Item — HN Reader

To be fair, this article is partially true. Now, allow me to pour some gasoline/petrol/benzine around this thread.

Have you purchased a college course required book recently?

There is a market monopoly by Pearson, Wiley,Cengage, and McGraw.

Buy the eBook, or the actual book with a CD in the back, but cannot access the pictures because the code can be use only once! (often the codes do not work at all)

Updated every 2 to 3 years, minor changes sufficient enough the break the previous versions. e.g., randomized tests, samples and alike.

Captive audience. If Jacky teaches the course, bet your bippy it is Jacky's book you will be buying, no ifs or buts about it.

I can do the same for certification. Have you seen the PMP certification book? Grey paper with gray text republished annually, meaning of words and descriptions are changes and tests are adjusted specifically to confuse on wording. Or, have you tried to by an international standard like ISO? $300 spiral binder, assigned to you, cannot be transferred.

So, are books not too expensive? Depends on the type of book.

5 comments

Yeah the textbook cartel is outrageous. I started a textbook publishing company to fight this!

I was working on web copy describing how crazy the mainstream textbook prices are, and used the price C$300 for the calculus book, trying to be flippant (to exaggerate the competitor price to make my prices look better). I decided to check the price in the bookstore, and to my surprise the price was even higher than that! (sold as bundle: book + exercise manual + solutions manual). When your real prices are higher than the pricing people use as hyperbole, you know there is a problem.

It makes no sense—for a subject that has been around for 300+ years, and virtually unchanged for the past 100.

It only works because the educators are complicit. Most bachelors degree textbooks in basic sciences do not need to change from one decade to the next. My Lorrain and Corson Electromagnetic Fields and Waves from when I was studying applied physics in 1975 is just as correct now as it was then.

I don't disagree about the complicity. However, biology and statistics, even at intro level, have had significant updates in material covered over the last 10-20 years.

More subtly, terminology changes. My copy of Rudin's Principles of Mathematical Analysis is just as correct now as it was when it was published in 1976, but I remember one of my professors describing the terminology as somewhat dated, as of the late 2000s.

They aren't complicit when the cheap edition isn't reprinted and instead it's "2nd, 3rd, revised" etc.

Universities could band together and write and publish their own textbooks. These days they don't even need to print them.

This is the kind of thing that is counted as "economic growth", too.

The considerate professors would use titles from Dover Books with supplemental reading:

https://store.doverpublications.com/pages/math-science

On the order of $10 each - small paperbacks.

Well someone sat down and wrote a 1000 dense pages that probably took 2-5 years of their life. That deserves to be rewarded. Of course there are problems with professors prescribing their own books for the class etc. but when I went to school you could return that $300 book for $200 to the bookstore once the semester was done.

First, the authors make very little money on most textbooks. You would be shocked. The money is staying with the book publishers.

Second, they've started publishing new editions so quickly with only the problem sets changed (in general) so that students can't use previous editions. If you're learning on your own, you can get some good deals on older editions for just that reason.

And on top of that, they maintain their own platforms so that even if you buy them used, you have to subscribe to a service to take the tests! All of this lines up to finding as many ways to extract money from students and at interest after it's all said and done.

> when I went to school you could return that $300 book for $200 to the bookstore once the semester was done.

This is not my recollection at all. My recollection was that I could buy a book for $300 and sell it back for $75 if it was in great condition. And I could only do that about half the time because version N+1 would make my copy obsolete.

The 'textbook cartel' plays the same role for authors as Ticketmaster plays for artists: they're the bad guy so that artists can charge more.

I had one professor in college who made most of their money by forcing students to buy his book (it was an ebook so it couldn’t be resold, and also super expensive, and the class homework was all linked to from the book itself). The class was also somewhat useless, which lead to a lot of students surmising that the professor’s deal was basically just <pay book price> = free A / course requirement lol

> I had one professor in college who made most of their money by forcing students to buy his book

This is a return to the original model of a university, where professors made their money from the course fees students paid to take their courses.

It's an improvement over what we have now.

Are you sure about that?

Where I studied in the UK the university provided all books. Which meant they had a lot more negotiating power, because they wouldn't pay £300 a book nor allow a professor to have a £300 book as a requirement for the course. So companies had to make sure their material was within the price range that universities were willing to pay for it.

where did you study? and is it still like that?

Newcastle University, and yeah, at least 2 years ago it was still true.

In Germany I spent exactly 0 dollars/euros on books in university. We got access to a huge amounts of ebooks through the university network and profs never required a specific one and would just recommend a few. One of these was always available. This free access was of course covered by the 250 euros per semester tuition…

But yes, standards and certifications are horrible.

The central thesis of the article is this:

> Don’t blame books for being too expensive. Everything else is more expensive, and that’s why you can’t afford books.

College textbook pricing is a function of the aforementioned rate of increase of everything else becoming more expensive, not a function of the cost of books increasing generally. They are, the author argues, decreasing, unless you introduce external distorting factors.

poppycock. the author is wrong about textbooks.

The article is correct that recreational books are below for cumulative CPI. College textbooks on the other hand are at ~ 3 times the rate of general inflation.

Source:

BLS CPI-U (FRED: CPIAUCSL)

BLS "Educational Books and Supplies" (FRED: CUSR0000SEEA, ~767 in Mar 2026, base 1982-84=100)

BLS "Recreational Books" (FRED: CUUR0000SERG02, base Dec 1997=100, recently ~96-100

(just search for the above, and follow the link to https://fred.stlouisfed.org)

I also heard tell the illustrated manuscripts market is soaring.

> the author is wrong about textbooks.

The author didn't write an article about college textbooks, he wrote a response to an article about mass market books and affordability.

The forces which have made college textbooks (and college educations in general) unprecedentedly expensive, real though they are, have little to do with this article.

Edit: I re-read my original comment and I probably wasn't clear enough. The external distorting factor is the higher education system absolutely exploding costs of everything to do with higher education, from predatory professors and textbook companies to the rent-seeking and regulatory capture of higher education institutions. College textbooks got incredibly expensive for reasons having absolutely nothing to do with the actual costs associated with making books, which are arguably cheaper than they've ever been.

Only for commodity goods does the cost of production impact the price. As substitutionality lessens, the price more and more approaches the value delivered.

Exactly. The article was specifically about mass market paperbacks.