You thought the rising cost of college tuition was bad？ Then check out the rising cost of

college textbooks. The American Enterprise Institutes Mark Perry has put together a detailed chart showing the notorious, 812 percent rise in the cost of course materials since 1978, as captured in the Bureau of Labor Statistics consumer price index data. The price of all those Introduction to Sociology and Calculus books have shot up faster than health-care, home prices, and, of course, inflation. Academic publishers will tell you that creating modern textbooks is an expensive, labor-intensive process that demands charging high prices. But as Kevin Carey noted in a recent article, the industry also shares some of the dysfunctions that help drive up the cost of healthcare spending. Just as doctors prescribe prescription drugs they will never have to pay for, college professors often assign titles with little consideration of cost. Students, like patients worried about their health, dont have much choice to pay up, lest they risk their grades. Meanwhile, Carey illustrates how publishers have done just about everything within their power to step up their profits, from bundling textbooks with software that forces students to buy new editions instead of cheaper used copies, to suing a low-cost textbook start-ups over ill-conceived and inadequate copyright claims. And that has consequences for students. According to the National Association of College Stores(NACS), the average college student reports paying about $655 for textbooks and supplies annually, down a bit from $702 four years ago. The NACS credits that fall to its efforts to promote used books along with programs that let students rent rather than buy their texts. But to put that $655 in perspective, consider this: after aid, the average college student spends about $2,900 on their annual tuition, according to the College Board. Were not talking about just another drop in the bucket here. AEIs Perry writes that hes confident open educational resources, made available via the web, will eventually make traditional textbooks obsolete, just as Wikipedia killed off the encyclopedia. The difference is that nobody I know ever had a college professor who said, "If you dont read the encyclopedia, youll likely fail this class." If we ever want to bring the cost of these books under control, the faculty need to become responsive to the problem.

The first paragraph is mainly concerned with______.

A．the rising cost of college tuition

B．a detailed chart of price indexes

C．the exceedingly high rate of inflation

D．the soaring price of college textbooks