Prices of College Textbooks

Textbook publishers are screwing students in ways that have been widely reported. I assume most readers are familiar with this scandal, so I won't go into the details. Suffice it to say that while the publishers are the chief bad guys, they are aided and abetted by teachers, most of whom don't know and don't care what students have to pay for textbooks.

The publishers couldn't get away with it if a reasonable fraction of college teachers accepted the responsibility that logically comes with their authority to choose textbooks. The most remarkable part of the scandal is how cheaply college teachers, as a group, have been bought off. A free book here, a kickback there, and it's open season on students.

To be fair, I should mention that I know of a few cases where a teacher chose an inexpensive textbook, or no textbook, because the commonly used textbooks for that course were ridiculously expensive. This proves that not all of the teachers with the authority to select textbooks are whores.

Anyone interested in the textbook price scandal should be aware of a report by the California Public Interest Research Groups (PIRGs): "Ripoff 101: 2nd Edition". The last time I checked, this report could be downloaded from the web site http://www.pirg.org/highered/. This report has been cited in many newspaper stories. Some papers, including the CSULB 49er (a student newspaper) have done additional reporting for stories based on the CalPIRG report. I suspect that additional muck remains to be raked by investigative reporters.

Of course, for journalistic balance and entertainment, one should also read what the bad guys (for example, the publishers) have to say about textbook prices.