Comment by LeifCarrotson
7 years ago
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.
Pirated textbooks are better than the ebook even. I wonder how they are sourced, because they are clean proofs even with markings where the binding obscures the pages when printed as a textbook. Must be from someone with access to those raw files. Plus, they are PDFs, and not clunky slow ebook files of varying proprietary format and offline availability.
Textbook prices correlate with federal loan amounts. Publishers probably take the same % of that loan limit to price their books, so ironically the tools designed to help make education affordable are being exploited to make education unaffordable.