my rant about expensive textbooks

[brats800]

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i just bought books for my senior year of undergrad and it was almost $600 for all used books! $200 alone for my orgo class! there's no reason for that! 😡

*wants to go postal on the bookstore*

 

[Mike59]

Originally posted by brats800
i just bought books for my senior year of undergrad and it was almost $600 for all used books! $200 alone for my orgo class! there's no reason for that! 😡

*wants to go postal on the bookstore*

That's a drop in the bucket compared to what everyone is shelling out for med school tuition. You should be smiling when you hand over your credit card at the bookstore and if anything........thank them!😱

 

[brats800]

i plan on paying nothing for medschool, thanx to USUHS or the HPSP program 😉

nevertheless! $600 is a lot for books.

 

[mikestuy]

$600 is ridiculous for used. how many textbooks are we talking about here?

 

[themann]

Yeah textbooks are such a racket. My favorite is when you have to pay over a hundred dollars for a paperback book- why don't you just call me dirty names while I take it up the tailpipe.

 

[brats800]

we're talking 11 books. if you do the math, that comes out to getting taken advantage of 😡

 

[missmod]

for everybody who is going to need to buy books this coming fall...check out

www.amazon.co.uk

it's amazon's UK website, but for some reason, a lot of their books are a LOT cheaper than in the US. as long as you have the right isbn number, you can be guaranteed its the same version. just remember... about 1.6/1.7 conversion rate.

they have a lot of the premed science books... just have to order early so it gets here on time.

 

[Dr. Xavier]

I'm going to a school w/a new pbl systems based curriculum and the staff suggest we buy all recommended text books. My lord dats alot of money. I said f*** dat, I'm just gonna buy the brs book for the subject and use class notes. And then I went to this workshop on clinical skills and it seemed more like a high pressure sales technique to sell optho/otto, stethoscopes, and bp cuffs. Screw buying there highly recommended junk I'm just gonna get used stuff from family memebers. They even gave us recommendations on some so called "computer deals" that they were offering, shiz you could get cheaper stuff at best buys. Sorry just venting about med school. Maybe I should post this in the allo forums, it's werd that I'm no longer a premed and actually a med student now.

 

[Grumpy Bear]

Just a word of warning about amazon UK: my bf bought his micro textbook there a couple of years ago and the book didn't arrive until halfway through the semester!!!

 

[All-Star14]

Originally posted by brats800
i just bought books for my senior year of undergrad and it was almost $600 for all used books! $200 alone for my orgo class! there's no reason for that! 😡

*wants to go postal on the bookstore*

I completely sympathize with you. I paid $175 for textbooks/lab manual for physics this summer (but they were all new). I'm looking at paying around $400 more for my books this fall. But I wonder...$600 for all used books? That's alot of frickin' money! 🙁

 

[DrSal]

I feel your pain. Dropped by the bookstore today, picked up 1 physics book and the lab notebook = $200. What hurts the most, is that the lab notebook isn't even a 100 pgs, spiral bound crappy thing, and it's $40!!!! But you know what, since startin college, all these expensive books i have had to buy have made "treating" myself soooooooo much easier. I like something for a $100? I'll buy, i mean what the hell, i spend so much more on books that i'll only use for a semester/year!

 

[Garibaldo]

I wouldn't be suprised if books start to be traded illegally online like music and movies. Someone could simply take a popular textbook, scan it into Adobe Acrobat format and distribute it electronically through file distribution networks. It would take a while for someone to do this, but there are internet groups that go to great lengths to pirate quality movies, so I wouldn't be surprised.

 

[DW]

Originally posted by Garibaldo
I wouldn't be suprised if books start to be traded illegally online like music and movies. Someone could simply take a popular textbook, scan it into Adobe Acrobat format and distribute it electronically through file distribution networks. It would take a while for someone to do this, but there are internet groups that go to great lengths to pirate quality movies, so I wouldn't be surprised.

wow, thats a great (albeit criminal) idea.

 

[vixenell]

wow, thats a great (albeit criminal) idea.

So, so, true. I mean, could you imagine someone doing something like that? I mean, could you? Thats right up there with first degree murder and child molestation.🙄

Alright, if anyone just happens to have a Maitland JOnes 2nd Edition Organic Chem book just lying around collecting dust, and would like to lend/lease/sell it to a fellow broke college student, PM me.

 

[Garibaldo]

Originally posted by vixenell
So, so, true. I mean, could you imagine someone doing something like that? I mean, could you? Thats right up there with first degree murder and child molestation.🙄

Alright, if anyone just happens to have a Maitland JOnes 2nd Edition Organic Chem book just lying around collecting dust, and would like to lend/lease/sell it to a fellow broke college student, PM me.

murder and child molestation are illegal?

 

[sacrament]

The price of textbooks pisses me off too, but I can understand why they cost more than a regular book. The paper is typically much higher quality than you find in a mass-market paperback, for one thing. They are usually stuffed with photos, illustrations and charts which add up to make a book much more expensive to produce (take heavy stock paper, start printing full-color photos and whatnot on every other page, and things get real expensive, real fast). They cannot be sold for years and years on end, like a novel, so they have to recoup their costs in the short run. And finally, most textbooks are being sold to a rather select group.... the latest big novel has all of literate America as a potential customer, but the latest textbook on physical chemistry has a substantially smaller customer base. So you print fewer copies... but when you're making and selling smaller runs of a book, the price necessarily has to go up because your margin shrinks (because although you are producing fewer units, the "one-time" costs remain high). I don't think anybody is getting rich off of textbooks. (But lots of people are getting poor. 😀 )
BUT, the future surely is electronic (e.g. download your new textbook onto your laptop), which would remove the substantial material costs from the equation.

 

[Alli Cat]

No, you don't get it... the $$ isn't about the glossy paper or anything like that. For textbooks, it's all about intellectual property. For example, in my boss' Path class, the students have to buy this gynecological cytology text that probably has a print run of like 2000 per year, or less. The book costs $300, and it's about the size of your undergrad calc book. The $$ goes to pay for the paycheck of the faculty member who had to write it and take the pics. You have to be making an intellectual property revenue on each book that is a lot higher than books like your calc book, simply because much fewer are sold. Maybe the base price of the book, for the materials, is like $50/book. On top of that you can add a $10 royalty for a big run, or maybe $150 for a really small run. Either way, the author has to make his dough.

By the way, I've heard it sux to have to write a textbook, totally not worth it, so don't go getting ideas about da bling. 🙂

~Alli

 

[BerkeleyPremed]

All I have to say is that it sucks when your professors make you buy a textbook written by an author at another university PLUS a textbook that your professor wrote himself. I've had to do this in several classes and I'm not a very big of it seeing as the costs really increase when you add on the price of lab manuals, readers, etc. I'm not sure whether requiring your students to purchase the textbook that you wrote is a phenomenon localized to UC Berkeley..or whether this occurs everywhere...but I do think it is despicable behavior. Especially since there are other textbooks out there that can teach the same material just as well (and in some cases, can teach the material better) which also cost much less... Since my parents are covering all my expenses, I don't have too much to complain about except the fact that I have to explain why X hundred dollars left my account overnight each semester...