Textbooks: (JP/J. Adiguna)
As a college student, reference books are the key to mastering the subjects on your course, a way to thoroughly research your papers and find answers to your exam questions.
But textbooks for college students are luxury items and are sometimes limited, making them even more expensive.
Dimas Pranaya, who studies marketing at Prasetiya Mulya, said it was sometimes hard to find textbooks recommended by his professors as some of them were only available in certain bookstores.
"But my friends and I usually order books at this one bookstore, coordinated by a friend of mine, and then the bookseller brings the books to the campus. We need to order quickly in case the bookstore runs out of stock," he said.
He said although textbooks were very expensive, as most of them were imported, he preferred to buy them rather than have them copied.
"Fortunately, I still can afford it, so I think it's better for me to buy the book. I can keep it for later and it feels much better to read it in the original version rather than a copy one," Dimas said, adding that sometimes he needed more than one book for a subject.
In Indonesia, it is common to see photocopy centers around campus areas flocked with students who want to copy textbooks. The reasons are varied: they want to buy cheap books, they can not find it anywhere or it is out of print.
Ananda Parameswari of Bandung Institute of Technology (ITB) said that in her early years, she copied many textbooks instead of borrowing them from the library.
"Books on interior design are hard to find here, and if there are, the price is unimaginable. The library has them, but there are so many things I have to do, to borrow them is too much of a hassle," she said. "Also, it feels better to have books of my own."
Fasli Jalal, the director general for higher education at the Ministry of Education, said there was no special scheme from the government regarding textbook for college students, saying that he let each university develop their own system.
"We encourage professors to write their own books and we have a certain amount of funding to help them publish them," Fasli said, adding that the government had also bought the copyright of some textbooks so that people could download them through its website.
Ananda said some professors at ITB published books about interior design, which she found helpful for her studies, and they gave ideas about where she could buy the books.
According to chairman of the Alliance of Indonesian Bookstores, Firdaus Oemar, the availability of textbooks for higher education is not as easy as those for schools.
Firdaus said the problem in Indonesia occurred because there were only a few publishing houses that focused on publishing textbooks for colleges and the small circulation figures had jacked up the price of the books.
"Among our members, only about 10 bookstores are college textbook importers. They import the books mostly from the United States," he said.
"And it's the fees importers have to pay - transportation and management fees when importers need to store their books at the port for a while - that have caused the books to be so pricey," he said.
"So when the books reach the customers, the price has doubled because of these costs." Firdaus said, adding that most books imported were medical books, economics books, and information technology books.
However, he said, importers had started to import from other countries, such as India, for lower priced books with the same content.
The Indonesian Publishers Association (IKAPI) chairman Setia Dharma Madjid said to tackle the high price of books, resulting in many students copying them, the IKAPI, the government, the universities and owners of photocopy centers had discussed the problem.
"We have this Reproduction Rights Organization (RRO) set up recently. Based on this, in the future photocopy centers will have to pay a certain amount of money to compensate for a book being copied," he said, adding that the detailed arrangements had not been settled yet.
Setia said that such a system had been applied in several countries in Southeast Asia, but had failed to work to its optimum.
"This system is a high-cost one. So I think it will take more than five years to see its effectiveness," he said
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