By: Mia Rotolo
If you thought that the rise in cost of college tuition was bad, the rise in price of textbooks is even worse. Lately it seems every “cheap” website for college textbooks is still way too expensive. Jordan Weisemann wrote in his article, Why Are College Textbooks So Absurdly Expensive?; “Academic Publishers will tell you that creating modern textbooks is an expensive, labor-intensive process that demands charging high prices” (Weisemann, 2013).
But the amount that college students pay each year for textbooks is through the roof. And some of the books remain untouched throughout the whole semester. Plus it seems that every semester, a new edition comes out for college textbooks and of course the teacher makes you buy that one. In a CBS News article on the highest prices of textbooks, they found that the most expensive textbook is sold for more than $1,000.
Who has the money to spend that much on one college textbook?
Buying books for college classes is inevitable, so students should know where to get the best price. The price of textbooks is compared between ones from Amazon, Chegg, and the Concordia University Chicago bookstore through Barnes & Noble. A simple college-level chemistry textbook is compared. From Chegg.com, (which is thought of as a cheap substitution to the school bookstore), a used college-level chemistry book is sold for $141.99. That same textbook is sold through the university bookstore for $97.30. From Amazon, that same used textbook is sold for $56.83.
When looking at several other textbooks sold through these websites, it seems that Amazon most often has the cheapest price. Different Amazon users sell their old books for cheaper prices than they bought them for, which could be the reason for the discrepancy in price. There are some cases in which Chegg or (rarely) the school bookstore has the cheapest price, though.
College textbooks can be very expensive and overpriced (as if college tuition wasn’t enough), so as a word of advice… Be smart, and do your research on several websites to find the cheapest option for school textbooks.
