High book prices reason to rebel

When the parents and grandparents of today’s college students step into university bookstores, they often grumble while retelling their memories of paying outrageous money for their own textbooks.

The high price of textbooks has always drained pocketbooks and fueled suspicions of a conspiracy among professors, bookstores and textbook publishers. If any generation can put a stop to what often feels like textbook gouging, it could be the generation now in college.

These young people balked at the high price of music CDs and so started swapping music off the Internet. This practice can be illegal and young people who do it and get caught pay for their misuse of intellectual property, as they should. But the boldness got the attention of the music industry, forcing it to alter some of its more expensive practices.

We are not encouraging young people to steal copyrighted information off the Internet to use in their classrooms, but we hope their generation rebels against rising textbook costs in a way that gets the attention of those who can make changes.

A July 2005 Government Accountability Office report says that textbook prices increased by 6 percent a year between 1986 and 2004. This was twice the rate of inflation. It will cost the average college student $900 a year to have the necessary textbooks. This is a burden for students from all socio-economic levels, but those most hurt are the low-income students at risk for dropping out of college as costs rise and rise.

The problem has many sources. Many professors already look out for their students’ pocketbooks when selecting textbooks. But some assign their own books, even when the material isn’t necessarily relevant, as a way to boost personal sales.

Bookstores often bear the brunt of the anger at rising textbook prices, and they don’t always do the best job of explaining to students, and their parents, why books cost so much. Nor do they volunteer ways to lower the total bill, such as buying used books.

The GAO report was especially critical of textbook publishers who sometimes update books simply to make a previous book obsolete, thereby boosting sales. Or they “bundle” the textbooks with additional material that sends prices even higher. The Association of American Publishers called the GAO report incomplete and biased.

Ultimately, the marketplace itself will force change. An Arizona high school issued laptops to all of its students and will not use any printed textbooks.

The idea seems revolutionary, but a few years from now, textbook-free classrooms could be the norm. And students of this generation, when they are parents and grandparents, will have to find a different memory to grumble about.