If you don’t feel a 25-pound burden pulling at your shoulders every day, then you’ve at least spent a semester or two staring at the stack of $200-plus worth of untouched textbooks on your desk. Face it. Textbooks are one of the many Catch-22 facets of college life.
We’ve been complaining about it for a while, and by mid-semester we’ve already grown anxious over having to buy a book that our Women’s Studies professor hasn’t referred to once since going over the syllabus. But asking professors to stop being optimistic and to spend more time weeding out the books that really aren’t integral to the course isn’t effective.
Everyone has some kind of beef with textbooks, be it buy-back prices, sustainability or prices in general. Which is why the Day of Action event this Thursday is so important. PIRG and the Arizona Students’ Association are rallying to make textbooks more affordable.
One of their biggest pushes is for the use of open-source textbooks. Half of us Google our required reading or study guide bullet points pre-exam anyway, so if open-source textbooks can break us from the expectation of buying physical textbooks, then by all means, let’s do it.
We’ve even seen other attempts to cut costs, like ASU Bookstores’ launching an in-store printing service with the help of Hewlett Packard in September. When the printing costs range from $20 to $40 per book, that’s a fifth of the starting cost. The digital printer at the ASU Bookstore has about 30 titles available to it, mostly books by ASU professors, but the printer expects to have a more course-oriented stock next semester.
The textbook revolution has been a long three years coming. In 2007, the Arizona Board of Regents decided to make a list of recommendations for lowering the cost of textbooks. These include encouraging professors to use non-printed materials, offer unbundled versions of textbooks and finalize their list of textbooks well before the semester starts.
We have begun to see rental options and comparative shopping options when browsing the ASU Bookstore’s website inventory. These efforts reportedly saved Arizona students and profs about $6 million in 2009. But when you consider that ASU had just more than 60,000 students last year, each putting out at least $200 per semester for books, this isn’t an impressive figure to be shared with the other two state schools.
NAU reports saving its students half their textbook costs with its Rent-A-Text program. UA established an official partnership with Chegg, the online rental company, in addition to Amazon. UA and NAU have both surpassed ASU when it comes to giving students a hand with their textbook needs.
The textbook situation for college students has been a winless battle for too long. With the right ideas and enough energy behind them, maybe we’ll finally see some changes and get out of this bind.
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