It is arguably the biggest sin of the deeply flawed world of publishing. Year in and year out students are charged exorbitant prices for the textbooks that they have to have. With the average shelf life of a textbook being 2 years the publishers have a built in dependency that borders on criminal. The schools and universities are not, like the students, innocent victims. They are complicit in this madness.
If the open access movement or the digitization crowd ever needed something to rally around the textbook trade would be the place to start.
The advent of buying used books online has eased the trauma a little bit and all the major players in the online used book market are plugging the hell out of their textbook components.
Why?
In 2006 textbooks accounted for almost 35% of all used books sold and more amazingly textbooks accounted for more than 75% of the used book revenue in the U.S. that year.
Just in the last week Biblio.com issued a press release titled Dropping Prices on Textbooks Means Rising Savings for Students and the Bookfinder.com (an Abebooks company) blog had a post extolling the virtues of their service and providing a sample textbook buy where they claim to save the student 47%.
And both Alibris and Abebooks have separate textbook sections on their websites with Abebooks running this banner on their homepage:
and Alibris having this header on their homepage :
Also entering the playing field is TextBookFlix – yep you guessed it a textbook rental service fashioned on the Netflix model.
The Bismark State College bookstore has also begun renting textbooks to students. For about a third of the price of the book you can rent it for the semester. You can even highlight in it and still return it! “Students have to understand, it is the publisher raking them over the coals,” says bookstore manager Tanya Fuher. The only drawback is that instructors are not required to join the rental program. They need to opt-in for their class textbooks to be part of the rental program.
Forbes article Textbooks Take Bite From Student Budget