On behalf of all disgruntled students everywhere, I invite you to pay your respects to our lost and outdated friends, the used textbooks, at the Textbook Graveyard on Wednesday, March 9, at Bascom Hill. This semester, a new report, titled \Ripoff 101: 2nd Edition,"" was released detailing the ways in which students are ripped off by textbook companies. For example, a student taking a full course load often spends as much as $900 per year on required textbooks alone.
With college costs at an all-time high and the lagging pace of financial aid programs, education is getting hard for many students to afford. Expensive textbooks can add extra strain to students' already tight budgets.
More than 59 percent of students who searched for a used book for fall 2003 were unable to find even one used book for their classes, and were forced to pay an average of $37.64 more for a new book.
Once a new textbook edition is produced, the used copy is quickly made obsolete. Publishers keep textbook editions on the shelf for an average of only 3.5 years before updating them. They claim that faculty demand new textbook editions. However, 76 percent of faculty surveyed said the new editions they use are justified half the time or less; more than half of those faculty said the new editions they use are ""rarely to never"" justified.
