College textbooks cost too much


Each semester I buy textbooks for the courses I’m taking, and each semester I’m amazed at the cost of those textbooks, Minnesota Daily columnist Trent Kays writes. This should come as a surprise to no one: Textbooks cost too much. I would like to suggest they’ve cost too much since textbooks were first required in college courses, but I don’t know if that would be necessarily true. According to a report released in 2005 by the U.S. General Accounting Office, textbook costs rose an astonishingly 186 percent between 1986 and 2004. This is, by now, an old statistic, so I can only imagine how much the percentage increase is from 2004 to 2012. Suffice it to say, students purchase new and expensive textbooks every semester, only to resell them to bookstores at a loss. Frustratingly, some small textbooks seem to often cost exorbitant amounts of money, while larger textbooks are much cheaper…

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