Saturday, February 4, 2012
College Books- Online Access Keys
After having spent a couple hundred dollars on textbooks for classes thus far, I must say this is a growing business to further get even more money out of students now with their so called "online key" access codes. Last semester during my economics class, I was required to pay $90 for an access pass to use an online system just for that semester, meaning the online code would work for only that semester and cost even more than the textbook itself. To much dismay my professor frankly said if we dont purchase this we would fail the course. I had no option and had to shelve out money to pay for something that I was basically renting for a couple months. Fast forward to this semester, yet again I had to purchase more online access keys. I had to do this for two classes and each one feels like a big business model that wants to somehow make everything be limited as opposed to just buying a simple textbook. Whether it is to stop people from reselling books or the fact that textbook publishers are more money hungry its apparent the college student is ever more part of one big business with their college. Whats even worse is that most of the time all these online keys to access online partitions for the course come bundled only with the newest editions of the texts. What does this mean? You are going to pay more for a book that just changed its cover but has the college online key with it.
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I hate buying textbooks. As a responsible college student, I know that money can go to better things, like beer.
ReplyDeleteI'd like to see every text book in E-reader format for a fraction of the price.
ReplyDeleteyea this is incredible how much it costs to pay for textbooks
ReplyDeleteyeah book publishers are crooks
ReplyDeleteAccess codes that are good for two semesters I turn around and sell to people who are in the same class
ReplyDeleteWell, to comment on Shockgrubz, There are a lot of books now being put into E-reader/pdf type of format. Problem is, they cost the same amount as the hardbooks. And I agree with the horrible access keys for online stuff. I had that in almost every class I enrolled in. Math, psychology, english . . it was horrible. When I first went to college years ago, it was books only and you can buy them used. Now they even replace teh books every year now too so you can't use older books. And professors are encouraged to get the new books and are even paid to do so, that way new students will pay for new books since the old books are now unusable. This was told to me by one of my professors. Sad times we live in.
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