Why are college textbooks SO expensive?
A. A very good question (!), not only for students but for college bookstore managers, who often take the brunt of criticism and frustration from student customers about the cost of their books. To be brutally fair, there are several contributing factors to the high prices of school textbooks: First, a college textbook is uniquely different from the popular hard–covers and trade paperbacks you’d find at “Borders” or “Barnes & Noble,” or gracing the New York Times bestsellers list. It’s a careful distillation of all the most current, available knowledge on a certain subject, and often it’s a very narrow subject at that. Writing a textbook is an enormous task. There is simply not a whole horde of qualified writers out there who are both expert in a given subject and able to write in a way that is engaging to the student reader. Those writers that can do it are very valuable to the publishing industry. Second, today’s world is very fast-paced, with frequent advances in our knowledge of th
