College Book Writers are Stealing your Money

 

 For years now, college students have been paying hundreds of dollars out of their hard-earned money just for them to purchase books for their specific classes. That’s just a small amount of money thrown atop of the few thousands of dollars that they are already paying to attended these college classes. On average students are paying around 655 dollars on textbooks a year, per the National Association of College Stores (NACS) (Zekri 2). For some people, like me, who are paying for both college and books by themselves, without any financial aid or scholarships, with their hard-earned money are struggling. By making college textbooks cheaper and or implementing a rental system through the school’s bookstore could help everyone who needs to purchase these expensive books for less money.

            Many, if not all, college students would rather not have to pay hundreds of dollars for a certain textbook, especially if you must pay for multiple books. Some of these students have more important things to spend their money on rather than dropping all their money on books. Most students work part time jobs after their college classes and use that money to pay for everything. Some may have more important things to put their money into, like supporting their families, or even children. Others may have to pay for bills, and even for transportation so that they can attend their classes. Making these books cheaper would help all the people who need to spend their money elsewhere.

            Paying all this money for these expensive textbooks to barely use them or not even open them is such a major annoyance. For you to be paying around a hundred dollars for these books and to only be using a select number of pages just as a reference is not worth the hassle. If this is the case for your class, which is a lot of them, most classes aren’t orientated over the book. If this is the case the professor should know how much you would use your book and inform the class whether, you would need to purchase it or not. If you are not using the book to its full potential, they should not be worth full prices to get them. The value of the book is not at the value that you would need it for.

            People who are unable to qualify or get financial aid and have no scholarship money should have another way for them to get college textbooks for free or a discounted price. Some colleges around the United States have started programs within their own colleges to help students who are struggling or even students who don’t want to pay the inflexed amount of money to buy textbooks elsewhere. The school’s bookstores hold a rental program in which students use their school’s IDs to rent their books for low cost or to the extent of being free. If their rented books are damaged or lost the students account will be charged with the equal amount of money to replace or fix the broken one.

            On the other side of the argument, a small group of people or even an individual, work through countless hours to print and write multiple volumes and editions of all these textbooks. These people have worked so hard to make a textbook with all the required information and can keep it organized, and up to date. They only make around 18 cents out of every dollar spent on the books. The company that they use to print and publish their books take the other 82 cents to cover all the other needs that are needed to print even more textbooks. (Segal 2). By lowering these prices, it would cause the writer of the textbooks to not make anywhere near the money they are making right now. It would cut their income almost in half if textbook prices would go down.

            Lowering the prices on college textbooks would help every college student with their thousands of dollars that they will be placed in debt for just attending the college to get their degree. By simply creating a rental program within the school, may save students a few hundred dollars of their hard earn cash.

Work Cited

Esposito, Joseph. “Why Are College Textbooks So Expensive.” The Scholarly Kitchen. Society for Scholarly P`ublishing, 10 October, 2012. https://scholarlykitchen.sspnet.org/2012/10/10/why-are-college-textbooks-so-expensive. 14 February, 2017.

Segal, Matthew. “A federal higher education advocate explains why college textbooks are so expensive — and what we can do to change that.” Business Insider. Business Insider Inc., 24 August, 2015. http://www.businessinsider.com/why-are-college-textbooks-so-costly-2015-8. 14 February, 2017

Zekri, Iman. “Textbooks Should Be Free Through A Bookstore Rental Program.” Eagle News. Florida Gulf Coast University, 7 February, 2016. http://eaglenews.org/opinion/textbooks-should-be-free-through-a-bookstore-rental-program/. 14, February, 2017