By Tim Waldorf

LISLE -- Benedictine University senior Christine Ahn didn't like the price the campus book store sought for the economics text she needed this semester. The store wanted $157 for a new book, and $117 for a used one.

"This was way too much for me to afford, especially with six classes worth of books to buy," said Ahn, who eventually found a cheaper, international version of the book for sale on eBay at a cost of just $12.

Ahn's professor, Isobel Lobo, said she felt for her students.

"As a student, I would not be willing to pay more than $50 for a book," Lobo said. "But I can't help it. I want the best for my students."

U.S. Sen. Dick Durbin believes the College Textbook Affordability Act he authored could solve this problem, and he explained how during a Friday press conference at Benedictine.

The act is intended to make textbooks costs more manageable by providing students with advance information on prices in course schedules and ensuring faculty have full textbook pricing information when making purchasing decisions. It also requires publishers to include information about textbook price, history of revisions and lower-priced alternatives when marketing a book to faculty, and it cracks down on the practice of bundling, in which publishers only sell materials that supplement their textbook with new books. The law would require those materials to be sold separately.

"They didn't think too much of me when I offered this law," said Durbin of publishers and their powerful lobbyists. "They came in and told me it would be the end of Western civilization as we know it and that I would put us back in the Dark Ages. Teachers would no longer be able to teach. They wouldn't have the best textbooks if they were conscious and sensitive to price.

"And I said baloney! I'm going to do it anyway!"

The act was approved when President Bush signed the Higher Education Act a few weeks ago, but publishers were successful in postponing its implementation until July 2010, meaning it won't help this year's college freshmen until they are juniors.

And, said Durbin, "That stinks."

Why?

Durbin noted that the average student spends $900 a year on textbooks, and said these expenses would, by the end of their college experience, represent 28 percent of the debt they incur to earn a college degree. He said students are often buying these books with credit cards that charge "higher (interest) rates than most of us would ever want to see our students and children paying."

Consequently, they end up with "monstrous credit card balances that they can't pay off because they aren't making much money." So, he said, they often drop out.

To many, the only alternative, said Durbin, is breaking copyright laws and using illegally posted online copies of the texts their courses require.

"Students will find a way to deal with rising costs," Durbin added. "Book publishers better wake up. What happened in the music industry is going to happen in book publishing."

Durbin praised Benedictine because it has already tried to address the added financial burden students bear because of the excessive cost of college textbooks by creating a book scholarship program. This year, that program that provided $350 of book money to Ahn and six other students who demonstrated financial need.