Bundled Books Add A Bundle

To College Textbook Costs

By Nancy K. Crevier

College is costly, and not all of it is the price of tuition, fees, and room and board. Costs that lurk beneath the surface rise to ambush students and their parents even before the enrollment process is completely underway. College visits, outfitting a dorm, calculators, computers, and books ring up the tab more rapidly than many families anticipate.

By and large, though, after the dorm room is equipped — including a computer, now a necessity for most college students — it is the cost of textbooks that takes college students by surprise.

The University of Connecticut website suggests that students plan on spending $725 for textbooks in addition to tuition and room and board. Quinnipiac University in Hamden estimates a student will spend on average $800 on books and supplies each year. At Eastern Connecticut State University in Willimantic, the website recommends that students set aside an additional $1,112 for books each year. A University of Colorado at Boulder student should budget $1,698 a year for books, and at Macalaster College in St Paul, Minn., the yearly cost of books and supplies is estimated at $1,710.

The estimates are fairly accurate, according to bookstore managers at state schools. Siobhan Tivnan, textbook manager at the Quinnipiac University bookstore in Hamden, said that depending on the major, incoming freshmen will spend about $700 the first semester on required texts, and a bit less in subsequent semesters.

The assistant manager of the WestConn book store in Danbury, Nicole Parkhurst, said that students there will average between $400 and $900 on books per semester, with those who choose a business or science major incurring the greater costs.

When students are spending $20,000 to $45,000 a year on tuition for higher education, the amount spent on textbooks may seem like a drop in the bucket. But according to a 2005 US Government Accounting Office (GAO) report, the cost of textbooks has tripled in the past two decades. That cost is primarily due to the packaging of supplemental materials with textbooks, said the report. And it is that kind of nickel and diming that aggravates parents and students who must pay the ever-increasing prices, not to mention the frustration at buying textbooks that go unused or become obsolete in the next semester, barring the student from reselling a book that could easily have cost them $100.

$100 Books

In the last two semesters, NHS graduate and Northeastern University sophomore Liz O’Connell has spent at least $800 on books, said her mother, Karen O’Connell. That number would be higher had her daughter not been fortunate enough to find several used copies of textbooks she needed. Her daughter has also taken advantage of the university bookstore’s buyback program, reselling textbooks that she does not need. “She really gets very little back on them,” said Ms O’Connell, “but it’s better than nothing.” Buying books online would probably be an option her daughter would employ, she said, if Liz knew far enough in advance what texts would be required.

“Everyone at school feels [paying so much for books] is a rip-off,” is Kate Sullivan’s take on book costs. She is a freshman at Notre Dame in Indiana, and a 2006 graduate of Newtown High School. Many of her books were in the $100 range, she said, and while her total cost — $500 the first semester and a bit less for the second semester purchases — was about what her mother, Connie Sullivan, expected, Kate still felt that the prices on many of her textbooks were too high. Especially for the sciences, Kate said that used books are hard to come by at Notre Dame. After forking out the money for a costly book, Kate especially did not appreciate that some courses required her to read only one or two chapters from the book.

Another 2006 NHS graduate is Jill Tanner. Jill is in the Health Services Program at the University of New Hampshire, and many of her books the first semester were science-related and expensive. “I spent over $500 the first semester, but then, because some of those books were for full year courses, I got away with spending only $150 the second semester,” she said. She and her roommate decided to share a book for a music course both were enrolled in this spring, so she was able to cut her book costs a little bit in that way. “I didn’t try to sell back any of my books. I heard it’s hard to get any money back. The college tells you that you can sell them back for a lot, but my friends that did only got about $10 for a book,” she said.

One of her biggest outlays of money for textbooks was for her anatomy class. “It’s a huge text. It came with a lab manual, extra picture books, a CD, stuff like that, all together. My nutrition book was all packaged with things, too,” said Jill. Of the extraneous material, only the lab books were truly used, said Jill. “I think we might have used the disc with the anatomy book three times.” For Jill, bundled textbooks do not seem practical.

  At Miami University in Oxford, Ohio, Sarah Salbu, a freshman there, said that she spent $700 over two semesters on textbooks. She had somewhat expected to put forth a lot of money for books, having been forewarned by her NHS senior year teachers, but even so, said Sarah, “It was still offensive.” Her book costs would have been even higher, she said, but Miami University lists all course books on line early enough that she was able to purchase books through amazon.com and other websites. Sarah, a business major, had some high-cost books that were used so little she could just as easily have referenced them in the library, she said. “The worst thing, I think,” said Sarah, “was a CD I had to buy for $70 and only had to use for the identification number.”

Buying The Bundle

The GAO report further suggests that because students are required to purchase books at costs substantially higher than their counterparts in other countries, and because the increase in textbooks is largely due to publishers packaging textbooks with CD-ROMS and other student supplements that may not be useful to the student or that can be accessed otherwise at little or no additional cost, the amount of money students spend on textbooks is greater than it needs to be. Publishers, on the other hand, said the report, say that packaging materials in a bundle is in response to instructor demand.

The position of the State of Connecticut, and other states, is that faculty and publishers must work to reduce the climbing costs of textbooks at the college level. In a 2005 report from the Board of Governors for Higher Education for the State of Connecticut, the Connecticut Taskforce on the Cost of College Textbooks included “faculty members should know the price of textbooks they select for their courses in advance of ordering them; college and university bookstores should establish a process by which information about the prices of various textbooks will be provided to faculty members; faculty should be encouraged to use textbooks for multiple terms or years; the practice of ‘bundling’ course materials should stop; the college or university library should have on reserve at least one copy of each textbook used in each respective course; and bookstores should provide students who resell their used books with larger prices for their books and should resell those used books at reduced cost,” among other recommendations to aid students in reducing the amount they must spend on textbooks.

The State of Connecticut has stepped in over the years to slow the escalating cost of college textbooks. Since 2001, state sales tax has not been charged on any texts or material required or recommended for a college course. And last year, legislation required publishers to inform faculty of book pricing prior to professors ordering a text for a course. Whether faculty has used that information to help students save money is yet to be seen.

 While faculty awareness of book costs and student awareness of Internet resources that offer reduced-cost textbooks are factors that can drastically offset the cost of books, the National Association of College Stores points out that after store expenses have been met, a college book store is lucky to make four cents on every dollar of a new textbook. It is not the college bookstore that is profiting from the increase in textbook prices.

Publishers, too, protest that they are not marketing books in a manner that brings them huge profits. According to a recent Associated Press report, publishers say that each edition of a textbook is only viable for four years, costs only $52 on average, and that it is because content changes so rapidly that new textbooks are required so frequently. Publishers can only recoup their investment in the initial year that the book is offered for sale, and that number is limited, affecting the profits earned by the publishing company.

What can students and parents who feel burdened by the increasing price of textbooks do? Buying used books, reselling books to college bookstores, and shopping online are all alternatives to the high cost of stocking the dorm bookshelf. The National Association of College Bookstores reports that only 23 percent of college students presently buy their books online.

Textbookx.com, half.com, and bigwords.com are online sources for college textbooks at reduced prices. International textbooks, which can be substantially less expensive, can be accessed at bestbookbuys.com or amazon.co.uk. At collegebookswap.com, students buy and sell used books from each other.

The cost of producing books will not decrease in the future, but how instructors and students approach assigning and purchasing books can change. With teacher/publisher/student/government cooperation, one of the hidden costs of higher education can become a less sore point for all.