Cheap textbooks accessible, fleeting

Cheaper textbooks, it seems, are just an ocean away.

On Oct. 21, The New York Times reported… Cheaper textbooks, it seems, are just an ocean away.

On Oct. 21, The New York Times reported that textbooks are on average 50 percent cheaper in Europe, and that American students, having noticed the disparity in prices, have begun ordering their books from overseas. The article compared prices at Amazon.com and Amazon.co.uk, and found the latter much more economical.

These prices indicate a greater problem – college students are a fixed audience with a fixed demand and our every necessity comes with a jacked-up price.

In order to live near campus, we need apartments, no matter how vermin-filled or poorly maintained. Similarly, in order to pass classes, we need to buy books, and buy them quickly.

Usually, this is done at bookstores on or around campus. But these stores are losing business to their cheaper overseas competitors, so the National Association of College Stores wrote to textbook publishers to end what it views as gouging students by inflating prices.

Besides petitioning publishers to lower prices, students can already trawl the Internet for better prices, particularly on used books. Also, there are Pitt-oriented sites that offer cheap rates on used books – allowing students to post what books they have as classified ads, then exchange them. But these take more time than many students have; moreover, with new editions published every year, these efforts can prove fruitless.

What about buying brand spankin’ new books, hot from European Web sites? Ordering from overseas isn’t illegal – in fact a 1998 Supreme Court ruling holds that copyright laws don’t protect manufactures from people ordering books at cheaper prices that those manufacturers set.

So what’s a broke college student to do? Ordering books from overseas is one way to go – for now. But as this practice becomes increasingly popular, manufacturers might erect new obstacles between students and the texts they so desire. “It is an open question how long the overseas price differential lasts,” The Times reports.

Rather than sitting back and allowing textbook manufacturers to mug us for extra money, why not order online? A textbook company representative said that these lower prices are designed for people with lower per capita incomes. So, as students with relatively low per capita incomes, and rising tuition fees and costs, we should use these fleeting advantages – but do so knowing that they could be quickly taken away.