Why does the price of textbooks come up every year?
Textbooks are a valuable resource for students. They supplement and enhance classroom instruction, provide a common intellectual platform, offer additional references and perspectives, and are excellent review tools. Students are rightfully concerned about the price of textbooks, but sometimes the issue is not price, but value. When textbooks are integral to a course, and faculty teach and test from them, the book is seen more as an investment and less as an unnecessary or forced purchase. Other significant reasons are (a) sticker shock (b) frustration when books aren’t used in class in the way students expect them to be used and (c) students are living on student budgets; they don’t have a lot of cushion in their bank accounts – every dollar counts. Additionally, textbooks are free for most students until they reach college. If their book-buying experience is limited to paying $9.95 for a paperback, having to buy three or four $80 or $120 texts is a shock. After paying a substantial t
