I just graduated college, and I agree the prices on textbooks are outrageous and seemingly random. They are far above what you pay for comparable books, fiction or nonfiction, from a normal publisher at a normal bookstore. It’s not uncommon to pay $30 for a normal-size paperback book, or $70 for a textbook-size paper-bound one. Hardcover textbooks routinely break $100. There are no prices listed on the books, so you have no clue how much you’re getting ripped off.

And half the time the school bookstores give you next to nothing when you sell them back.

My theory for explaining this is based on a Milton Friedman concept: The people deciding on the textbooks (professors) don’t have to pay for them. So, they get the best books they can but don’t care about the price. Publishers know this and jack up the charges. It sucks.

But, as these litigation-happy students are probably going to find out, that doesn’t give anyone a right to file suit. We have what’s called a free market in the U.S., and aside from crisis price gouging (which I and others would argue should be legal as well), there are few laws against charging too much for your product.

Legal behaviors can sometimes still bring about tort settlements, but I doubt this one will. It would open the floodgates for suits against every industry under the sun, and it would force courts to decide how much profit is “too much.” In other words, it would require central planning of the economy.

The other odd thing is that at most schools, if you don’t like the prices you can go elsewhere or order online — they’re suing the school and the bookstore chain, not the publishers. My junior and senior years I bought my books from Half.com or Amazon, and sold them online as well (selling them isn’t quite as worth it, but you feel good not letting the school bookstore take a second round of profit off you). A school paper I edited covered the opening of a competitor book store a block or two from campus. The books are still overpriced, but the competition brings the numbers down closer to what publishers charge wholesale.

However, the funniest thing is that they’re suing over pennies a semester. How in the world they think they can prove they’ve been “overcharged” this much is anyone’s guess, as companies routinely raise their prices for zillions of reasons. Many gourmet or otherwise fancy products, for example, get priced higher just to give buyers the sense of better quality. Price point is a subjective thing, and a lawsuit over a few cents per item will fail if the judge knows anything about economics.

Robert VerBruggen blogs at http://robertsrationale.blogspot.com.