[kennend3]

> harming the extortative textbook business

This.

The government doesnt seem to be doing anything about the textbook business and their questionable practices like:

- Moving a few words/chapters around and calling it a new release

- Selling "activation codes" with the text to kill off the resale book market.

When i went to school (long ago) there was a very active/healthy used book market, not anymore.

My kids were being gouged for books, often written by their prof's and you cant use last years book because the textbook integrates with the testing and you need your code?

But sure, let's not focus on that at all.

[Test0129]

The worst offender when I was in school was a physics textbook for a 2 semester introductory physics series. The textbook was about 400-500 pages with an online code. The total cost was $380, and even in graduate school this physics textbook remained the most expensive textbook I was forced to purchase.

Of course, the other worst offender is schools that get their own copy and sell you a printed version (so you can't resell it after).

Entire business is corrupt all the way down. Piracy would be unnecessary if a single semester didn't require almost $1000 in books. Textbook trading was commonplace when I was in school. To the point the CS lab was a veritable copy-factory because one kid would get a textbook and the rest of us would use our monthly credits (something like 2000 pages/semester) to copy it.