CLASS ACTION.(The Talk of the Town)(textbook publishing)

"I don't care who writes a nation's laws--or crafts its advanced treaties--if I can write its economic textbooks," Paul Samuelson, a Nobel-winning M.I.T. economist and the author of the most durable economics textbook ever written, once said. There's a business corollary to this: over the past two decades, growing school attendance and rising book prices have made textbook publishing more lucrative than ever. College students now spend more than five billion dollars a year on textbooks, while states spend another four billion on books for elementary and high-school students. And the revenue is not being spread around: five publishers account for eighty per cent of new college-textbook sales in North America.

But dominance has its discontents, and textbook publishers are routinely denounced as price gougers. The average price of a book is around fifty dollars, and many, particularly in the sciences, will run you well over a hundred. A General Accounting Office report released this summer found that, since 1986, prices have risen at a pace of six per cent a year--double the rate of inflation. For critics, such numbers are proof that the publishers are manipulating the market. The dearth of competition in the business is an issue, but the fundamental cause of the price spiral is what economists call an agency problem: professors pick the textbooks, but students have to pay for them.

Patricia Schroeder, the head of the Association of American Publishers, has said that college professors are "among the best educated and most sophisticated consumers in America." But sophisticated means one thing when you're spending your own money, and another when you're effectively spending your students'. When professors decide which books to assign, the main consideration, they would say, is quality, not price, so any competition occurs on the basis of features rather than of cost. The G.A.O. report placed much of the blame for soaring prices on what it called "enhanced offerings," all the CDs and instructional supplements with which textbooks are increasingly bundled--or burdened. When price is no object, professors might as well choose the fanciest textbook around.

A few idealistic souls have proposed alternatives to the current system. Ian Ayres, a professor at Yale Law School, has proposed that colleges could buy the books; people in the open-source movement have talked of producing free textbooks, the way they currently produce free encyclopedias and free software. But, until the revolution arrives, college students must bear the burden of the high cost of reading. It may be a losing fight as long as professors keep picking texts, but the students are waging it in a surprisingly canny way.

To begin with, students arbitrage international prices. You can often buy the same textbook abroad for significantly less than it costs in the U.S., so students have learned to buy ...