Think of everything you could do with $900 in a year; you could watch 100 movies in theaters or buy about 400 energy drinks. Or you could buy textbooks.

“Textbooks are a serious financial burden on students,” said Nicole Allen, a textbook advocate for WashPIRG. “The average student pays $900 a year on textbooks.”

Textbook prices prompted more than 1,000 professors from more than 300 schools to sign a statement of intent last Tuesday to find cheaper alternatives.

“I signed because I know books are way overpriced, and we need to get a handle on that somehow,” said one UW professor who wished to remain anonymous so as not to offend colleagues.

While acknowledging the amount of work going into writing a textbook, the professor added that publishers are charging way too much.

Textbook prices are high for three reasons. Workbooks, CDs and other tools bundled with textbooks creates extra charges for students. These items, which about 65 percent of professors don’t use, jack up prices and make it more difficult to sell the books back, according to U.S. PIRG (Public Interest Research Group).

New editions also appear on shelves about every three years, even in subjects such as math and chemistry where information hardly changes year to year. Professors are also kept in the dark about prices and when new editions will be appearing.

Professors hope to search for cheaper alternatives to textbooks — including cheaper, and sometimes free, online versions.

E-books are unlike conventional textbooks. The author gives up some of the rights to the book, which are licensed rather than copyrighted, allowing the book to be displayed online.

Freshman Katelynn Sortino bought an e-book for her Psychology 101 class and paid half the price the textbook sells for new. However, she had some regrets buying it.

“If you want to study, you not only have to have access to a computer, but also Internet,” she said. “And for some reason, the pages are … super slow loading.”

While printing is always an option, it can be pricey.

“Seriously, 12 cents a page?” Sortino said. “I might as well buy the book.”

At 12 cents a page, however, the price of printing 300 pages from an online e-book is $36.

Some downloadable e-books are completely free.

Matthew Conroy teaches precalculus and calculus at the UW. For his precalculus class, free online versions of the book are used. He said the online textbooks are a great idea.

“With calculus texts, a popular technique publishers use to keep their profits high is to release new editions every few years,” Conroy said. “These new editions tend to involve minimal changes, yet they wreck the used textbook market for the last edition of the text.”

Getting the markets to lower textbook prices may take awhile.

“There’s no silver bullet,” Allen said.

The statement of intent signed by the 1,000-plus professors is a first step, and it is sending a message to the marketers, Allen said.

“It shows [that] professors are sick of textbooks being expensive,” he said. “They’re declaring their intent to look for cheaper, appropriate alternatives.”

[Reach reporter Joy Yagi at news@thedaily.washington.edu.]