The Back-to-School Boondoggle

The "Thrift Notes" version of this blog:

Academic publishing houses bankrupting students with the high price of new textbooks Some alternatives to financial ruin are out there e.g. thriftbooks.com Back to School promo' code, giving you 15% off used textbooks until Aug 16th, 2015. Code is TBTEXTBOOKS.

For those of you that want extra credit:

Studying Management Science? International Media and Communication? – Take a deep breath and prepare yourself for college textbook sticker shock. Books in these fields and others, particularly medicine, will run you well over $100 a pop; some even stretch into the thousands! Textbooks costs outstrip the rise in the cost of higher education (and pretty much everything else) and no student is exempt from the big book bill. How much does The College Board recommend you put aside for text books this year? $1,200.00!!! So why, and are there any ways around it?

Big publishing

Academic publishers have a captive audience. You want to pass the course? You have to buy specific books. To what lengths academic publishers will go protect their position was well illustrated in June this year, when McGraw Hill saw a twitter campaign backfire on them. In a very transparent attempt to drive up new text book sales and ridicule the market in used text books, they offered $100.00 to tweeters to offer up anecdotes on dumb things students have found in second-hand books. Pretty much instantaneously their feed was inundated with angry tweets from impoverished students decrying publisher greed. (Some of them are downright hilarious, #usedtextbookproblems.)

Professors don't focus on cost

Why should they? Almost every college campus has a story about professors insisting you pay extra for unpublished research papers they authored themselves. True, but they have been hired to impart their expertise and in the upper levels of academe, bleeding edge theory can be individual, brand new and unpublished. Coming down to earth a bit, they're not the poor sods footing the textbook bills, their priorities are to provide you with the best materials at their disposal and too few of them factor in cost.

Publisher cost

According to the National Association of College Stores, for every dollar spent on new textbooks, $0.78 goes to publishers. Given the complexity of producing textbooks, and the extent of editorial work involved, it's got to be a lot more than a romance novel. However, with a handful of major publishers controlling the industry and an increasing trend for new editions to be published every three years as opposed to five years, prices have gone the way of the New Horizons space probe. Getting those publishers to open their books on the breakdown of costs isn't easy because they're defending turf, and the only party in the equation who has no say in this is you; the student. Actually, that's no longer true. Increasingly, power is coming to the people.

Your choices

Concerned groups have pioneered the concept of "open textbooks." The concept grew out of the open educational resources movement and provides freely accessible, openly licensed materials used by both professors and students. This can lead to 70-80% savings over traditional new books, but concerns linger over coverage and the long-term sustainability of "paying" contributors by grant, creative royalty schemes, or sometimes paying them nothing.

E-book versions of new text books are frequently cheaper. Not enough to justify the fact that they cost a fraction of their physical counterparts, but they are cheaper. However they're riddled with drawbacks. Mathematical equations don't lend themselves to variable font sizes and pinching and zooming; and neither do images with text overlays. More than a decade into the e-ink revolution, the most reliable formats are basically "scans" of a page from a physical book. Additionally there's no ability to sell the product to the next student, once an exam has been sat.

Which brings us neatly to the second-hand market and used text books. College bookstores can play the spoiler by holding off the release of reading lists until 2 or 3 days before class starts, playing havoc with your shipping requirements, but that notwithstanding, the savings are here and plain to see. Each of these examples, at the time of going to press, from pediatric dermatology, to electronic science, to volumes on solid state chemistry - even more modest guides to speaking colloquial Thai, have price on their side. Apart from the last example (84% off) each of these is well over 90% off the list price. Even if you're lucky enough to study within the literary canon you're going to find everything well represented here and at discounts that are routinely over 70%. Currently Thrift Books has a live coupon on the site (TBTEXTBOOKS) that is good for another 15% off, until Aug' 16, 2015, so anyone not looking for what they need here, first, could be throwing money away.

Read more by Hugo Munday