Disadvantages Of Textbooks

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Expensive Textbooks
Textbooks are a must have in every university. On top of tuition, dining, and housing fees, the high cost of textbooks can be a huge burden on students. Often times, students cannot afford to buy books for their classes on time due to the prices of textbooks. According to NBC's review of the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) data, textbook prices have risen over three times the rate of inflation from January 1977 to June 2015, a 1,041 percent increase (Popken). I don’t think the money is worth because students are at college to grab knowledge not books.
Research has shown that a student spends around twelve hundred dollars a year on textbooks (Senack 6). Imagine a student you know from your neighborhood, who has a poor financial …show more content…

Open source textbooks can be a great solution to decrease the expenses on the textbooks, as all the resources are available on the internet for free. In addition, it can be accessed anywhere at any time, so students shouldn’t carry heavy textbooks with them. Although, some might argue that many students have a habit to study from hard copies of textbooks; they can easily download and print from the open source textbook off the internet which might cost only 20 – 40 dollars to print, compared to hundreds of dollars spent on textbooks. Moreover, it can be easily edited by professors as needed, and students can learn what their professors really want them to focus on. Yet, some might still argue why professors would waste their time editing textbooks when they can easily recommend them to students. Though, they can recommend, the textbooks might always miss something or write more about something which the professor requires or do not require respectively. Also, editing the open source textbook isn’t like writing a whole new textbook, which consumes a lot of time; it’s just adding or removing some necessary or unnecessary information, which can be done easily. Hence, another problem of buying older versions or new versions of books per the teacher’s choice can be easily

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