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Bout time textbook companies were investigated

Originally posted by: CorporateRecreation
Seriously, textbooks are outrageous
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That's why after my freshman year I stopped buying them.

My sister has a single book next semester which will run her $250+.
 
I think it's a three way between the publishers, the bookstores, and the professors.

A professors doesn't need to have new editions every year for many subjects. A few lines added into a textbook don't qualify as a new edition. And giving you a $15 trade in on a $60 (when new) book and reselling it for $45 is freaking robbery.


Bah!
 
"We have a revision diary that's hundreds of pages long for that book -- we invested $300,000 of research to change it," said Rohm, referring to the Calculus 101 book that Connolly held up at a news conference in Portland on Wednesday.
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that's only because you assholes intentionally don't edit for spelling! i've never seen as many misspelled words in ANY regular book than i have in a standard law textbook. oops, we spelled it "judgement"... we'll have to fix that and print a new edition! i have a case brief book for the previous edition and not only are all the cases exactly the same, but they are in the exact same order!
 
What I hated was buying a brand new textbook at the start of the spring semester and taking it back to the bookstore at the end of the spring semester and being told that they weren't buying the book back because they were using new editions in the fall. THE FREAKING BOOK WAS JUST STARTING TO BE USED DURING THE PREVIOUS FALL SEMESTER!
 
book prices aren't that bad for me... they are for intro classes, but the upper level classes have reasonably priced books imo. then again, i usually buy off the internet if the retail price is too high.
 
Originally posted by: Queasy
What I hated was buying a brand new textbook at the start of the spring semester and taking it back to the bookstore at the end of the spring semester and being told that they weren't buying the book back because they were using new editions in the fall. THE FREAKING BOOK WAS JUST STARTING TO BE USED DURING THE PREVIOUS FALL SEMESTER!
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Not like you were missing much. The most I've seen them give back is a dime on the dollar
 
Originally posted by: datalink7
Yah, I spend $250 last quarter on books.

They offered me a total of $1.00 (no joke) to buy them back.
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Damn, my school buys them back at 1/2 the price they sell it at. Thats not too bad I suppose..
 
my book store is giving 50% of the retail price for the books now. So that means i get, what, $62 for my freshman physics book? What a rip. I will just infront of teh book store and sell it to some incoming freshman for $90. I know, a used book for $90....but hey, i need money too.....
 
I just kept all my books after my first semester. They weren't giving enough on the trade-ins to make it worth my time. What really stopped me from taking them back was a brand spanking new book (which we hardly used in class anyway) that I bought for the fall semester: I paid ~$90 for it, they offered me something like $15 or $20 for it, then turned around and sold the used ones for $60 or $70 :|

Nate
 
I was taking an A+ cert class and on the first day the instructor told us "DO NOT INSTALL THE CD THAT CAME WITH THE BOOK!" I guess if you did you would never get the program out again. Also, he said that a lot of these companies just buy programs from gradstudents and just assume that they work.


 
Actually overseas, they sell the same books (sometimes without the bells and whistles) for fraction of the price, with a label that says "do not reimport into the US"
That has to stop.
 
Originally posted by: SuperTool
Actually overseas, they sell the same books (sometimes without the bells and whistles) for fraction of the price, with a label that says "do not reimport into the US"
That has to stop.
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That's how I got my $110 brand new Calc book for $40 including shipping from England. That's because the publishing companies don't bribe and artificially inflate the costs to rape college students over there.
 
Originally posted by: Passions
Half.com, learn it, use it, stop whining.
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I started getting all my books there last semester. I save at least $40 per book. And I'm normally buying $120+ engineering books.

This semster I paid $220 for my books through Half.com. If I bought from the bookstore, it would have been $341.
 
Here's a summary of the spring semester book breakdown for my school (Georgia Tech) for you to compare with. BTW, our textbooks are outsourced to Barnes & Noble on campus.

Bought at beginning of semester:
ELMASRI, FUND.OF DATABASE SYSTEMS - New Price: $89.10 Used Price: $66.85
WICKENS, INTRO.TO HUMAN FACTORS ENGINEERING - New Price: $107.85 Used Price: $80.90
I managed to get both books used for a total of $147.75 at the beginning of the semester. Some people aren't so lucky and end up having to purchase the new ones which would have cost $196.95 altogether.

Sold at the end of the semester:
ELMASRI, FUND.OF DATABASE SYSTEMS - Buyback Price: $44.50
WICKENS, INTRO.TO HUMAN FACTORS ENGINEERING - Buypack Price: $0 - NEW FREAKIN' EDITION BEING USED IN FALL!!!

So as we can see, $103.25 + 1 now useless doorstop was my total cost of my 2 books for last semester. It should be noted that the DB book was like-new when I got it, hardly a scratch on it while the psych book looked like it had been dragged behind a car for 5 miles. In comparing the 2 books:
- The DB systems book had 3x as much material, was written by a professor at my school, and was more recently published.
- The psych book was a couple hundred (200-300) pages long, felt like it was written by a grad student who didn't do any research of his own and cited everything, and looked like it had last been published in the 80's. Psych book, which sucked, cost almost $15 more than the DB book and wasn't worth a single penny of that.

techfuzz
 
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