HOW DO WE GET THAT EXPENSIVE TEXTBOOK?
by Jackie, Shijia, Van, Yixuan
Life is
never easy for a college student, isn’t it?
When
approaching the time for thorough packing at the end of the semester, we will
find the most troublesome stuff is BOOK. Staring at these textbooks, do you
recall the scene of hesitating in Odyssey? After careful comparison with copies
online, we still walked away because of the ridiculously un-affordable price.
Why are
textbooks so expensive? Even though it does not cost hugely to enter the
publishing industry and the U.S. has antitrust laws, a relatively small
number of powerful publishers are still perceived to have monopoly power
over textbook pricing. When our professors decide the materials for their
courses, they will place orders at prospective bookstores, in our case the
Odyssey. Odyssey will then contact publishers to notify them what books to
order. Once the deal is set, the retailer like the Odyssey has the right to
increase the price of each copy a little bit for its own profits.
Unfortunately, if our professors happen to choose books whose copyrights owned
by certain publishers, then it is quite usual for us to spend over $200 for the
latest edition of a hard cover, colored, used textbooks. Sadly, since
publishers only make money when new books are sold, they also buy up the old
books and force the used book market to raise price, which makes used books
less appealing to students.
In this
case, some of us tend to seek for digital forms of textbooks instead. This
option generally costs less and is suitable for students’ tiny budgets.
Not surprisingly, as we can see, Amazon dominates vast marketplace of e-book
retailing and provides with only kindle edition to limit the use of resources.
Compared to physical books, e-books are more accessible. You can read e-books
on multiple devices such as PCs in the library, your MacBook, or even the
smartphones that you carry everywhere. However, e-books also bring about
inconvenience that keeps majority readers from using, such as difficulty in
looking up specific part of the book, distraction from redundant features like
embedded quizzes and electronic flashcards. You will find another disadvantage
of e-books when you read through this blog.
Luckily, we
can go to our beloved library and borrow a hard copy of textbook for free. From
the economics we learned, we know that each decision has an opportunity cost.
Most textbooks are on reserve and each student can only borrow one at a time
for three hours. We need to well plan this limited time period and use the book
to the fullest. Don’t be too optimistic! You are risking not getting the book
and re-plan your time, because someone might have already checked it out! Well,
“If only I had bought my own book!”
After the
semester is done, you are offered several ways to sell back your books. Odyssey
only buys back books that have been ordered from professors for the new
semester at no more than half of the original price. You can try bigger
marketplace like Amazon.com, Half.ebay.com, Textbookrush.com, where you will
find a pool of potential buyers. Compared to Odyssey, in the latter option, you
will see listed prices of different sellers and then set your own price. It
sounds like perfect competitive market where you have perfect
information, competitors perceive same prices as you do, and it is easy
to enter and exit. Faced with this elastic demand, however, you may
realize that the older edition that you possess, the less likely you are able
to sell it back. Besides, you wouldn’t be able to sell if it is an e-book!
Rationally speaking, you want to adjust your preference for purchasing textbook
next time by thinking of how will you be better off. As a supplier, your cost
is the original price you paid, the depreciation of the book, the transaction
fee charged by Amazon, and the shipping fee you paid. You need to balance the
original price you pay for and the chance of getting potential return.
In a
nutshell, we are
facing unaffordable prices for textbooks. Many of students still prefer using
physical books. We cannot change the fact that we need books to do homework,
which contributes to a fairly inelastic demand for textbooks. Thus, we do wish that the textbooks
could be less expensive. We hope there would be more open source. However, it
seems that the price adjustment won’t come soon, so why don’t we think about it
in a more optimistic way: The cost we pay for books will gradually pay off and
become our very own intangible asset, something called “Knowledge”.
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