How much is too much? When does healthy ambition become unconscionable greed? College students often struggle with these dilemmas on a theoretical level. However, with recently discovered evidence of exorbitant price gouging by the college textbook industry, the questions posed above are now hitting a lot closer to home for many students at De Anza, and all over the US. Our collective answer must be this: by pursuing excessive profit margins in a socially important market, textbook publishers have crossed an ethical boundary. According to a 2007 report by the Student Public Interest Research Groups, the average college student will spend $900 a year purchasing textbooks, up to 50% of total tuition and fees. In order to inflate these prices even more, textbook publishers have taken to “bundling” their books with other materials like CDs and study guides (driving up costs by as much as 47%), and issuing new editions almost every 3 years, with minimal real content change. Publishers have responded by pointing out the limited market available for their books, and the presence of a large resale market. They say they have to set prices high just to stay in business. Yet something is amiss. College enrollment has steadily risen in past decades, greatly expanding the textbook market. A series of mergers in the 1990s resulted in each individual publisher attaining a greater market share. Technological advancements have made book-publishing cheaper than ever. And yet, textbook prices haven’t dropped in recent years. They haven’t even remained steady. Instead, they’ve skyrocketed at FOUR times the rate of inflation. And this is only the tip of the iceberg. Higher education is not a luxury item, it is crucial to the health and growth of any society. The average college graduate will earn 73% more annually than the average high school grad. In the pursuit of ever increasing profits, textbook publishers are critically hampering the US economy. Congress has recently opened an investigation, but students can also make a difference. Write to your local representative. If you decide not to buy a textbook because it’s too expensive, write to the publisher, letting them know that price was a factor. Tell professors if the textbook they’ve assigned has an unreasonably steep price tag. Or, best of all, cut out the bookstore and use the internet to find student-run trading sites where books can be purchased for less and sold for more. A few relevant sites (aside from Amazon and eBay):http://textbooks.studentsmetro.com/http://www.cheapesttextbooks.com/http://www.bookfinder4u.com/