The New York Times has a really crazy op-ed article today on the high cost of textbooks link here. The author, Michael Granof, a professor of accounting at the McCombs School of Business at the University of Texas, a textbook author, and the chairman of the university's Co-op Bookstore, claims that it is the second hand book market which keeps prices on new books high that is the only way publishers can recoup their costs. He also claims that the second hand text market is highly organized, competitive, and cheap. If that were true and the old and new texts were even just roughly equivalent, publishers couldn't sell many new texts. Granof acknowledges that text prices are very high and has some ideas for improving matters, as he notes publishers "try to discourage students from buying used books by bundling the text with extra materials like workbooks and CDs that are not reusable and therefore cannot be passed from one student to another." He would have publishers sell site licenses to the university planning to use the text and charge students appropriate fees. The real solution is that proposed by David Levine put the text on line and ignore the question of what publishers charge for hard copies. If anyone wanted a hard copy, he could pay to print it himself. That way, the author can alter the text as often as he wants, as intellectual honesty requires, as pedagogical effectiveness suggests, and as current developments in the discipline would seem to require. Granof has some justified criticisms of the Advisory Committee on Student Financial Assistance which was asked by Congress to suggest a cure for the problem of high text prices. His bottom line: "Unfortunately though, the committee has proposed a remedy that would only worsen the problem by doing nothing about the second hand book market."