Yeah the textbook cartel is outrageous. I started a textbook publishing company to fight this!
I was working on web copy describing how crazy the mainstream textbook prices are, and used the price C$300 for the calculus book, trying to be flippant (to exaggerate the competitor price to make my prices look better). I decided to check the price in the bookstore, and to my surprise the price was even higher than that! (sold as bundle: book + exercise manual + solutions manual). When your real prices are higher than the pricing people use as hyperbole, you know there is a problem.
It makes no sense—for a subject that has been around for 300+ years, and virtually unchanged for the past 100.
It only works because the educators are complicit. Most bachelors degree textbooks in basic sciences do not need to change from one decade to the next. My Lorrain and Corson Electromagnetic Fields and Waves from when I was studying applied physics in 1975 is just as correct now as it was then.
I don't disagree about the complicity. However, biology and statistics, even at intro level, have had significant updates in material covered over the last 10-20 years.
More subtly, terminology changes. My copy of Rudin's Principles of Mathematical Analysis is just as correct now as it was when it was published in 1976, but I remember one of my professors describing the terminology as somewhat dated, as of the late 2000s.
Well someone sat down and wrote a 1000 dense pages that probably took 2-5 years of their life. That deserves to be rewarded. Of course there are problems with professors prescribing their own books for the class etc. but when I went to school you could return that $300 book for $200 to the bookstore once the semester was done.
First, the authors make very little money on most textbooks. You would be shocked. The money is staying with the book publishers.
Second, they've started publishing new editions so quickly with only the problem sets changed (in general) so that students can't use previous editions. If you're learning on your own, you can get some good deals on older editions for just that reason.
And on top of that, they maintain their own platforms so that even if you buy them used, you have to subscribe to a service to take the tests! All of this lines up to finding as many ways to extract money from students and at interest after it's all said and done.
> when I went to school you could return that $300 book for $200 to the bookstore once the semester was done.
This is not my recollection at all. My recollection was that I could buy a book for $300 and sell it back for $75 if it was in great condition. And I could only do that about half the time because version N+1 would make my copy obsolete.
I was working on web copy describing how crazy the mainstream textbook prices are, and used the price C$300 for the calculus book, trying to be flippant (to exaggerate the competitor price to make my prices look better). I decided to check the price in the bookstore, and to my surprise the price was even higher than that! (sold as bundle: book + exercise manual + solutions manual). When your real prices are higher than the pricing people use as hyperbole, you know there is a problem.
It makes no sense—for a subject that has been around for 300+ years, and virtually unchanged for the past 100.