As the employee of a college bookstore, I welcome the upcoming Textbook Revolution! Seriously, what they charge is outrageous, as is when they just slap a new cover on a book and call it a "new edition."
Practices on the retail side, which of course I'm most familiar with, are just as outrageous. No matter how much I hear my bosses cry poor (especially now that my bookstore, which is independently run by the university, is probably going to be closed in favor of a chain bookstore coming to the town in which the university is), I know they're making money. I've seen papers: they get discounts, sometimes as high as fifty percent, on the books from the publishers, and then jack up the price. And then there are some books, such as in psychology, that we buy back at the end of the semester, and then keep selling them used (which is 25% below new price; like, wow, thanks...) for several semesters. They make a whole lot of money off those. Also, for most books, they don't even pay if they don't sell, they just send them back to the publisher/distributor and get credit!
So rise up, comrades, and storm the palaces! Textbooks want to be free (or at least reasonably priced)!
(Via Maud Newton, via MetaFilter)
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