The High Price of College Text Books

My oldest son just left for college and it has been interesting to hear about his adventures. While he is only eighteen, he finished his Associates degree this summer and entered college as a Junior. That means he has completed all of his general requirements and can focus on the fun classes. He is in the Computer Engineering program and has a few programming classes that he really enjoys.

One of his classes is an introductory programming class where he is learning Java. For the record, I think Java is a horrible language, but that is a topic for another day. However I am interested in what my son thinks of Java and so I was asking him about it. He was able to complete his first programming assignment even though his text book had not arrived. I was surprised that he didn't have his text book until he told me how much it cost: $110.

My first question was, "How could a book to teach someone Java cost $110?" There are hundreds of books on the market and most of the good ones are less than $50. Furthermore, the best references for Java are online and only a troglodyte would require a textbook. I mentioned the cost of the Java textbook at lunch last week with some of my work associates and they all agreed with my assessment. To say we were outraged would be an understatement. Considering we all work with computers on a daily basis and most of the group were programmers, it should say something about the disconnect between our University system and real-world programming.

My son had purchased his textbook from Amazon.com in the hopes of saving some money. Instead of $110, it was only $50. The only problem was that it took 10 days for him to get the book (the book arrived yesterday). Having written and published a computer-related book in the past, I started doing a little research to discover why it cost so much. It turns out that the book uses 4-color printing on every page. At 500 pages, that makes it an expensive book. While color is nice, if you need pretty pictures to understand a concept, you are an idiot. If you are an author and can't convey your message without 4-color pictures, you are a super-idiot. Finally, if you are computer science professor at a major university and require your students to purchase a $110 text book that uses 4-color printing, then it is obvious that you are too stupid to make it in the real world and had to resort to being a professor. I guess there is a lot of truth to the old cliche that, "Those that can't do, teach."