[richardbatty]

Why can't students just borrow textbooks from the library? I see the 'textbooks are expensive' complaint from Americans a lot and I'm confused. I never had to buy a textbook at my UK university, there were usually plenty of copies in the library. What's different about the US system?

[cbhl]

While this doesn't apply to every case, this certainly affected me as a university student:

1. Mandatory online assignments for credit that require a code from a new textbook. (Usually because then the professor doesn't have to grade the assignments.)

2. New editions of textbooks every year, where the order of chapters or questions is shuffled, requiring you to have the latest edition of the textbook in order to do an assigned problem set ("Read Chapter 3, do question 2, 3, 5, 7 on page 148" only applies in the latest edition).

3. Libraries often only have two or three copies of the textbook, and all the students want to access them at the same time (cramming the week before exams).

4. The university library has hours and closes at night.

5. Fewer people buying textbooks leads to textbook publishers increasing per-book costs to cover the fixed costs of a print run, leading to fewer people buying textbooks.

6. Different professors teaching the same course having different preferred textbooks. Both get listed on the course description, but you don't know which one you should buy until the first day of class.

[richardbatty]

Oh right, I think a big difference is that in American courses it seems that there is one course textbook, and the assignments are taken from that. Our courses weren't designed around a textbook.

For us, assignments (both problem sheets and essay questions) were written by our tutors. They came with a reading list that would include a selection of relevant articles, books, and textbooks, but there was no single one that you had to use.

[robjan]

UK redbrick graduate here. My courses mostly followed textbooks as well. The library usually had enough stock for 10% of the student body to have a copy at any one time.

[appendix]

Librarian here...many university libraries here actually have policies against purchasing textbooks.

The reason being, there is just not enough in the materials budgets to purchase textbooks for every class (especially considering that after a year, many will be "outdated" and need to be replaced) and still have enough money to purchase all the other necessary materials (mostly database subscriptions which cost an arm and a leg, but all the other books they need to purchase as well). However, practically speaking, we can often get copies of individual textbooks on an as-needed basis through interlibrary loan. Usually someone somewhere has a copy, but it's not a solution that can be applied on a university-wide level.

Often a professor will put a copy (that they own) on reserve so it may be used within the library, but those can't be checked out and taken home for use for the entire semester.

Personally, I think it's shameful we don't have a better solution, but that's the state of things here. Many schools are turning toward open educational resources (OER) but it's slow to adopt, because many professors have a favorite textbook and OER texts aren't always of the same quality as mainstream texts. It's a really frustrating situation.