[bsgreenb]

The author left out one major reason textbooks are so expensive-- course adoption lists (i.e. which books go with which courses) are kept private or disorganized so that students or businesses can't offer rival "Search by Course" type sites without scraping the local bookstore. As a result students go to the bookstore which knows their requirements unlike Amazon.com.

I open sourced a course data scraper a while ago to help solve this problem: https://github.com/bsgreenb/Open-Textbooks

[ben1040]

There was a law that was supposed to make this easier, to make it so that students have more time to look for books rather than the week before the semester starts.

Starting in 2010 schools that receive federal financial aid are required to list the ISBN and title of books (or author, title, publisher, and date if an ISBN is not available) at the time of course registration.

In practice, though, one wonders how many courses have their texts listed as "TBD" up until the week prior to the semester.

[bsgreenb]

The law was called the Higher Education Opportunity Act, and the bookstores responded to it mainly by offering seperate, inconvenient search forms. If you found your way there, you you'd then have to copy and paste the ISBN.

The law was good in spirit but in letter it didn't require making the data available. A good law would just be that every school has to offer all the data they send to the bookstore to everyone for bulk download.