[prawn]

#2 is an unhealthy conflict of interest that saddens me. I remember buying $100 textbooks that were quickly out of date and too heavy to lug around.

Anyone in a senior position like this should have the interests of students and their education at heart and be doing everything they can to provide students with accurate and affordable learning materials. In fact, I don't see why their creation shouldn't be subsidised and so they can be freely provided in electronic format to students. The curriculum should be free of copyright.

[ethbro]

I remember buying $200 textbooks that were absolutely terrible.

The professors I respected most were those that said either "none of the course materials will be taken directly from the book" or "there will be no book for this class, here are a number of texts that are good, get a used copy from Amazon."

PS: For anyone in undergrad, #1 question when you start a semester -- email professors and ask if the text is required, and if so, whether a previous version can be used. (I know publishers are getting worse and worse about one-time-use codes and "enhanced offerings" though)

[anamexis]

I'll take this opportunity to plug my current employer, Verba Software. We work with college bookstores to make textbooks cheaper, from making it easy for professors to find cheaper alternatives when they are adopting textbooks, to helping the bookstore source cheap used textbooks, to helping students find the cheapest books through transparent comparison shopping.

http://www.verbasoftware.com/

[ethbro]

I always thought crowd-sourced feedback on whether a class + instructor combination required the textbook would be incredibly useful.

A) There are 20+ students in typical undergraduate classes

B) Professors tend to teach undergraduate classes extremely similarly from year-to-year

So I imagine it wouldn't take long until I could plug in a school, class, and professor and get a list of impressions back. E.g. "Homework taken directly from book"

Second idea. OCR + diff would be incredibly valuable for version diffs of popular textbooks. How much was rewritten? Were the homework questions changed? If so, which ones?

Thanks for the good work though!

[prawn]

I have read about those shady techniques from publishers. Universities should refuse to deal with them and those proven to take favours for making these publishers required should be penalised.

[ethbro]

Ultimately, students make a pretty poor voting demographic (especially in Republican state legislatures in the south).

So if a college earns some kind of financial benefit from choosing a particular text "solution", then that's money the state doesn't have to fund.

If students want this to change then they need to organize politically and make it a clear demand, as they're the only stakeholders impacted by higher priced textbooks.