Bookstore budget battles

It’s the first week of September—my social media group chats flood with messages now that our courses’ syllabi have been released. My eyes light up in excitement as my life as a university student finally kickstarts. That excitement, however, quickly morphs into concern as some bookstore browsing unveils the hefty prices of the textbooks that my pre-college research over the summer had warned me about. 

With my limited knowledge of economics and a little bit of research, I understand that the reason why textbooks are so expensive is because publishers don’t expect more than a couple hundred sales. This low expectation is rooted in the fact that the market for university textbooks is limited to (obviously) university students. The anticipated low demand for textbooks forces publishers to raise prices because developing textbooks takes years and costs quite a lot, pushing prices to soar as high as $300. Besides involving expert input, colour production, illustration, graphics and additional software, textbooks cost an arm and a leg. The economic justification of it all, however, does not make me feel any better about spending around $300 CAD a semester for books I will only use for four months. I’m an incoming university student without a job, and so, as financially dependent as I am on my parents, the guilt weighing on my conscience as I muster the courage to ask them to pay that much money is pretty damn nerve-racking. 

As any student would (I think), I instinctively turn to a website through which I might be able to obtain the books by less *ahem* legitimate means. Eureka, I found them! Wait, but here’s the thing—I need to buy my math book through Perusall in order to be able to complete my assignments and be graded on my annotations. There is no way around it. Save my parents $138.00 CAD (sorry, no, $100.00—the class was offered 50-year access to the book by Perusall, rather than permanent access, for $38 CAD less… bless their hearts) or pass my class? The decision was a no-brainer. And, based on my Reddit research, many other courses have backed their students into the same corner as well. 

The monetization of education has always been a topic of deep frustration for me, especially considering that many students worldwide either skip out on college entirely due to lack of affordability or choose not to buy their textbooks at all, at the inevitable expense of their academic success. Alongside the correlation between financial status and college admission success, textbook prices demonstrate that education has become more of a luxury than a right. When I told my mom that downloading the textbook’s PDF off a website was not possible, her defeated reply to my question about whether I should buy the book was, “Do we even have the choice?” Heartbreaking.

I think I speak for all college students when I say, thank God for used books, rentals, and free PDFs. The decades-old stereotype that college students work on a tight budget holds true, and we are all inevitably scrambling to obtain our textbooks at the lowest price possible. Tuition costs, residence costs, meal plans, and student loans make going to university difficult enough. On top of this pre-existing difficulty, a study conducted in 2009 for the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation showed that the prices of textbooks played a vital role in many students’ decisions to opt out of college entirely. What should be part of the package deal of being a university student has evolved into a major threat to student success. Plus, the demand for textbooks continues to decline as college students use alternative ways to obtain them. As such, prices keep hiking up in order to maintain publishers’ profit from sales. And with the textbook market being dominated by only a few publishing companies, the lack of competition eliminates any possibility of price reductions.

At this point, we’re all eagerly searching for ways to deal with such exorbitant prices. I, for one, am actively looking for a job in order to alleviate financial pressure off my parents’ shoulders, especially amid an economic crisis back home. Severe local currency depreciation makes it even more expensive to buy my university textbooks priced in CAD. I know of many others who have either chosen to share textbooks with each other or work with less well-formatted—but free—versions. I feel less alone when I realize that penny-pinching is a shared experience. But the value of solidarity does not help our pockets. This is not to say that our professors have not been helpful; several professors have posted the necessary textbook/reading chapters on Quercus or referred students to rentals or used textbooks from the bookstore. The efforts of such professors have certainly not gone unappreciated. But with the limited quantity of such books, most students are left needing to buy new or digital copies for no less than around $70 apiece.

All in all, I genuinely hope that some sort of financial reform hits the education sector in the near future. With the pandemic making finances harder on all of us, it is my wish that nobody experiences unnecessary hardship. All we can do is help each other out, and keep a lookout for discounts and offers. We will undoubtedly need them.