The price of textbooks

[Baron von Lotsov]

How much would you expect to pay for a book? Lets say it is a hardback. I would guess about £10- 15 for a reasonably large one. The trouble is, if that book happens to be a textbook. Being an inquisitive type I was just reading an article in Wikipedia to do with maths and an equation had a reference and that reference was itself an ISBN number. I do a search and ting!! the price comes up as £143.



So how the hell do we in this country learn anything if:



1) the price of each textbook is this sort of amount

2) you can't get these books in your library because they are too expensive and no one would read them.

3) if you do a course at a university then the library might have a copy, but not one copy per student or that would be astronomically expensive for the library.



By the way, please do not use the argument that they are expensive because someone has to do all of this research blar blar. This particular one is just a restatement of 19th century maths. It will be copied from the original papers of the man who invented it.



It amazes me that going back say 50 years, textbooks were cheap and plentiful. Now we have modern technology and modern efficient printing presses, the cost has gone up. Why?