<p>I was talking to the parent of a college freshman who was shocked at the price of textbooks (which I know has been a shocker for years), but she said that now the professors are requiring books that come with a code for REQUIRED online use that expires at the end of the semester, making the used book worthless.<br>
Are you experiencing this? Are some schools taking steps to stop this practice, or is this just the trend now?</p>
<p>Often you can buy the code separately, but otherwise, yeah, that’s normal. Some professors try to avoid making it a requirement, though, so there’s that.</p>
<p>Yea, it’s been like that and I’m pretty sure schools are fine with the prices being so high. We pay so much in tuition, room and board, and other stupid feeds then we have to buy super expensive books that we most likely won’t read cover to cover and might be worthless by the next semester b/c new editions come out.</p>
<p>Good ole 'merica. Scamming students in their universities since 1636.</p>
<p>You can buy the code separately, but these codes can cost any where from $50-$70. That’s the code alone.</p>
<p>So let’s say you’re gonna buy a used book that originally costs like $200-250 and used, it costs something like $100-$120 or whatever, add the code you need to buy for it, which is usually mandatory and you’re basically back at square one. You save just a few $10 dollar bills for a used book.</p>
<p>Personally, the local bookstores around my school carry these “customized textbook” custom made for our school, they are like $100 dollars cheaper and bring the code. For example there’s an accounting book I had to get and it costs $170 normally. But the custom edition for my school costs $98.99 brand new with the code. Another example is a Math book that originally costs $240 brand new with the code, but my school’s edition costs $110 brand new with the code.</p>
<p>Yup, several of my classes require an online access code usually costing anywhere from $70-100. And it cannot be resold, because it remains linked to your student ID and expires after a certain amount of time. They’re generally only used to grade homework at my school, which tends to be less than 10% of one’s grade. I had to buy one for Chemistry, and it was only used for homework the first quarter (which was 6% of my grade.) Despite being listed as a requirement, it wasn’t used the second quarter, and it will expire before I take my third quarter of Chemistry. College is such a scam.</p>