On top of mounting tuition, college students face increasingly more costly textbooks, NBC reported.

The cost of a textbook has risen 1,041 percent since the mid-1970s, according to NBC’s review of the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ (BLS) data, and students shell out an average of $1,200 a year on just books.

“[Publishers have] been able to keep raising prices because students are ‘captive consumers,’ ” said Nicole Allen, a spokesperson for the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition. “[Students] have to buy whatever books they’re assigned.”

But some publishers disagree with the numbers. Marisa Bluestone, a spokesperson for the Association of American Publishers, calls the BLS data “misleading” because of the “law of small numbers”; a small item that increases from $100 to $200 appears as a one-hundred-percent increase, while a tuition increase from $10,000 to $11,000 appears only as a ten-percent increase.

The results are also not relevant in an age of used-book buying and renting, said Laura Massie, spokesperson for the National Association of College Stores (NACS).

Furthermore, the changing prices are symptomatic of a changed publishing industry. “I think part of it is the consolidation... There’s less competition now,” said University of Michigan-Flint economics professor Mark J. Perry, who is also a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. “The other thing that irritates students and professors quite a bit is they’ve really sped up the publishing schedule,” causing new editions to come out every couple of years.

Still, publishers and bookstores are putting a serious strain on college students, Perry said. “College textbook prices are increasing way more than parents’ ability to pay for them.”

Related reading: Organizations such as the OpenStax College have developed “open textbooks” written and peer-reviewed by academic experts—a catalog of free, electronic textbooks that save students money.