TELL ME WHY. Seriously, tell me why I walk into Campus Books needing three – may I stress, only three – texts for an English course I’m currently taking, and I walk out $134.25 poorer. For THREE fiction books. One of which was almost sixty dollars, which sure, it’s a fairly chunky book, but most of the paper isn’t used because it’s contemporary poetry. It’s all whimsical and spread out, letters spattered around like someone just threw them down and then closed the book. I paid triple digits for a whole lot of pages with a whole lot of blank dead tree. But I give no excuse to the one that was over fifty dollars and had less than seventy-five pages containing, you guessed it, poetry. More blank space. I’m not exactly made of money here.
Now I was one of the luckier students in this class who still had some money left on their Studylink course related costs, so I could claim that money for these books, but not everyone I spoke to could do that. A lot of my peers had to use their own money to buy books for a course we’d already bought books for (don’t even get me started on this story), because the cost of living and studying at the same time is so high, we’re drowning. You’d think that with the amount we pay to be students, we’d be given access to texts we need in order to pass the damn classes. And sure, a lot of texts are on the library website or available in the course readers, but that’s not enough. People are shelling out two hundred plus dollars for books they only need for one trimester, and then what? We just never need them again?
I’m inclined to believe that the reason Campus Books is so expensive is simply because they know that students are rarely able to find the books they need elsewhere. If it’s the only option, they have the capabilities to rack up the prices because we don’t have any other choice. And even if we are able to find copies on the library website, it’s often not the right edition, and in some classes, having the wrong edition gets you slandered. I’m all for hyping up physical publication and using physical copies of books, but this is just all way too far. How are we supposed to afford this every trimester with up to four classes demanding we need this book and this text and this and this and this?
This has got to stop. Students are already struggling with the whole Fees Free getting taken away, and now we might as well chop off a finger and hand it over the counter every time we need to buy the fiftieth updated edition of the book we’re only studying for three months. I’m over it. I do my best to only purchase from Campus Books when I really have no other choice, and it’s still ridiculous. I can’t even imagine how frustrating it is for people who have to get a lot more than I do. Just lower the prices guys.
#paylessfordeadtrees
