Students spend an average of $900 a year on textbooks, which is 20% of
tuition at an average university and half of tuition at a community
college! And the prices keep going up.
We think that textbooks
should be reasonably priced, students should be able to easily sell
their books and used books should be easy to find.
Around the
country, students and professors are fighting back. They're refusing to
buy books from publishers unless they're cheaper, unbundled and on the
market for longer. They're trading books with each other at online book
swaps like CampusBookswap.org. Some professors are even switching to
open textbooks, which are free online and affordable to print.
And
publishers are feeling the heat: they're negotiating deals with faculty
who push and scrambling to offer lower priced books. But they're not
working fast enough. New competition like the open textbook publisher
Flat World Knowledge and increasing faculty demand could send
publishers a message they can't ignore - make textbooks affordable!












