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Today, I come to my classmates to lend a hand to those pocketbooks of ours. I am sure many of you have purchased your textbooks from the bookstore this semester. The same bookstore that charges outrageous textbook prices that can continue into the one hundred dollar range. For all of you today that pay for your own textbooks, I have a solution. Before I get into the solution, I’d like to tell you why these books are so expensive. At least five economic factors work together keeping prices high. No one or two of these could sustain the high prices on their own.: THIRD PARTY SELECTION 1. Like prescription drugs, a third party selects the products you must buy. In the case of textbooks, the professor or the department makes the decision to “adopt” a particular book, usually for at least three years, and price is only one of several factors considered. 2. Publishers must invest large sums to compete on non-price features and need to raise prices to earn an acceptable return. Free An-cil-laries for Instructors 1. One way publishers compete is to develop great-looking, full color books with lots of “ancillaries,” which are teaching aids given free to adopting professors. 2. These include test banks, Internet sites, and videos, which can cost hundreds of thousands of dollars to develop. A single set of overhead transparencies given to the faculty member, for instance, can eat up the profit on ten books in disciplines like Accounting. The Efficiency of the Used Book Market 1.
Approximate Word count = 990
Approximate Pages = 4
(250 words per page double spaced)
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