LETTER: Used books raise prices
Editor,
Your editorial on the cost of textbooks is in need of revision. Let’s take your question: Who’s at fault for high textbook prices?
1. Publishers? Probably less than 15 percent of textbooks on the market turn a profit. Only a few, like Samuelson’s Economics text, get so well established that they make their authors and publishers big money. But, in general, textbook publishing has one of the lowest profit margins of any business.
2. Authors? I once calculated that the money I earned for the work I put into writing a textbook came in at about 10 cents per hour. Obviously, we write textbooks because we want to improve our courses, and because we get rewarded by our departments. Few of us expect to make much money from our efforts. In fact, the majority of books on display in our bookstore are used and, unlike sitcom stars, authors don’t get anything from reruns.
3. The campus bookstore adds roughly 25 percent to the wholesale price of textbooks, but it’s hardly fair to call this “gouging students” when our bookstore, unlike many private campus bookstores, plows its profits back in to the student center. There are many, many student activities and events that are supported by our bookstore, which is staffed by some of the lowest paid, hardest-working people on our campus.
4. So why are prices so high? Ironically, given the thrust of your editorial, it is the resale market that drives up prices. There’s a huge infrastructure in place to buy back and then redistribute used books. That cost is passed on to you the buyer. Meanwhile, for every sale lost to the used book market and off-campus resellers, publishers have to jack up their wholesale prices to make up the lost revenue. Before the used book trade took off, textbooks were issued in new editions only about once every 10 years. But publishers now issue new editions in two to three year cycles to try and choke off the flood of used books. The process of revision, changing artwork, format and so on is a major factor in driving up the price of books.
I miss the good old days when the net cost to students over four years was much lower than it is now and publishers and authors didn’t see their rewards stolen by the used textbook industry.
David F. Lancy