Textbooks are a real concern for college and university students. After all, they are one of your biggest expenses. As a result, the textbook industry itself gets plenty of feedback and it’s certainly not positive for the most part. Perhaps now is a good time for understanding the textbook industry better.

 

Authors of a variety of textbooks have explained that the prices of college textbooks are on the rise for a variety of reasons. The cost of printing itself has gone up, as well as expenses across the board, which results in a higher price for you as the consumer but leaves the author with the same or even less funds than in earlier years.

 

Are you wondering what the publishing policies entail? There are many components tied to the distribution of the money you pay for a textbook. Let’s look at an example. A Math Textbook is purchased by the bookstore for $75.00. The author receives a 10% royalty on that sale so he receives $7.50, and the balance goes to the publisher, which would be $67.50. Then the college bookstore marks it up to the list price on the book of $100. The bookstore makes a profit of $25.00 where as the author receives only $7.50. You can see that the author is actually the least paid of all.

 

When you are done with your course you then sell your used textbooks back to the bookstore — they’ll give you somewhere between 20% and 50%. Let’s use our original example above. You now sell your Math textbook for 40% of the retail price. That puts $60 back in your pocket. The college bookstore sells the text again putting profits back in their pocket. After the first sale, the publisher and the author make no more money, meaning their revenue is limited.

 

 

However, the cost of publishing continues to climb and because they do not have residual revenue, they are forced to increase the price of the textbooks, which isn’t good for you. This in turn will force more students to opt to purchase used textbooks. This creates a vicious circle.

 

Student feedback on many of the forums is one of frustration as prices continue to grow. Students are usually on a very fixed income and their textbooks are one of the largest expenses. It can be quite frustrating to see that you need to purchase $500 or more worth of textbooks.

 

What’s the solution? From the publishers point of view it’s difficult to determine just what they can do to reduce their costs, and would those savings actually make it to the bookstore. One thing you can do as a student is begin to shop for your college textbooks online. This can save you a bundle of money. You can buy both new textbooks and used textbooks online. Used textbooks can be purchased saving you a substantial amount of money, and even new textbooks can save you as much a 35%.

 

The textbook industry is very much demand driven. The publisher and the author are not the ones that are making the huge profits off these textbooks. For the most part, it is the college bookstores that make those profits. Rather than supporting them, why not begin to purchase your new and used textbooks online?