With the Hornet Bookstore and Sacramento State professors in full cooperation, publishing companies have been running a scam on students with regards to the buying and selling back of books. I call it “The New Edition Scam.”

This is how it works: The publishing company designs a textbook and sells it to the bookstore. Students then buy the textbook and when finished with it, sell it back to the bookstore for a reasonable percentage. However, this mutual relationship ends once a new edition of the same textbook is produced by the publishing company. Once this new edition is sold to the bookstore, the “old” edition becomes obsolete, meaning the bookstore no longer has use for it.

If the bookstore does buy back the old edition from the student, it is sometimes for only pennies on the dollar. Students are then forced to buy new editions because their professors require them for class, resulting in obscene profits for both publishing companies and the bookstore.

The idea of creating a new edition of a textbook to replace an outdated one is not inherently fraudulent or evil.

If a new edition were worthy of production, the publishing company would be justified in producing one. This, however, is simply not the case regarding most of these so-called new editions. They contain hardly anything new, hardly any substantive additions or crucial revisions. All that is changed are trivial things such as new introductions, photographs, end-of-chapter questions and, maybe if we’re lucky, a new chapter! The nerve!

Yet, it is this audacious deception on the part of the publishing companies that has professors reasoning erroneously that what is new must be better than what is old, leading them to require that students purchase new editions to use in class. However, old editions can satisfy academic goals sufficiently and professors should have long ago recognized this. Such unconscious decision-making has ended up costing students thousands of dollars collectively.

Furthermore, the bookstore uses this unethical and exploitative process to extort money out of students, and in addition, it can then justify only giving back to students a small percentage of what they originally paid for the book, in light of the new editions.

The bookstore should be held accountable for the perpetuation of such a corrupt system because it can choose not to purchase new editions from publishing companies, since these editions rob students of their money and never substantially improve their educational experience. Sadly, the bookstore and its decision makers instead choose money over moral obligation.

The publishing company has most of the blood on its hands because it designed this scheme, creating a need for new editions that doesn’t actually exist. Because there is more money in creating new editions that students must buy, publishing companies are quick to capitalize on this, thus exploiting the very foundation that Sac State, and for that matter, all universities are built upon: the student.

However, part of the reason the publishing companies aren’t held accountable for such corrupt behavior is because it is the professors who require these new editions, thus giving publishing companies reason and justification for producing them. In fact, publishing companies will give you, the professor, a free copy of their new edition, sweetening the deal so as to get you to implement these new editions for class use. Smells like some good ol’ fashion, Grade-A bribery to me. Professors complain that they aren’t making enough money. So why would they ever want to aid in the financial exploitation of students?

Besides being financially fraudulent, this hustle is environmentally irresponsible. For example, what happens to old editions when new ones are produced? They sit in students’ closets, serving as the epitome of the reckless wasting of paper.

Professors must take the initiative to end this corruption because they are the ones being used by the publishing companies to plant the seed that allows this scam to flourish. Professors must immediately cease to require new editions for class use. Consequently, this would thus cause the bookstore to stop ordering them, forcing the publishing companies to stop producing them. If there’s no demand, there will be no supply, and any old edition of an economics textbook can tell you that much.

Josh Cadji, a philosophy major, is a former Hornet writer.