This particular semester my books cost me over $900. Seriously, for 4 books. This was over 17 years ago.
Now I am the parent paying for all of these books and the cost is even more appalling. The thought of my three boys graduating college fills me with pride, but the costs associated with attending a university fill me with dread. With the costs of education skyrocketing something needs to be done to help our students get the education they need without driving themselves into debt.
I feel there are so many steps that need to be taken to reduce the cost of education, one of the first should be reducing the costs of textbooks. For both K-12 schools and for higher education, the cost associated with textbooks is ridiculous.
One option for students is to rent E-Books. Right now, both the Kindle and the Nook offer an E-book rental service. This gives students a more econimical and more Earth friendly option to classroom textbooks.
Not to mention avoiding years of back aches and chiropractor service later!
While using an E-book rental service doesn't get rid of the cost of books, it does help make it more manageable.
Schools.com recently published an article titled "How far students will go to get rid of textbooks." You can see that 76% of college students would get rid of traditional textbooks if given the choice. Check out the awesome graphic and see how far our students would go to eliminate the textbook.
Courtesy of: Schools.com
There are many reasons to use Ebooks. You are using a greener alternative, you will have less back pain and you save money. Ebooks offer a slighly more affordable option to the overall costs of attending college.
Doris
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4 comments:
Oh, I definitely recall those heavy textbooks in college...and how you couldn't even resell them at a decent price, because the professors were always changing the assigned books.
Digital sounds like the way to go, though. I like the graph, too.
Thanks for sharing.
Here's MY SUNDAY SALON POST
I agree. Textbooks are way too expensive and heavy too!
Yikes, that is a lot of money to spend on books. I didn't ever have to spend that much in a term (thankfully). However, I do remember looking at the science textbooks and being so grateful I didn't have to buy them. Some of them were almost $200 each.
I usually sold my textbooks back to the store at the end of each term to get some of my money back.
I remember one class though - I hated the books, couldn't stand the professor, and since they weren't offering the course the next term they wouldn't buy the books back. So those were the only books that went straight to the recycle bin. Horrid class that was!
I've never read a textbook that wowed me.
Never.
And I've read a lot of textbooks.
Let's start a drive to rid the world of textbooks!
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