Why are textbook prices so high?

Yesterday, I paid almost $500 for books for my daughter, who is a new freshman at a state university. She is taking only nine credit hours, in psych 101, German 101, and public speaking 101.
This is an outrageous price to pay for these books when better ones are available at Barnes&Noble or Borders for only a fraction of the price.
I have written a study adjunct book for nursing students available for only $7.95, and get bawled out because it is too cheap. The site is cheering angel. com, in case anybody wants to look at it.
(The URL is all one word with no spaces. I added the spaces to keep webcrawlers from picking this up.) If I raise the price to $35, will people fight to buy it?

P.S. I am NOT going to raise the price.

That's what happens in a monopoly. Believe me, I feel your pain. I'm a university student, and I spend about $300-$500 per quarter (10 week period) on textbooks, usually adding up to a little over $1000 for one year.

And that's considering that I buy all of my books used, and some of them from Amazon.

The reason they cost so much is...well...because they can. Like you said in your details, the books at the University aren't available anywhere else. If you buy them cheaper, it's because they're used and damaged. There are a few sites (I believe one is called the university book exchange, but I don't know the url off the top of my head) to get books cheaper.

But ultimately, we pay more because the supply of books is strictly limited. Most of the books are only available through the university. And there's the fact that new editions come out every few years, to pressure you into buying the new one.

On you last point...ironically, if you raise the price to $35, people might be more likely to buy it. Studies show that people value something more when it's more expensive. But I really couldn't say on that point :) good luck though, I plan on buying a copy of your book when my little sister starts nursing school.

Campusbooks.com did a good feature on the price of textbooks on their blog www.campusbooks.com/blog. It takes the view from three different angles. Report It

The reason is quite simple actually and is two fold:

1) The professors teaching the classes are the ones writing the collegiate level books and therefore they use their own writings to create additional residual income for themselves.

2) It's a function of supply and demand. The collegiate textbook market is surprisingly small when compared to the overall publishing industry, yet, those books are relatively expensive to publish. Therefore, for the publisher and author to generate any profit the prices need to be inflated since the market is small and publishing costs are high.

I agree though, it is rather ridiculous...

One of my former professors was also the department head.
Not only did he write the books, he came out with new editions every year, which made the previous editions useless. That way, nobody could buy or sell used textbooks for his classes.

get a grip, if you can buy it cheaper somewhere else. then why don't you ?