| While this doesn't apply to every case, this certainly affected me as a university student: 1. Mandatory online assignments for credit that require a code from a new textbook. (Usually because then the professor doesn't have to grade the assignments.) 2. New editions of textbooks every year, where the order of chapters or questions is shuffled, requiring you to have the latest edition of the textbook in order to do an assigned problem set ("Read Chapter 3, do question 2, 3, 5, 7 on page 148" only applies in the latest edition). 3. Libraries often only have two or three copies of the textbook, and all the students want to access them at the same time (cramming the week before exams). 4. The university library has hours and closes at night. 5. Fewer people buying textbooks leads to textbook publishers increasing per-book costs to cover the fixed costs of a print run, leading to fewer people buying textbooks. 6. Different professors teaching the same course having different preferred textbooks. Both get listed on the course description, but you don't know which one you should buy until the first day of class. |
For us, assignments (both problem sheets and essay questions) were written by our tutors. They came with a reading list that would include a selection of relevant articles, books, and textbooks, but there was no single one that you had to use.