Textbooks

Look out, sleazy used-car salesman jerk face, there's a new swindler in town. And he sells textbooks.

Allow me to explain with some reader participation: Examine a textbook and compare your findings to that of a regular book. [SPOILER ALERT: Answers ensue, so please do not read further unless you've completed your book comparison.] Most likely there is a cover, there are pages, there are words -- perhaps even pictures if you're lucky -- on those pages, and, well, that's about it. So, where does the price gap between that $24.95 regular hardcover history book and the $89.95 textbook that covers virtually the same material and timeline earn its justification? That's what I'd like to know.

Yet anyone who has been a student on one end of a textbook transaction knows the madness doesn't end there.

While the textbook prices are outrageous, the buyback cash offers bookstores extend to desperate students are arguably even more outrageous. Buy an economics book for $120 and sell it back to that bookstore four months later for $8. Here's a better idea, student: keep the economics book and read it again, primarily focusing on the chapter about profit gains and losses. You're welcome.

Fortunately in this tech-savvy age, students can try maximizing their textbooks' resale value on the net. Amazon, eBay, Craigslist, and a plethora of other sites allow customers to sell and buy directly to and from each other. It's a win-win for students -- but a loss-loss for textbook companies.

But, of course, they're fixing that.

Apparently in recent years, textbook companies have weaseled a new factor into the mix: access codes supplementary to new textbooks that "unlock" additional material online. Obviously if that material is desired -- or, worse, required -- a used textbook without the access code may as well be a baby booster. Since when do you need a Game Genie code to tap into the secret treasures behind a textbook's material? Isn't that what the textbook is for?

If there was ever a time Congress should involve itself in the marketplace, textbook vending is it. Seriously, lawmakers, step away from verbally barbecuing the steroids-jacked ballplayers for a second and help a few college students out with this colossal dilemma. It's not really an issue where the consumers can boycott and say, "We don't need your textbooks," because actually, yes, they do need those textbooks.

Teachers/Professors (since I know you frequently refer to this peer-reviewed, scholarly blog), I implore you to stand your ground and consider the ridiculousness imparted by these textbook companies. Why update your class curriculum around a new textbook version every year or even every other year? Wastefulness aside, how much sense does that make with the basic truths and logicality within your class lessons? How many updates since the first edition of your chosen textbook have been made to the botanical process of photosynthesis? Or to the assassination date of Abraham Lincoln? Or to the calculations of a circumference? Or to the published works of any dead author? Is that new, colorful flowchart in the 17th edition really worth asking your students to purchase a brand new textbook? Be thrifty, man, they're college students. They need the money for booze and regrettable tattoos.

In college I had a math professor who did his part in refusing to exacerbate this problem: he wrote his own textbook. "Yeah, but lots of professors do that -- and those are the same textbooks that sell for $100." Sorry, let me clarify: he wrote his own textbook independently. In pencil. And ran his own copies of his pencil-written textbook on standard printer paper and sold it out of the college bookstore for $10. Even copyrighted the darn thing. Now that's a problem-solver. Which is fitting for a math professor.

Obviously, I'm not proposing every employed teacher/professor grab a sketch pad and a mechanical Bic and draft his/her own textbook, but I think every teacher/professor -- like every textbook publisher, bookstore owner, and congressman -- should look at the insane, exponential price-gouging behind a stack of continuously reversioned textbook pages, priced like they're turkey sandwiches at an airport, and think to themselves, "Do students and parents really deserve this?" like my math professor did.

Your move, everyone else.