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Textbooks in the U.S. are so expensive that even used versions can give stud

游客2024-03-09  33
问题     Textbooks in the U.S. are so expensive that even used versions can give students a sharp pain in the wallet The 7th edition of Francis A. Carey’s Organic Chemistry—a standard text for pre-medical students— costs $213 new and somewhere around $150 used. Add to that the companion study guide (学习辅导书) ($113 new; $90 used) and a student would pay between $326 and $240 for just one course. With four to five courses a semester—many assigning multiple textbooks—the costs add up.
    The same edition of Organic Chemistry, however, is available on a Canadian website called AbeBooks. com for $12. The book is an international edition, printed in English but sold in India, and identical to its expensive American edition except for its soft cover. With a click of the mouse, a student could save hundreds of dollars.
    According to the Advisory Committee on Student Financial Assistance, U.S. textbook prices rose 186% between 1986 and 2004, or twice the rate of inflation. College students now spend roughly $900 on textbooks every academic year, books they are required by their professors to purchase. This disconnection between the buyer and the seller allows publishing companies to artificially inflate their prices.
    International textbooks are printed—frequently in India, although sometimes in other Asian nations— under copyright agreements with Western publishers that allow the books to be sold for a discounted price. "The reasoning is that people in other countries can’t afford the higher prices," said Swarthout, "so this is a way to provide them with the same quality of education as we get in America." But just as the Internet has enabled illegal access to music and movies, so too has it opened the international book market-especially to the hands of college students. International textbooks are available on major bookselling websites including Amazon, eBay and Half.com. It’s legal for students to buy them for personal use, but illegal for anyone to resell them outside of their intended country.
    With luck, students won’t have to outsource (外购) their educational needs for much longer. This summer, Congress approved a new law that would require textbook publishers to provide pricing information to professors, to help them decide which books to select for their courses. There are also e-books—digital texts available on the Internet either for free or a small price—not to mention book rental services and good old-fashioned hand-me-downs.
    But for students who want a complete, original copy of the textbook, international editions are hard to ignore. "Not all of my books were available as  international editions,  and sometimes the price break between ordering off eBay and buying in the bookstore wasn’t large enough to guarantee the extra effort," says Rodgers, who graduated last spring with a degree in neuroscience. "but I always checked."
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