Students Don't Like Textbooks - Too Expensive and Heavy.

Students Don’t Like To Buy Textbooks – Survey of Student’s Feelings About Etextbooks.

Posted by Tony on September 13, 2012 | Filed under education

In a recent survey by Bookboon (an online publisher of free text ebooks) some interesting things came to light about the text book buying habits of US students and their European counterparts, which you can see below in the table summarizing these results.

About 2164 students took part in this survey, which was aimed at discovering the text book buying and using habits of students in the US, the Netherlands, the UK, Denmark and Germany and produced some surprising and interesting results.

For example, it showed that about 75% of US students do not buy the text books their professors require them to have, but look for cheaper means of obtaining these books, or at least the chapters they need to have – by photocopying, finding them online and in any other way possible. They also tend to buy second hand copies, which the professors hate, as this means they probably have older editions of the text books in question, with the inevitable problems that this will cause.

The reasons for this are simple enough.. cost of new text books is too high in the students opinion, they are too bulky (as opposed to electronic forms, such as ebooks), and they hate the fact that they have to buy an entire book only to find the professor only refers to one or two chapters in the damn thing.. so wasted money.

In fact about 60% buy second hand copies of these text books.

Also interesting, of the American students, about 58% preferred digital version to the text books.

Curiously the survey of European students found that as far as digital text books went, they were much less likely to have ebook versions, but this was put down to the fact that in Europe (by and large) ereaders are nothing like as prevalent as in the USA.

Anyhow, here are the survey results in table form for your amusement and interest.