Textbooks are a valuable resource for students. They supplement and enhance classroom instruction, provide a common intellectual platform, offer additional references and perspectives, and are excellent review tools. While we understand that students are concerned about the price of textbooks, the real issue is not price, but value. When textbooks are integral to a course, and faculty teach and test from them, the book is seen more as an investment and less as an unnecessary or forced purchase. Textbook prices reflect real costs and a reasonable return on investment for authors, publishers, distributors, and the bookstore.
Textbooks are free for most students until they reach college.
In high school, most, if not all, of a textbook is required reading. Yes, they do. The fact is the bookstore makes very little profit on textbooks. While it varies significantly by discipline and course level, an in- creasing number of students are trying to get through classes without purchasing the required texts either from the store or from other students. Others share copies with classmates.