people are heading back to school and i'm hearing about the costs of books again

in my experience i found that the content of the reference materials vary by very little from year to year and 97% of the same content gets recycled under a new label and made mandatory so that students cannot necessarily sell their current collection of books to the newer generation of students (varies from program to program)

in some cases there's direct conflicts as the very professors you're studying under had a hand in writing the very books they want you to buy and these books can cost from as little as $50 to as much as $250.

you can often use the previous years edition at a much lower cost with little to no impact on learning the course material and professors are known to provide reference materials for both the current years editions as well as previous years to accommodate students who don't rush out to buy the latest editions of reference materials for their courses which have just recycled the same information that was already available in previous years editions

though i also know of some universities that are particularly scummy as they will assign specific codes into the pages of new books which are required to work with the online course material so even if you could get all the same content from a previous years book, you still have to buy the newest editions to gain essential access to the course content

there was really no getting around it so i started buying all the books i needed from india for no more than $20 a piece in non hard cover, black and white format which got me by the last 3 years of university and i advise the same for those that don't want to pay ridiculous prices for books

overall i think this is a cheap money grab trying to squeeze money out of students while providing them with very little value

Releasing new ones every year is plain and simple racketeering.

It's not a common practice at my university, luckily. Plus you can generally get the pdfs from various sources pretty fast.

The only books I buy now are ones with licenses for software attached to it.

Pretty well-accepted as a scam. Well, "scam" might be an exaggeration but it does seem to me like a form of price gouging.

Many of the professors I've had realized how overpriced textbooks were and would give us suggestions on how to save money (buy buying an older version for example, or some would just not even require a book at all).

It's especially ridiculous for things like math books where nothing new has been discovered. But the professors assign homework from the book so you need the current edition.

Math textbooks are the worst. They're often poorly written and have a "practice makes perfect" mentality.

You're paying $200 for a set of problems and an answer key.

My university was excellent about textbooks, the only place where it's bad is the humanities department where they force books written by faculty on you at an absurd price. All of the engineering profs either wrote their own problems, and/or had the homework questions posted online. Physics department was the same, and the chemistry department didn't really assign homework, and the one class that did had a 30$ text.

I had to pay extra for the answer key.