This Textbook Costs More Than $1 Per Page To Read (PHOTO)

It's just a textbook, but it packs quite a financial punch.

HuffPost College reader and Santa Clara University junior Christine Keating recently tweeted a picture of her Human Genetics and Society book.

"This book costs $187," she wrote. "That is more than $1/page I have to read." Ouch.

What was your most expensive textbook? See a list of thousand-dollar coursebooks here.

LOOK:

Comments

[pla3355]

03:34 PM on 01/28/2011

I have to question the author's math ability... This book, although expensive due to the content, is 336 pages. That would make it roughly .55 cents/page. You can also use the publisher's website www.cengagebrain.com to buy hardcopy texts, e-books, chapter-by-chapter, associated technology access and supplements, and to rent the books direct.

[dramaglama]

08:45 AM on 01/19/2011

College students......you should check out Chegg.com and other rental sites for your textbooks. I've saved hundreds of dollars over the past few semesters. For instance, this book you can rent for just $34.00 which includes shipping to you and back to chegg.

[johnatl98]

07:40 PM on 01/18/2011

eBooks aren't going to change this much.
You aren't paying for the book (paper, cloth, ink, glue), you are paying for the content.
The more obscure and esoteric the content, the more the book costs.
Compare them to DVDs. DVDs cost, what, US$0.10, plus maybe US$0.25 to burn and print? But when you buy a movie on a DVD, it costs a lot more.

[Alfonso Estvez]

02:23 PM on 01/18/2011

Oh Huffington Post. This same book costs $40 on AbeBooks.com. It's not like shopping around is hard!

[MilesToGo]

06:17 PM on 01/18/2011

Excellent tip, Mr. Estvez. Abe Books is an excellent source & vendor. But of course, the point of the article is to focus on the ruse and scandal involving absurdly-expensive text books, which only adds to the grief on any normal person wishing to get through and pay for a college education.

[dramaglama]

08:43 AM on 01/19/2011

You can even rent the book at chegg.com for $34.00

[Aldo Rodriguez]

01:15 PM on 01/18/2011

Meh. I'll wait for the movie instead. ;-)

[ZubinTomato]

02:56 AM on 01/18/2011

What are these "textbooks" you speak of?

[Eva fate]

05:53 PM on 01/17/2011

For my first semester of business tech school, my pell grant covered everything but the textbooks.
I currently have enough to pay my bills and buy food, and not much more. Even used, textbooks were too expensive for me to buy in cash before classes started, so I had to take out a loan for more than $1,000 just to pay for one semester's textbooks.
Many of the courses I took did not even use the text, or used only a few chapters of it.
This is a big contributer to the fact that I did not choose to attend a second semester. I used to work in a "discount" book store where books were sold at a tiny fraction of the "suggested retail" price on the cover, and the store and publisher still made a profit. This includes reference books that had multiple contributers and fact checkers, the way textbooks do. I cannot imagine the profit percentage on some of the paperback textbooks, often without proper binding, that I was forced to buy... If they didn't have the official university text logo on them, they would have been $30-$50 books depending on color and page material. I only bought around 5 textbooks. So that put them at around $200 a pop!

[Rishona]

07:34 AM on 01/19/2011

Excellent point. If you are dependent on financial aid to pay for your books, you do not get you refund until weeks after the semester starts. But the college bookstore can put things on your account (and they have the worst prices). This is what I had to do. None of my parents nor I had credit cards either!

[Miss Trust]

03:31 PM on 01/17/2011

When I went to university and had to or wanted to read an expensive book, I got myself a copy card and just copied it at the university library. A card for 1000 copies was five Euros.

[TDAllonsy]

04:05 PM on 01/23/2011

Isn't that illegal?

[ManiDeli]

03:17 PM on 01/17/2011

E books will put the hard cover text books out of their usual business within about a year.

Large page cheap color E screens are on the horizon. All your textbooks will fit in. If the text book guys refuse to provide them as E Files students should take matters into their own hands. There is no reason to lug around all that stuff and teachers make enough on their regular salary.

[JennieBH]

02:38 PM on 01/17/2011

Back in the late 1980s when I was in college, I paid $50 for hardcover textbooks and thought that was expensive...

[Friend TextbookStop]

12:22 PM on 01/17/2011

The best option that I have found is to try out a comparison site like BigWords.com. It helps out by allowing you to compare many websites at a time. Another good option is to rent textbooks, although sometimes that is not necessarily the best deal either. When it all comes down to it, the textbook industry can be rather ridiculous; there needs to be change.

[Lisbeth35]

11:10 AM on 01/17/2011

how much did it cost the author to write it: in time, coursework, study, experience? But then again, the authors get little compensation. Textbook companies are raking it in.

[tooncesrocks]

09:51 PM on 01/17/2011

so i guess the whole point is moot then?

[schmedes2]

01:25 PM on 01/18/2011

how much did it cost the publisher to change the questions at the end of the chapter from last year?

[tdotbird]

10:52 AM on 01/17/2011

Just for giggles I looked the book up pictured in the article on Amazon and as I suspected, you can get a used copy for less than 50 bucks.

[tdotbird]

10:48 AM on 01/17/2011

Don't even bother walking into a school's bookstore, kids. It's the single biggest racket colleges have going. For example, this semester one of my textbooks was listed at over $100 on the bookstore's site. I found a decent used copy online for $5.

[lcr999]

09:52 AM on 01/17/2011

Note to the title....
It costs NOTHING to read it. It only costs to buy it.