A fight over the price of textbooks
You see what Alex feels about Howard Dean? That’s how I feel about congresswoman-turned-publisher shill Pat Schroeder.
If you aren’t in college and don’t have college-aged kids, (or private-school-attending kids) you may not have noticed, but textbook prices have soared in recent years. There’s no reason for it, really, except that the publishers can make a lot of money selling $100 textbooks to college students. I asked a couple of students here, and the cheapest textbook they have is about $60. It’s a paperback.
This is exacerbated by something that again you may not have noticed. In the last five or ten years, it’s become commonplace for publishers to issue new editions every year or two, rather than wait four or five years as they once did. That way, students can’t buy used textbooks and/or can’t sell theirs back to the bookstore.
Crying Pat thinks this is just great:
But Pat Schroeder, president and CEO of the Association of American Publishers, said it was important to bear in mind that authors and publishers profit only from sales of new books, whereas bookstores profit each time they resell a book.
“It sounds like we’re the ones that buy them all back,” Schroeder said. “We don’t.
“There are many major publishers, and they’re all competing,” she said. “What they’re doing is what the professor ordered, and they say these [extras] are needed. They are the customer.”
It’s all the miracle of competition! That’s why the book that costs $10 to make costs $100! That’s why the CD that costs fifty cents to make can’t be sold separately! That’s why they change the text every year so they can guarantee ever bigger profits! It’s competition!
Sounds like Pat needs to read some economics textbooks. Maybe she can take out a loan.
(Registration possibly required. Use email address mac@warliberal.com, password warliberal.)
2 responses so far ↓
Green Baron // February 1, 2004 at 8:03 am
Well, you’re the first liberal I’ve seen decry Pat Schroeder and well, good. I was hoping because of her liberal viewpoints as a Congressowmen, she might actually give a damn about students in College. I graduated in 2000 (a month before I jopined the Army) and I remember how much they cost me.
I had a Marketing Professor who tried to find every way he coudl to make teh book cost for hsi students minimal including photocopying a book he would use sparingly. I wish more Professors were like him.
Mac Thomason // February 2, 2004 at 8:52 am
It’s not the professors that are the problem much of the time. The ones here have been told (not in so many words, but this was the implication) that they shouldn’t do that and should “encourage” students to buy the textbooks. Most of our students are lower middle class.
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