 "Photo: Caity Colvard")
Brad Green is a graduate student at Texas Tech who, like many of his peers, has to factor the increasing cost of college textbooks into his budget.
A teaching assistant, Green said he and other teaching assistants play a role in choosing the textbooks for the music for elementary school teachers class he teaches.
"We take price into consideration," Green said, "but a lot more than the actual price of the book, we consider the length and how applicable and useful it is."
According to the U.S. Government Accountability Office Web site, www.gao.gov/, the cost of college textbooks increased at two times the rate of inflation between 1986 and 2004.
Though price is not necessarily the determining factor in what textbooks are chosen, Green said he remembers how expensive textbooks were when he was a undergraduate student in the early '90s.
"It seemed ridiculous even then, especially at campus bookstores because they're always way more (expensive)," he said. "Somebody's getting kickbacks, and I don't know who."
According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics Web site, www.bls.gov, as of 2001, 64.4 cents out of every textbook dollar is retained by publishers, while 11.5 cents is forwarded to the authors of the textbooks, leaving 24.1 percent of the cost left over.
Chad Davenport, assistant store manager at Varsity Bookstore, said Varsity only keeps approximately 5 percent of the total cost of a textbook.
"We mark our books up 20 percent from what the publisher charges," he said. "At that point, we still have to pay for freight coming in, the labor to put the books on the shelf, electricity to keep the store open and credit card charges."
Davenport said the average incoming freshman spends approximately $900 for his or her first year of textbooks.
Two tips he said can help make sure students do not spend more than they have to on textbooks is to buy them used and make sure they need what they buy.
"I hear from students a lot of times that say they don't actually use the textbooks," Davenport said. "If you're actually going to use the textbooks, then paying a certain premium I don't think is a bad thing. But if they're not going to be used, then that's a problem."
Mason Moses, Student Government Association president, said the SGA worked with the University of Texas at Austin and Texas A&M to introduce legislation to remove local and state taxes from the sale of college textbooks, though the legislation was never passed.
"We were really close this past session," he said. "We got it through the senate but it died in the House because there wasn't really enough time."
Removing the local and state taxes on textbooks would save Texas college students more than $40 million, Moses said.
Though House Bill 1434 did not pass, Moses said the SGA is still focused on presenting a bill to reduce the cost of textbooks when the Texas Legislature meets again in 2009.
"We're still trying to get more information, talking to more students, and trying to figure out how much more money this is going to save students," he said.
In the mean time, Moses said he encourages teachers and faculty members at Tech to use books multiple times rather than requiring new versions every semester.
Davenport said since taxes still apply to textbooks, he thinks they should be included in the state's tax-free weekends.
According to the Texas comptroller's Web site, http://www.window.state.tx.us/, apparel items up to $100 are eligible for the tax-free weekend that occurs before each school year, but school supplies, including pens, notebooks and college textbooks, are not.
Andrea Leal, a junior nutrition major from Midland, said eliminating the taxes from textbooks is not enough; textbooks cost her more than $600 a semester.
"It's taking more of my money that I need," she said. "(Textbook prices have) gone up every year since I've been in school, and I've had to keep a job full-time sometimes just to pay for everything."
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