Why This Matters

“I can’t wait to spend over one thousand dollars on textbooks this year,” said nobody, ever.  In the 2013-2014 school year, the average American college student spent $1,137 on textbooks (Behr). Do we have your attention now?  This number has risen 82% in the last decade, and a whopping 812% in the last 36 years. These numbers represent a major problem for students, especially considering Debt.org blogger Cecillia Barr’s point that books are just another cost adding to the general debt incurred by collegiates.  Students across the country are in search of ways to save money on overpriced textbooks.  If you’re reading this, then you too are probably looking for an alternative solution to buying that $375 textbook, one which you probably won’t open more than a handful of times all semester.  Luckily for us, there are ways around dropping a cool grand on your books. 

The first step towards solving this problem is to understand it. The textbook market can be broken down into the supply side and the demand side, each of which involves multiple parties: the author, publisher, distributer, university, bookstore, professor, and students. You can already see how complicated this issue is. On the demand side, one of the major problems is that the individuals who choose the required textbook (the professors) are not the ones who need to buy and use them (the students). Central Washington University Economics Professor Robert Carbaugh compares this to the relationship between a doctor and his patients; the doctor will always prescribe the best medicine available, and the patient is more-or-less forced to buy it, regardless of cost, or continue to suffer their symptoms. Students have the fear that if they do not buy the text, they will perform poorly on the homework, exams, and other work. Unfortunately, this has led to the market becoming “price inelastic”. What this means is that students are not sensitive to changing prices; for example, a 10% increase in price has been measured to have as little as a 2% decrease in purchasing (Koch). To make matters worse for college kids, the market has become an oligopoly in the last thirty years, dominated by only a few large companies. This concentration further forces students to continue paying whatever is asked for their books. 

Surely, then, the problem of high prices originates with the publishers? Not entirely, according to Dr. James Koch of Old Dominion University, who did a study and created his own proposal as to how to alleviate the price burden. Bookstore wholesalers also form an oligopoly, and authors collect royalties on every copy sold. In the case of faculty authors, this can seem particularly unfair. Universities often profit when their professors or bookstores do, and the tendency to be unwilling to buy back used books takes away one of the students’ options for lessening the overall cost. Carbaugh claims that publishers and authors are already concerned by used book markets without them expanding even more.  One more practice is to only offer books in bundles which can include such things as solution manuals, test banks, transparencies, resource CDs, study guides, website access, and online homework, all non-optional and all further hiking the price. The web-based resources can also make used textbooks entirely useless, since a one-use access code is often required. The problem of textbook cost comes from multiple sources (as shown in the below figure from Carbaugh), so our proposed solution is also multi-faceted.