A blog post on the American Enterprise Institute site from Mark Perry of the University of Michigan Flint campus provides recent costs of the most expensive textbooks used at that campus. The data were collected by Matthew Wolverton, an electronic resources librarian at UM Flint. See http://go.hawaii.edu/lw for the full post by Perry. One of the charts shows the most expensive average textbook costs by discipline, ranging from $147 to $260. Students generally take more than one class a semester, making their out of pocket expenses potentially out of reach. Perry posits that the inflation in cost of textbooks is an aspect of an economic bubble and unsustainable given initiatives such as OpenStax , offering free and high quality textbooks at no cost to students.
The $400 college textbook and higher ed
