THE REST of the nation is complaining about gas prices these days, but paying close to three dollars a gallon at the pump is nothing compared to what most of us have been shelling out at the bookstore in the past week. The sticker shock is more than enough to rival any fill-up, as cash registers from Newcomb to the Corner climb to gasp-inducing triple digits. Yet while the targets of gasoline woes are easy enough to name (from OPEC to the president, choose your culprit), the staggering costs of textbooks seems more like an unexplainable, if miserable, phenomenon.
But just in time for back-to-school season, the Government Accountability Office, at the request of Rep. David Wu, D-Ore., published a study on Tuesday about the skyrocketing costs of books that indicates that there may, in fact, be some accountability to be had.
The study found that the prices of textbooks have nearly tripled in the past twenty years, increasing at about twice the rate of inflation. Translated into your life, that means the average student is spending nearly $900 a year on textbooks and supplies, or 26 percent of their tuition and fees at public four-year colleges like the University. American families spent more than $6 billion on textbooks in the 2003-2004 academic year.
What's driving the increases? By and large, says the GAO, all those multimedia bells and whistles that come shrink-wrapped with your books. The industry name for the practice is "bundling," and textbook publishers claim that they're "increasing investments in developing supplements in response to demand from instructors." If you're thinking that you'd just as soon spend the extra cash on your rent instead of a supplemental CD-ROM you'll be using all of never this semester, you're not alone. The Public Interest Research Groups of California and Oregon conducted a study of their own in the fall of 2003 and discovered that while half of college textbooks now come bundled, 65 percent of faculty rarely or never use the bundled materials in their college courses. While learning supplements can have a useful place in and outside the classroom, the need is clearly not driven by professors but rather by the profit motives of the industry, leaving us students with a stack of very expensive coasters.
The useless computer disks and glossy case study booklets aren't the only examples of the publishing industry's gouging of student pocketbooks. According to professors interviewed for the study, textbook publishers issue a new edition of a single book approximately every three years -- for all subjects, regardless of how the subject has changed during that time period. Obviously, material in textbooks must keep pace with new discoveries, theories and ideas in the fields they address, but keeping the material up to date doesn't excuse forcing students to spend more money on a new edition of a Latin book, for example.
But what's good for students isn't good for the bottom line -- as soon as one version of a textbook becomes available used to the majority of students, the profit margin for the publishers starts to decrease, as a new books on average cost 58 percent more than their used counterparts. The survey quotes a former publishing industry executive for the Academic Press as acknowledging exactly that: "Publishers release new editions of successful textbooks every few years -- not to improve content, although that may be a byproduct -- but to discourage the sales of used books by making them seem obsolete." There's no blaming the professors in this case, either; 76 percent of faculty report that the new college textbooks editions they use are justified "never" to "half the time," and 40 percent of faculty say the new editions are "rarely" to "never" justified.
The Textbook Market Fairness Act, passed by the Virginia General Assembly this year, requires Virginia's public universities to post course booklists online so that students can comparison shop for the best prices; the new policy is certainly a step in the right direction. But empowering students to hunt for the cheapest of outrageously priced books is only a band-aid, and is no substitute for placing pressure where it is due. The price-gouging practices of the textbook publishing industry hurt students and hurt university communities, and the publishers need to answer to the students and families paying the bills.
Katie Cristol's column appears Mondays in The Cavalier Daily. She can be reached at kcristol@cavalierdaily.com.
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