Send Ken To College

I have been delaying this rant for awhile but now it just must come out!  Textbooks are more expensive than they are worth!

What brought this on you might ask?  Well since you did ask, I will tell you.  I was talking to one of my instructors from whom I will be taking a software development course in the spring.  He was showing me the texts that we will be using.  Yes, I did state texts, as in multiple, three to be precise!  I wrote down the author and title of each but I seem to have lost the list so I can not even look up prices.

If you google textbook costs you will find many sites hashing over the high costs of textbooks, and even a site named maketextbooksaffordable.org that calls students to action to take steps to lower book prices.  On some of the sites if you read through the comments at the ends of the posts, you see arguments being made on both side of the textbook price battle.  US News and World Report even tells us four reasons why textbooks will drop.  Do I believe it?  Not really!

My suggestion for book publishers is to create books that are meant to span multiple semesters on a subject, such as the textbook that my calculus class used.  It was used for three semesters.  Of course by the time I was done with it there was a new edition out so there was no resell value on the used book.  I do realize that multiple semesters are not always a possibility so my next suggestion would be to write shorter texts that provide coverage of a semester’s worth of class.  I don’t know when the last time was that I ever got further than 3/4 of the way through a book.

In the Mt. Mercy student newspaper, there was an article on the campus bookstore researching a text rental program.  The only drawback seemed to be that the professors would need to use the books for three semesters.  Some of the sites I read through suggest that certain topics would not be conducive to large gaps between editions since new data emerges all of the time.  Most math and history classes I have been in really do not need new books that frequently because the stuff just does not change.

My area of study, computer science, does not always need the latest and flashiest book either.  Some classes like programming languages and database design change slowly enough that even a text a few years old is going to be quite adequate.

I generally by most of my texts used through Barnes and Noble, Amazon.com, or Textbooks.com.  I suspect I will continue to do so for the next few years although I have heard of textbook rental companies.  I have not tried any of them yet, but with a few more years of schooling to go who knows!  Anything to save a buck!