The Price of College Textbooks

In is latest newsletter at Consciousness of Sheep, Tim Watkins illustrates the cost of living crisis with the following chart.

We all know that hospital services and college fees have been increasing very rapidly. But it is interesting to see that the third item on the chart is College Textbooks.

The steep increase in book price seems to be a conundrum. The cost of publishing a book has dropped significantly due to the impact of services such as Kindle Direct Publishing. Moreover, many college books can be distributed as ebooks without loss of utility.

An additional factor is that it is so much easier now to become a published author. An expert on a topic can go directly from “farm to market”.

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