A Brief History of the College Textbook Pricing Racket
One point that is often undiscussed: what defines a textbook has expanded greatly. It used to be that a textbook was just a book. But now a textbook is the book plus a huge collection of other resources, most of which the student never sees. A modern textbook includes tests with answer keys, a teaching guide that a grad student TA can use to teach an entire course, flash cards, supporting videos, handouts for class, online exercises, etc etc.<p>The dirty secret of modern textbooks is that there has been a huge arms race in developing material that makes it easier to teach a course with less work. I don&#x27;t really think that truly benefits students, since most of this material isn&#x27;t for the student, it&#x27;s for the professor (or more cynically for the free labor of grad students used to do a lot of the teaching). But you can&#x27;t sell a textbook these days without it. I wish there was a universe in which you could sell a simple Psych 101 textbook for $50 and have that be that. But the market won&#x27;t adopt a simple book like that without the myriad of extras. And since the market here is wonky, meaning the person making the decision (the professor) doesn&#x27;t bear any of the cost (and might in fact benefit if it&#x27;s her book), we end up where we are.<p>This isn&#x27;t to say that the whole new edition thing isn&#x27;t worth criticism. Or that there aren&#x27;t all sorts of things wrong with the industry. But the percentage increase you see in the cost of a textbook for students doesn&#x27;t just equate to the same percentage increase in the profit margin of textbook publishers. They&#x27;re not just making the same product from 40 years ago and jacking up the prices 1,000% as the article implies. The product is a whole different beast.<p>(source: I sit on the board of my family&#x27;s textbook publishing company)