As anyone who has stepped foot on a college campus knows, money is definitely a cherished yet limited resource. Depending on the generosity of your sponsors, also known as parents, you are constantly under the hammer, struggling to pay tuition, eat, live, sleep, and pay for the gas that gets you to and from work.

All of these holes poked into your money bowl can deplete the contents of the bowl rather quickly. So needless to say, after feeding the hungry mouths of these financial termites, we barely have enough left over to buy toilet paper.

Although difficult, we still manage to make all the ends meet, but considering the recent trend of rising textbook prices, it appears that making these ends meet in the future will become an impossible feat. Should there not be a system to help out the ambitious “little guy?”

The price of college textbooks is outrageous. The cost of books has risen more than the rate of inflation or the cost of tuition over the last decade. UWG students say they pay an average of $500.00 on textbooks in a single semester.

According an article by Jim Marchman, a professor of aerospace and ocean engineering at Virginia Tech, textbooks are sold at about ten times the cost of publishing them, so there is obviously enormous profit in this business.

Marchmann has co-authored and published textbooks in the past.

Due to the staggering cost, many students shop the Web for bargains or simply go without.

It is a shame that students are faced with the difficulty of being able to afford the very tools they need to lay the groundwork for their field. Fortunately, this issue is exactly what our representatives in the house are now questioning - laws are now being passed to lower the cost of textbooks for college students purchased on campus. A number of states have or are currently composing similar bills to accomplish this feat in their home areas.

In 2007, Washington State takes the lead in this new reform. Effective July 22, 2007, the College Textbook Transparency Act requires publishers to disclose prices and changes made in new editions to faculty.

The goal is to help lower the astronomical cost of textbooks for students by making faculty aware, so that they can help also. How? If teachers are aware of cost and changes they can elect to use different editions or different texts to help lower the cost, or simply continue to use older editions that haven’t been changed enough to make a significant difference in the quality of the material.

Specifically, the CTTA - also known as House Bill 2300 - requires that “Each publisher of college textbooks shall make immediately available to a prospective purchaser of their products who is a member of the faculty of an institution of higher education:

(a) the price at which the publisher would make the products available to the store on the campus of the institution that would offer the products to students; and

(b) the history of revisions to the products, if any.”

Is this bill another one of those “good in theory” ideas or will it actually make a difference? Since it depends so heavily on the active involvement of the teachers and bookstores in its implementation, this remains to be seen, however neither employees at the on campus bookstore, nor at the Braves bookstore knew about these laws. Also, many professors admit they do not know about these major changes.

Another important issue is the used book market. Since students spend so much money on their texts, they often sell them back to university bookstores in order to make back some of the money they initially spent.

However, bookstores will only return a fraction of what the texts cost when they are bought new. According to employees at both the on and off campus bookstores, this number is not determined by the store.

Publishing companies provide figures for what new books should be sold for and what used books should be bought back for. The fact that students are almost coerced by financial need into selling the texts back for these significantly lower amounts shows a serious misplacement of values.

These books are the fundamental building blocks for students to learn their field, and many like to keep them for later use as basic reference material. They are like tools to a mechanic, or a scalpel to a surgeon - necessary to a fundamentally cohesive performance in their field.

With the semester coming to a close and that time of year that tugs at our wallets comes around again, we should all be thinking about these changes and how they will affect us all. Let’s all be aware.

By: Constance Palmer From: www.thewestgeorgian.com

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