WASHINGTON, July 17 (Xinhua) -- Nearly 300 textbooks, valued at more than 200 dollars each, have been stolen from a school in the U.S. state of Ohio since March, local police said.

Thieves carried off a total of 277 textbooks from the University of Dayton School of Law, which worth over 56,500 U.S. dollars, local media on Tuesday quoted police sources as saying.

According to camera footages, four suspects stole 106 books on June 12, and two men carried off 99 new law school textbooks worth 20,900 dollars on June 30.

Local police were able to identify one of the suspects as 29-year-old Christopher Begley. Police are asking the public to provide information on the identity of the other three suspects.

Some of the stolen books have been recovered from a local secondhand book store.

Although rare, the case underscored the increasingly burdensome cost of textbooks for U.S. students, especially those seeking higher education.

According to the the National Association of College Stores, the average cost of a new textbook cost 58 dollars in 2011-2012 and 80 dollars in 2015-2016.

A study conducted in 2013 by the Government Accountability Office, a non-partisan government watchdog, found that in the decade between 2002 and 2012, the price of textbooks sky-rocketed 82 percent, almost three times that of the consumer price inflation during the same period.

An even more striking graph from the think tank American Enterprise Institute showed that the price of college textbooks exploded by 812 percent from 1978 to 2012, far outpacing the growth of medical and home costs, and inflation.

Experts believe that textbook publishers maintain book costs at high levels by releasing frequent new editions, to prevent students from using second-hand textbooks.