Textbook Prices Continue to Skyrocket

I dread walking into a campus bookstore at the beginning of every semester. As I move aisle to aisle, browsing the shelves, I cringe at every price sticker I see. This year, however, I was able to leave the store only shelling out a measly four hundred dollars; similar, but not as horrible as the six hundred dollars I had spent last semester. Four hundred dollars to read about the classes I’m already spending thousands of dollars to be able to attend. Who is profiting from this highway robbery? My first thought was the textbook companies themselves. They must be sitting back, laughing at students as they “throw away” thousands of dollars every year, brainstorming new ways possible for us to spend every last dime on their books. After conducting some research I’ve found that this wasn’t the case at all. At the end of each semester, new textbooks aren’t just thrown away. Students sell their old textbooks back to the bookstores in order to receive a small portion of the money they had originally spent. Then the “used” textbooks are purchased again by students the following semester for a reduced price, as compared to buying a brand new book. So, theoretically, a single textbook can be used by a large number of students before a new version of that book is ever purchased. Unfortunately for the textbook authors and companies, they only profit from the original sale of the book. Therefore, the profit from the continual sale of used books does not go to the large textbook companies, but to the small mom and pop stores on campus that specialize in new and used textbook sales. Ever wondered why it seems like a new edition of a textbook is released every semester? To combat the loss of profits due to used book sales, textbook companies pressure their authors to update and revise their books frequently, or simply rearrange the chapters in the original book, in order to make students buy the updated edition. There is always the choice to search online stores for cheaper textbooks, but there are consequences for doing so. The student would then have to wait on their textbooks to arrive, which could be weeks even after classes have started. This is one reason why the majority of students go to the bookstore physically, to avoid the hassle of online ordering.

What else are local campus bookstores doing to keep us shelling out hundreds of dollars every semester for textbooks? Let’s look at an example. Say a local bookstore buys a new textbook, wholesale for $60.00, and then marks it up a humble 30% making the shelf price $78.00. When a student buys this textbook, the bookstore profits $18.00 while the author/book company, who gets about 15% of the original wholesale price, only pockets around $9.00. Now fast forward a few months to when the student comes back to the bookstore to sell their books back. If the bookstore gives the student a generous 40% of the price they paid for the new textbook, they’ll get around $31 dollars back. This is horrible! Suppose the store then sells this used book for $55.00, (which is much better than the original $78.00 price tag) they then get another $23.00 profit off of the sale of the book, which is even higher than the original profit. Now, take the cumulative profit of that book’s sale over the course of a few semesters, and you can clearly see that the bookstore ends up raking in a huge profit, while the author and book companies come out with next to nothing. So, it would seem that we are in the ultimate catch-22. We buy and sell used books in order to save money, but in doing this we are causing textbook prices to remain ridiculously high. So, when you are looking for someone to blame for emptying your bank account, skip over the textbook companies and point a finger at your local bookstore.