The cost of college textbooks is rising as publishers increasingly bundle CDs, videos and study guides with books and issue new editions that make used copies obsolete, a consumer group and a state lawmaker charged on Thursday. Students and staff at California State University, Stanislaus, are noticing the increases as well.

Kevin Storms, manager of the Kiva Book Store at CSU Stanislaus, said that the books are not marked up considerably - just enough to pay for the stores’ expences.

“If there was a profit to be made in textbooks, Wal-Mart would sell them,” said Storms. “Most of the money made on textbooks goes to the publisher. I know books are expensive, They were expensive when I was in school.”

The California Public Interest Research Group and Assemblywoman Carol Liu called on textbook publishers to make books more affordable by publishing supplements instead of new editions and by exploring online textbooks.

“Textbooks don’t need to cost as much as they do,” said Liu, a Democrat from South Pasadena who is chairwoman of the Assembly Higher Education Committee. “Students are forced to pay full price for new editions that are largely unchanged.”

CalPIRG found that University of California students paid an average of $898 a year on textbooks. The UC president’s office, which tracks student textbook costs, found that students are paying 24 percent more since 1996-97, the report said.

“The first year I got here I thought, ‘wow, these are expensive,’” said Bertha Silva, a junior at Stanislaus. “I started buying books from other students.”

Publishers take students’ concerns seriously, said Judith Platt, spokeswoman for the Association of American Publishers. The industry is working to find ways to keep textbooks affordable, she said, but college texts cost more to produce than mass-market books.

“It can cost more than a million dollars over a couple years to bring a textbook to market,” she said. “We’re talking about an extraordinary expensive product, the price of which has to be spread out over a limited number of students.”

Kevin Garcia, a junior accounting major, said the higher costs are taking a financial toll.

“Every semester there’s a new edition out,” Garcia said, which keeps him from selling his books because the school won’t take them back.

Garcia said he has purchased bundles of text books and other materials that cost more than $100, but rarely uses the extra materials, “not the study guide or the CD-ROM, I just use the textbook.”

He’s spent $350 this semester, including a $130 business law book.

CalPIRG researchers questioned more than 500 University of California students and examined the 33 books most often assigned by UC professors, said Merriah Fairchild, the report’s author.

The report found that new editions for 25 of the books were issued within three or four years. Frequent new editions make the old editions obsolete and often unavailable, Fairchild said.

The books that are sold “bundled” with CDs, videos and other study materials cost less than if those items were sold separately, Platt said, and students can always order just the book by shopping around or buying from the publisher.

About 87 percent of the professors surveyed by the group said they’d rather see the changes put into a supplement, instead of having new books produced.

Brandon Price, a CSU Stanislaus student, was not impressed with the idea of supplements, but said if used in classwork, they could be beneficial.

“It depends on how they do it. If it is convenient, it would not be a bad idea,” he said.

CalPIRG recommended several changes, including:

- Publishers keep each textbook edition on the market as long as possible by providing paper or online supplements, instead of producing new books.

- Professors should choose the least expensive book when the educational value was equal.

- Colleges and universities could start student book exchanges and rental programs that would let students pay a small fee to check out the book for a semester.

Liu said she would introduce legislation to encourage those changes and to have publishers list what changes each new addition made to the book.