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“Well, I’m sorry to bother you, Peter, I know you’re busy,” my mother said on the other end of the phone. “You sound a little preoccupied.”
She could probably tell by the tone of my voice that I wasn’t in the mood to talk. When she called, I was smack dab in the middle of “The Real World: San Diego” — clearly not the best time to try to get my attention.
“But Dad and I thought it was best to call you right away because we’re a little concerned … we just want to ask you about this credit card bill. Somehow you managed to spend $500 in one store?”
Suddenly, whether or not Randy should take a cab to pick up Robin from jail didn’t seem so important anymore.
“$500?” I thought. “What could I have possibly spent $500 on?” My mind raced as I racked my brain for any big purchases I’d made recently. My small arms business is cash only, so it couldn’t be that. And I have a separate credit card to feed my online gambling addiction, so it wasn’t that, either. Did I have any pending real estate transactions with checks that hadn’t gone through?
It was only when I picked up my smoothie off the history book I use as a coaster that I realized where the money had gone: I used it to buy my schoolbooks!
Unfortunately, I’m not the only Pepperdine student who can’t start a semester without dropping half a G on “required materials” for class. College textbooks are notoriously expensive, and just about every undergrad across the country – whether they pay $30,000 a year or $3,000 a year – complains about the problem at some point.
It’s not every undergrad who does something about it, however, which is why the California Student Public Interest Research Group is so refreshing. According to a Feb. 12 Los Angeles Times article, this student activist group may have dealt the first substantial blow in the war against textbook price inflation.
The group conducted a study at various California colleges, asking faculty members about their view of textbook prices. According to the article, many faculty members “believed that publishers had driven up costs by releasing unnecessary new editions. More than three-quarters of the faculty members surveyed said that, at least half of the time, the new editions were not justified academically.”
Anyone who’s tried to sell his or her books back to the bookstore, only to hear, “Sorry, we’re not taking that anymore,” has felt the effects of this phenomenon. New editions push the old ones out of the market, even though many professors believe the new editions don’t have any revisions or additions to make them worthwhile.
To make prices even steeper, “the survey found that half of the new texts purchased by students had come bundled with additional instructional materials such as CD-ROMs and workbooks,” according to the article.
Thus, the perennial question — “how does it take $95 to make a math book?” — gets answered: book publishers are ripping you off. (Maybe you shouldn’t have been so snippy with that woman behind the counter at the bookstore after all).
The downside to this realization, sadly, is that it’s a lot harder to convince the book publishers to lower prices than it would be to convince the campus bookstore to do so, right? Wrong. Thomson Higher Education, part of the $7.8 billion-in-sales-per-year publishing giant Thomson Corp., has done the unthinkable: they made textbooks affordable for us broke college kids.
Thomson does this by making “reduced” books, with fewer photos and less color. Some of the books will be unbound, sold in loose-leaf binders, while others will be sold without the accompanying CD-ROMs and bells and whistles. One good example is “American Passages,” a U.S. history text. At original wholesale price, the text would be sold to retailers for $70. It would then most likely be sold to students for $90. A reduced copy of the book would go to bookstores for $22.25. The savings, Thomson assumes, would be passed on to the students.
I certainly hope so. Any drastic price changes in the textbook industry would be too late to help stuff my wallet — I’m graduating this year. But a real change will be a welcome relief to anyone who’s ever had to pay an exorbitant amount of money for his or her books, just because of the principle; high-priced books were, to most students, a wrong that constantly needed to be righted.
Thomson has finally done just that, though the company claims that the low-cost book idea was just an effort to be sensitive to the needs of the customers. That may be true. But if inflated-price textbooks can be considered an attack on education in general, then a price drop is more than just a nod to the customers. It’s also an investment in the future and in the educations of those who will make it bright — an admirable move that is, sadly, far too rare nowadays.
Submitted February 26, 2004
MALIBU, CA
