Textbooks should be free

This semester I have spent $319.42 on textbooks. The single most expensive of these cost me $129.47, and that’s after Labyrinth Books’ “student discount.” This has always struck me as one of the most ludicrous parts of life at the University and at colleges in general. Even after paying tuition, we still have to pay an exorbitant additional sum just to be able to take our classes. But it doesn’t have to be like this.

The current system of textbook usage at this school works something along the lines of the following: We enroll in classes, and those classes’ professors tell us what books we need to buy for them. The professors often do not have an incentive to try to limit the books we need to purchase, because they are not the ones bearing the cost. In fact, on some occasions they authored the book they teach from and receive royalties every time a copy is purchased, and I can imagine that that puts some of our professors in an awfully tempting situation. Next, we all crowd our way into Labyrinth to buy these books at an exorbitant price because we really have no other option. There is Amazon, but its prices aren’t always much better and it presents the additional challenges of delivery times and a lack of returns. We hold on to these books for a mere three or four months, after which we sell them back to Labyrinth at just 25 percent of the original sale price. All Labyrinth has to do is store them in a basement over the summer or Intersession. Then the next wave of students comes in, and Labyrinth can sell to them at full price those very same books we just sold back for next to nothing. And thus the cycle continues.

Of course, there is student-to-student textbook exchange. This, however, does a poor job of connecting sellers and buyers and rarely works to its full potential. For example, this semester I tried to buy every single one of my books from the textbook exchange Facebook group and could not get a single one. One reason for this is that everyone wants to buy at the beginning of the semester and sell at the end, creating a vast imbalance in the peak seasons of supply and demand. Another is that professors often mandate that their students buy the latest editions of textbooks even though there is usually little material difference between them. Finally, there simply isn’t the infrastructure in place at the moment for a robust and efficient textbook exchange market for students at the University. In short, Labyrinth makes a killing off of this whole scheme at the expense of every student at this University, and the University loses nothing in the process and so has no reason to intervene. But nonetheless it could, and in doing so change this University forever. Here’s how.

Eventually, I envision the University having a store of all the textbooks that classes use consistently. Every student who enrolls for a class is loaned all the necessary textbooks for that class for free. The students must return them at the end of the semester. Any failures to return textbooks or textbooks returned in a damaged condition will result in a fine. Implementing this plan all at once, however, could be costly.

Instead, what I propose is that the University implement this strategy class by class, starting with the biggest classes and slowly expanding to every class with consistent textbooks. Additionally, to help ease its burdens, the University could buy these books used from students. Thus, while the initial cost for the plan may be moderate, it can be spread out among many years. Additionally, once the program is in place, upkeep costs will be significantly lower than buying new books perennially.

If we want an example for this system, we need look no farther than our own iClickers.

I would like to stress that this isn’t simply a plan to shift the burden of paying for textbooks from the students to the University. Rather, this plan would cause far less money to be spent on textbooks in total. In the current system, we all pay a large amount for the textbooks Labyrinth sells, as well as a decent amount for all those textbooks that end up being forgotten in someone’s attic rather than recycled into the system and thus need to be replaced by brand new books. This plan cuts out both of those costs. As a result, even if the University needed to raise our tuition in order to make this happen, it would still be by an amount far less than what we currently pay for textbooks.

Our current textbook system is ludicrous and causes us to lose hundreds every year unnecessarily. The University needs to use its power as an organizing force to create change on this issue for the benefit of us all, and to do otherwise is simply irresponsible.

Colter Smith is a computer science major from Bronxville, N.Y. He can be reached at crsmith@princeton.edu.