Comment by rhinoceraptor
7 years ago
Perhaps if text books didn't cost $200 each, broke college kids would actually be able to afford them.
7 years ago
Perhaps if text books didn't cost $200 each, broke college kids would actually be able to afford them.
>$200 each
Sadly, you are dating yourself with that comment.
Especially when it comes to an engineering textbook. While my university's selected electrical engineering books were all sub-$500 (usually in the $300 range), most of the "core" civil engineering books were at or over $1,000. Just insane for anyone who was not on scholarship. (And this was 20 years ago!)
Surely with prices going that high the students could pool their resources to buy one copy and have it professionally scanned? It's only $1 per 100 pages.
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Has the price changed recently?
Yes, it's inflated. Looking up a selection of my engineering textbooks from junior and senior year at my alma mater, where I remember new list prices of $150-200 and used prices of $100-150 per course in books they now add up to a typical $250 list new.
However, there are a lot of ebook options now for $50-100 per course. Books that can stop working, as crazy as the linked tweet thread acknowledges. Books that will not be available on my bookshelf if I want to keep them for reference in the future.
And there's still piracy. I expect the ebooks will make this more and not less popular; a lot of pirated textbooks were...allegedly....low-quality scans when I was in college.
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