Students like freshman Jeremy Price - who pays for his own textbooks - are feeling the pinch of high textbook prices.
He's not the only one. A study from the Government Accountability Office (GAO) found the prices of twice the rate of inflation, tripling in cost since 1986. The Boston Herald reported students spend an average of $898 per year on textbooks.
"[Booksellers] are making money off of students, who are already paying crazy college tuitions, doing work study and scraping by just to stay in school," Price said. "It's not like jacking up prices of expensive cars that rich people buy _ it's college students."
But according to the GAO report, Price's ire is misdirected. Increased prices are caused not by university bookstores, but by textbook publishers, who often package their books with multiple supplements that can sharply drive up cost, such as accompanying CD-ROMs, answer keys and study guides.
Frequent revisions of textbooks also drive up prices. According to the GAO study, new editions are released on an average of every three years, often with the only changes being in layout.
Russian Professor David Sloane has had difficulty with new editions. When a new edition proved impossible to use in a class he was teaching and the older version was no longer for sale, Sloane illegally copied the older version - at a cost of approximately $500 to himself - to distribute to his class.
Sloane also bought the newer edition, which cost $120, back from students who had thrown away their receipts. "I shot a big wad, but it worked," Sloane said. "For me, it was more important that the class went right."
Sophomore Dana Peterson, a pre-med student who is paying for her own textbooks, has her own solution to the problems raised by new editions. "This semester, what I decided to do is use the old editions and just update page numbers from the library," she said. "All they do is change the layout, or the orders of the chapters; it's never new information. It's worth the extra $150 to me not to buy a new book."
The Tufts bookstore has been working to prevent new editions of textbooks from unnecessarily taking the place of old ones. "We seek out the professors that are changing the editions and tell them that the students have this book in their hands, and if you change the edition, it's going to take half the money away from the students," Tufts Bookstore Manager Ron Gill said.
The Tufts bookstore has made efforts to offset the higher prices set by the publishers, Gill said. Since he became manager in 2001, the bookstore has increased buyback options from less than $10,000 to over $300,000.
Last year alone the value of books bought back increased 75 percent, Gill said.
In order for the bookstore's used-book business to succeed, professors must submit their reading lists for the next semester well in advance. If the bookstore knows a professor will be re-using the same text, it will buy back the text at half-price from the students, and sell it again the next semester at three-quarters of the original price.
The bookstore partnered with the Student Center in an effort to encourage more teachers to submit lists of textbooks.
The buyback growth "is directly attributable to the student center and our partnering with the professors and the department chairs," Gill said. "It really has been a marriage."
Although the number of professors delivering their lists on time has increased, according to Gill, many lists are still not in by the due date. Sometimes the lists are not available when classes begin.
Many professors, however, find the deadlines to be unreasonable. For example, in order to be able to buy back books from students to be used in the spring semester, the course reading lists must be submitted to the bookstore by Oct. 15 of the fall semester - and Sloane said faculty members are often too busy to plan that far ahead.
"Faculty members are thinking, 'What am I going to do tomorrow in class? What am I going to do next week?,' rather than 'What am I going to do five or six months ahead?'" he said.
Philosophy Professor Nancy Bauer agreed. "The reason we don't submit [the reading lists on time] is not because we are insensitive to the students' concerns, but because we genuinely haven't had the time," she said.
It is the students, however, who suffer the burden when professors don't deliver their lists in on time. "Until the book has been confirmed by the professor that they're going to use it [next semester], [the bookstore] will give you, like, $3," Peterson said. "I couldn't sell my drama book because the professor hadn't decided what he was going to use yet."
Gill acknowledges that there are places to buy books at lower costs than the bookstore, but said that frequently, not enough cheap copies are available for an entire class. "If a professor has a class of 60 students and someone finds a book on Amazon.com for $20 but there's only two copies, it doesn't benefit [the class]," he said.
Gill's point is proven by a quick search online. A used copy of "The Cambridge Encyclopedia of the Sun," a textbook used in the Astronomy 10 class at Tufts, sells at the campus bookstore for $45. At Amazon.com, it sells new for only $37.80, but as of Sept. 2, only two copies were left in stock. At BarnesandNoble.com, used copies sold as low as $28.33, but only four copies were available.
Another option for professors is using course readers from Gnomon Copy, which consist of separate articles or chapters chosen by professors. Bauer, who uses course readers, does so in an effort to save students money.
"If I'm going to have students read at least a third of the material, I'll assign the book, but if it's just an article or chapter, I usually use a course reader," she said. "I ask students to tell me if the cost of a book is prohibitive, and if it is, I try to figure out another way to make that reading available to them."
Students often prefer cheap course readers to $130 textbooks. "My community health reader was $35 or 40, and it was all articles that [the professor] wanted," Peterson said. "It was far more helpful than textbooks that I barely use."
However useful course readers are textbooks from the university bookstore are still far more prevalent. And although Gill acknowledges that the Tufts bookstore is a for-profit enterprise, he says it is still interested in the needs of students. "It's not the bookstore's fault that the prices are so high, but collectively, we can do something to reduce them," he said.
