Opinion

Academic Money Pit

Textbook scams are too common

By Christine Guerette

Posted on Sept. 29, 2005, at 12:00 a.m.

Textbooks are the bane of my existence as a college student. They’re heavy, boring, expensive and generally useless. Textbooks are like the weights on the chains of my learning experience. Quite frankly, I’m sick of having to sell an organ every time I have to attach a new book to the myriad volumes I already own.

I’d say the one thing I despise most is bundling. The government has been doing it for years, and the publishing world has caught on. Bundling is the process of adding study guides and instructional CDs to your textbook, then requiring that you buy them as a shrink-wrapped package. In other words, bundling is a devious scheme to take your money from you in exchange for a nearly worthless circle of polycarbonate and the remains of some poor tree.

Has anyone ever actually utilized these bundled materials? Do the professors make references to them or make them a part of the curriculum? As far as I have experienced, most professors make practically no use of the actual text, let alone spare a thought for the study guide or informational CD with the code that lets you access the website.

I don’t need the web site, and I don’t need the study guide, and nine times out of 10 I don’t even need the book to get above a B in these courses. I still don’t know why I buy them. Perhaps I think, maybe this time I’ll need the book and this material and there will be relevant information in it that will help me understand the content of the lecture. But every time I’m disappointed.

Aside from bundling, these publishing corporations like to release a new edition every other year as another method of gouging money out of the buyer. I understand new editions for classes on the cutting edge of technology, the sciences that are really moving forward like sensors, quantum physics, and genetics, but I’m pretty sure there’s nothing new going on in basic physics, biology, geology or chemistry that require a new text with this much frequency. God knows no one needs to make another edition of “Typhoid Mary,” “An Interpretation of the Latin Classics” or “A Guide to Plato’s Republic.”

Have they found a new type of rock? Is there some sort of new cell organelle that students of biology just have to know about? Seriously, did they find a new element? A new molecular geometry? Have they proved physics wrong? No? Then why make a new book? If all the major information in the first edition is going to end up in the second edition with little change and no new breakthroughs, why make us spend more money?

The cost of tuition is rising faster than inflation, especially at state universities, and all I need in life is to add a five-to-six-hundred dollar expenditure to my bill every semester. I don’t have that kind of money. I can’t even afford things I need to buy, or want to buy, let alone pump cash into this monetary black hole.

Textbooks are sold cheaper and unbundled in other countries, so why are they so expensive here? Apparently we can handle the cost. And don’t imagine we’re subsidizing these cheaper books for poorer people, because the only thing that’s happening is that the publishing companies are getting as much more pure profit as they can.

I say boycott text book buying. They can’t flunk us all.

Christine Guerette is a fiery redhead.

This entry was posted on Thursday, September 29th, 2005, 12:00 am. You can follow any responses to this article through the RSS feed.