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