> _work or activity that is wasteful or pointless but gives the appearance of having value_
The verb version is "waste money or time on unnecessary or questionable projects."
Basically the project is useless and unnecessary.
For textbooks, things are working out very well indeed and just as intended for textbook companies and the professors who write the textbooks that are required for their own classes.
When you are performing a boondoggle, you generally had a reason or purpose in mind, and what you're doing right now is pointless towards that purpose.
For instance, let's say you wanted to improve the educational quality of a university and you build a new chemistry lab that costs a lot of money. You're about 80% of the way through when you realize that the lab is never going to help education if you can't attract competent professors. Oops. That's an example of a boondoggle.
So what word would we use for charging 'new' costs for textbooks containing 'old' data, with the only substantive changes being an updated graphic (updated as in: a photo of a law office taken in 2017 whereas the third edition featured a photo taken in 1992), and some reworded paragraphs-where ultimately the core academic content remains the same?
Boondoggles are unintentional. This is working as intended.