Where To Buy Used Books Online
Why are books are so expensive?
Chegg is the #1 online textbook rental company that saves students tons of money & plants a TREE for every order.
In the early 80's, textbooks for computer science and math courses regularly ran about $50. Now they run about $100.
Try to find a copy of the book on reserve at the library. Some schools have requirements that every textbook required for a course had to be on reserve at the library - sometimes multiple copies for large classes - to make sure that students who could not afford the books were able to complete the assignments.
Alert: Campus book stores don't always have the book in stock. Teachers should make sure there is a copy on hold at the library available only for limited check-out (hours usually) and if students don't have books they need - send them to the reserve desk at the library.
Some library's do not like to put textbooks on reserve because they disappear and students sell them back to the store. Or, text books can be made illegally into pdf files and shared among students.
Where you may have problems getting books - sometimes the teacher will put the relevant parts on the website like homework assignments and we were told to use previous editions for reference until the book came in.
For popular textbooks, check "AddAll.com", which lists the best available prices for used books (you have to click on "used books" to see them). Used copies are often offered at much less than 50% of the new price.
A similar source is isbns.net
Why are books so expensive?
Authors are encouraged to update every 2 - 3 years because all the following expenses can be incurred and prices kept high. In addition, in order to say they are current, a CD is often produced. People really aren't using the CD. In some subjects, frequent revision may be necessary, however a book for Basic Spanish cost $200 book. The language has not changed all that much in recent years.
Economics of College texts circa year 2000
* Authors are paid an advance on royalties - depending on your reputation, sales history, and agent, that could be as little as $4 or $5K to $10-15K.
Royalties were often 5% of net from retail sales, less on other sales. (typically worked out to be about 2.5% of cover price)
* Technical editors/reviewers are paid - usually a per-page rate around $1.
* Content editors are paid - either contract at around $3 a page, or in house salary.
* An indexer is paid - $800-$1600 a book
* Copy editors are paid - either contract or in-house.
* Someone designs the cover graphics and any illustration graphics the author doesn't produce
* Additional administrative overhead is allocated to the title
* Sales costs are allocated to the title
These books and textbooks typically have small production runs - 4 or 5,000 a first run on an untested book/author/topic, but more for something like the 5th edition of Internet for Dummies.
All in all, it would frequently cost $100,000 or more to put a book on the shelf.
There are certainly plenty of choices in books for the computer science curriculum. Given that the enrollment even in large schools in courses with a high enrollment count (intro to csc type courses) are fairly low, you'll be lucky to sell more than 100 at a given institution. Multiply that by how many institutions actually choose your book, and your potential audience is quite small.
The break-even price becomes quite high, and of course publishers aren't in business to simply break even.
Add to that, textbooks don't age well, particularly in time sensitive areas such as Computer Science. English Lit? Not a lot has changed in the study of Austen. Many programming topics are changing faster than even quick-to-market publishers like O'Reilly can keep up, let alone textbook
publishers. "The market" often demands "freshness" in their titles, whether the material has substantively changed or not - a textbook written more than 2 or 3 years ago is unlikely to sell well, hence the trend toward frequent edition changes - which brings a new round of expense in updating, editing, and producing.