S. Worthen | Weblog

I currently pay about $100 per class on average; English classes tend to be less, science to be more, but comp sci classes are oddly the cheapest because the books don't get republished every year. The most I've spent over the last 2 years in a single class was $194 (economics, 2 books and a subscription to "The Economist", which is still making me miserable each week); the least, $6.74 (C Programming, I found the book on half.com for $2.75 plus shipping.)

UK, Chemistry, 1995-99: ca. £20 to £35 each. No specific required textbooks (we didn't teach from books, but were given references to them), but we were very much expected to own some. I ended up with half a dozen by the end, and could have used more.

I was surprised to see prices of £9.99 for Wordsworth's The Prelude and £16.99 for Edmund Burke's essay on the Sublime and the Beautiful that I bought in 1991 - that seems a lot now! I think books must have been relatively more expensive back then! My Collins dictionary cost £38 -£48 for the French-English one.
Also, I remember that some of the art students taking Astronomy as their subsidiary were paying £80 for the principal text book (well, one did, because she thought it was beautiful... I think everyone else just borrowed it from the library!)

As an undergraduate, I developed the believe that my professors (across a variety of fields, Classics, English, and Physics primarily) tried to limit the total cost of books to $100 or less per class. Often it might be considerably less--$60 or so--but, after a few semesters, the $100/class expectation was a feasible way of preparing my textbook budget.

I should also say that I was rarely, if ever, required to buy a "textbook," as I conceive of the term (a volume designed to touch comprehensively upon the subjects of a course, often designed for that type of course exclusively); I was more often asked to buy readers/course packets and individual books which were not comprehensive. It took several to cover all the planned topics for the semester.

I've heard that for bio or chem, the textbooks might be $75 or $100 a pop and thus bump up the overall costs.

The cost factor is a challenging way of selecting books--does one, for example, request that students buy the Riverside Chaucer, $75 new, in order to set them up with the most widely used reliable edition, or does one recommend a cheaper paperback of the Canterbury Tales alone? I think the importance of the specific edition used can vary for undergraduates compared to graduates, but I also have been forever grateful that the teacher of the Chaucer class I took in my sophomore year made us buy the Riverside; although I've since bought a couple extra editions of various works of Chaucer's, that volume has been in constant use throughout my studies.

I imagine that our undergraduate experiences with this were relatively similar, owlfish. The only major "textbook"-like books I had to buy were the Norton Anthologies of English Lit in first year (6th ed, the 7th came out a year or two later) and the Riverside Chaucer and Shakespeare for courses of those titles. I think I bought Chaucer new and Shakespeare used. I remember course readers being staples of many history courses, so I don't think I purchased more than 5 other books for most of them. English courses were naturally more book heavy, I think I had to buy 10-12 for Doug Patey's Jane Austen seminar, plus at least a couple course readers of novels that were out of print.

There may have been a semester or two where I spent less than $100, but I would say over $100 happened as well. I learned to use the library more often as well, and during both tenures in Edinburgh, I purchased very few books, we were encouraged to use the library almost exclusively (certainly in postgrad), which had its own availability issues.

A friend currently in a literature postgrad program at UT Austin has observed that there is a major difference in emphasis on which volumes of texts are necessary. At Smith, you would have relatively inexpensive paperbacks available for most novels, but she's finding that most of her professors will only allow the critical editions to be used. Which at that level makes sense, I don't know if this is an issue in historiography or not.

UK, Chemical Engineering 1994 - 1998. About £20 - £40 per textbook... say £120 a year? It could have been more, but there was quite an impressive second-hand trade plus the library was stocked with the really expensive texts (a la Coulson and Richardson and Perrry's Handbook).

W.r.t. the US, in history.

Speaking from the professor's pov here, cliosfolly is correct for me at least: I try hard to keep the total price of books required to be purchased for a single class at about $100 (not counting sales tax). Occasionally it is less, occasionally a bit more. That $100 price tag is for new books, by the way -- students who buy used books when possible will save a bit.

That level of spending expectation is slightly more than what I paid as an undergraduate around 1990 (again in the US), when I budgeted about $300 for books for 4 classes. I attended a private college, and am now teaching at a public university.

Textbooks, as in history survey texts etc., vary quite a lot in price, from the mid $30s to the $70s, depending on publisher, topic, etc. I usually require a textbook plus some additional books (literary works, monographs, and/or a source reader being the most likely).

We were a small class of 21, what we couldn't borrow from local university libraries we would buy one or two mutually exclusive titles each, second hand (either in town or online), and then trade them amongst ourselves whenever an essay came up as we were all in the same Halls. Also I recall helping myself to photocopying publications at various places when I did practical experience. Convinient and very, very cheap. So I couldn't tell you the actual values.

However, all I'm left with now afterwards is a shelf-full of books on Anglo-Saxon Death (because I went wild in Oxbow Books once) and two essential cover-all texts, so I guess people wanting to carry on in their chosen field would probably not be wanting to do the same!

I'm an undergraduate scientist, and we tend to get away with only a few books since the core material is in the lecture handouts and proper research involves reading journals. The few books I do own are huge and expensive, £40+.

i should add that if I'd been on the ball I'd have spent WAY more on books for the diss. i anticipate spending a good $600 in the next year or so on things i now want to own.