With three daughters nearly the same age, Margaret O’Sullivan thought she’d be able to get expensive textbooks down the line — instead she spends hundreds of dollars a year on new books.
it’s because small additions or changes in pagination have made perfectly good books “useless,” she said.
Ms O’Sullivan, from Dublin, said an “increasing greed” from textbook publishers means her daughters – aged 12, 15 and 17 – have not been able to pass their books on to their sisters.
“It started in elementary school when at the end of the summer semester I put the books aside for the following year when they would be needed by one of my other girls,” she said.
“But then we got messages from the school that they would be using a new Irish book for the next year or that the history or geography book had a new addition.
“I asked the teacher if I could use the old one, but because the page numbering had changed, it meant the girls would never be able to keep up with the class because they had to search for the right section.
“It was absolutely infuriating because I had to buy completely new books when 99.9 pc of the versions we had were exactly the same.
“In addition, more than once they’ve decided to use a new book for Irish or English, so we’d buy the new version and give the previous one away, only to be told a year or two later that they’d decided to go back to using the one we originally had. It made no sense and just cost us more money.”
Ms O’Sullivan said this practice continues through her children’s school life and now that two of them are in high school, the cost is even higher and they often struggle to find the money.
“It was hard when they were younger, but since they started high school, the books cost twice the price, so it was hard for us to find the extra money,” she said.
“I don’t know who makes these decisions – the school or the publishers – but whoever it is, it’s completely ridiculous and as far as I’m concerned just out of greed.
“And to make matters worse, the local school supplies store used to buy used books, albeit for a very small price, and sell them to someone else for double or triple, but now they don’t even do that anymore, so every year we have books that are useless to anyone. It’s outrageous.”
Kerry mother Niamh O’Kennedy has two sons aged eight and ten, but is in the fortunate position of renting out their school books.
“When I was growing up, we used to sell textbooks to the bookstore and they resell them, but I’ve heard people say they can’t do this anymore because books and pages have been changed so they can’t be used — that’s just awful,” she said.
“We are very fortunate to have a system in place at our school where we pay €100 (and up to €150 for older children) for books for the whole year – including copies, workbooks and photocopies.
“Obviously the books are second hand apart from the workbooks which are brand new and I can see they have been used before but they are all in good condition and we will return them at the end of the year. It’s a perfect system.
“I think it’s outrageous that parents have to throw away books after a child has stopped using them.
“I have friends in Limerick who pay about 200 euros for their children’s books and when they go to secondary school it’s double that. Then they can no longer pass them on afterwards and the books are simply written off.
“I think the system we have in our school is the way forward. It makes economic sense and it is sustainable. If books have updates or if there is a change in the curriculum, our teachers will insert some photocopied sheets with the extra text – it just takes a little common sense.
“Tossing books in the trash, or worse, just because of a few changes is absolutely shocking and not acceptable in this day and age.”