Every fall, University students leave the bookstore with arms filled with textbooks for the upcoming term and school years. But often they also leave with empty wallets after spending hundreds of dollars on required reading materials.
On top of the price of tuition, rent, bills, food and other living expenses, students fork over nearly $1,000 each year on textbooks.
According to an Oregon Student Public Interest Research Group
report titled “Rip-off 101,” students spent an average of $898 on
textbooks during 2003-04, up from $642 in 1996-97. According to an OSPIRG press release, University students spent an average of $269
in fall 2003.
Chris Standish, book division manager at the University Bookstore, said prices have increased 1 to 2 percent since last year because of inflation.
But the increases make school less accessible, ASUO President Adam Petkun said.
“Textbook prices are one of the many costs that are making the price of going to school so hard to afford,” Petkun said.
The OSPIRG report put much of the blame on textbook publishers, who add “bundled” material to the textbooks and release new editions more frequently, making the less
expensive used textbooks “obsolete and unavailable.”
Half of all textbooks come with “bundled” material, such as CD-ROMs and workbooks, which 65 percent of the surveyed faculty said they never use, according to the report. Of the books surveyed, there was only one instance where
students had the option of purchasing the textbook without the extra material. The bundled software cost twice as much.
Standish said CD-ROMs don’t add much to the price of the book. He added that the CDs are more for marketing purposes.
According to the report, publishers update textbooks, on average, once every 3 1/2 years. Seventy-six percent of the faculty surveyed felt that new editions were justified “half the time or less,” and more than half of those faculty said the new editions are “rarely to never” justified. The old editions become unavailable when students try to look for used copies, forcing them to pay an average of $102 for a new book, rather than an average of $65 for a used book.
According to an OSPIRG press release, few changes were found between Thomson Learning’s 1999 edition of “Calculus: Early Transcendentals” and its 2003 edition, which sells for about $130. A used edition can be found for $20 to $90.
Standish blames the high prices of textbooks on “limited demand and a high cost of production.”
University Spanish professor and textbook author Robert Davis said another reason for the high prices is the free materials and textbooks the professors request. To compensate for those free materials, bookstores raise prices, he said.
He said articles and pictures in the textbook, as well as color, cost
publishers a great deal of money.
Another factor in the price is the used-book market. New books would be cheaper if authors and publishers were paid every time a used book was sold, Davis said.
Publishers are starting to make changes in response to the high prices, he said.
The new edition of a textbook that Davis wrote will be sold at a lower cost than the price of most new textbooks, he said, adding that McGraw-Hill, the textbook publisher, is doing this in response to complaints about textbook prices.
“They streamlined production costs and cut corners where they could,” he said.
OSPIRG’s study provided a few recommendations to keep the price of textbooks down.
One recommendation was providing the option of buying textbooks without bundled items. Other recommendations included keeping textbook editions on the market “as long as possible without sacrificing the educational content,” creating on-line editions and providing more forums for students to purchase used books.
Petkun said book swaps are a more affordable way for students to purchase books. OSPIRG has set up a Web site, www.campusbookswap.com,
to do this.
The University Bookstore is working on setting up one of its own, Petkun said.

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