Issue date: 10/5/07 Section: Forum

The price at Norris Bookstore was just too much to bear. For a microeconomics textbook - a soft-cover one at that! - from which I was not going to read more than 10 pages, I wasn't willing to pay $125. So Amazon.com it was.

When the yellow parcel showed up a week later, I wondered whether "Like New" really meant almost new, or whether it was going to have dog-ears or coffee stains. But apparently, in this case, "Like New" really meant, "India Edition." In my quest to save 50 bucks, I ended up with an international version of my assigned textbook. Thanks, Amazon vendor with a 95 percent positive rating. Thanks, publishers who set textbook prices so high that I'm resorting to international editions in the first place.

It's time to really think about how we can lower the cost of textbooks for good. In the age of the Internet, information is supposed to get cheaper, not more expensive. Look at everything from financial information - you can look up any public company on Yahoo!Finance - to daily news - recently, NYTimes.com became completely free for everyone.

Maybe schools like Northwestern should experiment with different ideas, such as publishing some of its own books. Why not? There's no copyright on many books, because authors such as Milton and Shakespeare are long-dead. Another idea is to compile open-source textbooks online à la Wikipedia, reviewed by NU professors before publication. After all, the big, expensive, survey textbooks like for Intro to Psych don't tend to present new, original ideas, but accepted knowledge and cited theories.

Or, most plausibly, NU could go the way of the public high school and buy the books themselves. Then they could charge students a fee to use them. We could sign them out on the first day and then return them at the end of the quarter.

For at least three quarters (unless publishers start changing editions every three months, which would be really, really ridiculous), students could use the same books.

Publishers are probably going to argue that this move would push textbook costs even higher. Oh really? High school text books aren't any more expensive than college texts.

Publishers need to realize they can't use textbook prices as a threat whenever students or professors find a logical option as simple as reselling. That type of thinking is not only economically illogical, as it shows they think they deserve a certain revenue rather than having to earn it, but archaic in a world becoming increasingly open-source. They need to learn to do what other industries do constantly: adapt. Otherwise, at some point, we'll find a way to not need them.Medill senior Jenny Song can be reached at

j-song3@northwestern.edu

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