> The trouble with textbooks is that nowadays there's a new edition every other year, with slightly different pagination and exercises, all of this for an extortionate price.
This is what really gets me. I don't necessarily mind charging $150 new for a big textbook, especially given the likelihood of it being shoveled back into the used market, but when the used textbook market is also killed off via gimmicks like new editions that do little more than shuffle exercises or one-time-use online codes, the justification for that high initial price tag is lost.
And I say this as somebody who also curated a personal library of textbooks that I do refer to in my day-to-day work!
It's an incredibly toxic cycle. The book is expensive because it is required for completion of an already expensive task (a class). Teachers and departments require the latest evergreen textbook because of incentives from the publishers paid for with the profits of the sales of said evergreen books.
How does education get off of the treadmill? Students can't reasonable refuse to buy the new textbook. They could organize and demand that professors stop, but in some fields the subject matter does change relatively frequently e.g. advanced medical courses. So the opposition would point to those and ask the rhetorical question "Don't you want your education to be current?. It is unlikely that professors at scale will act unilaterally because they are at best neutral in this situation.
It could be solved, perhaps, with legislation, although it seems that such things are fairly universal across countries (although I am somewhat ignorant of how it works in Europe) and if the Europeans haven't tried to regulate it yet, it is incredibly unlikely that the Americans would try.
Book piracy is the logical result of this cycle. If book prices were reduced either through reduced evergreening causing the used market to exist again or by some other means then piracy would reduce as well.
The answer may be surprising: pay teaching faculty better and give them proper job security. Students see only the textbook, but there's the other half, the slides that come with the textbook that contingent faculty will use for their lectures. If teaching faculty were to stay in any one place for more than three years they would prepare their own lecture materials instead on relying on the readymade pap.
Students would have to push for proper teaching. Unfortunately, in these times of elite overproduction they are more interested in their GPA to get into medical school.
This is what really gets me. I don't necessarily mind charging $150 new for a big textbook, especially given the likelihood of it being shoveled back into the used market, but when the used textbook market is also killed off via gimmicks like new editions that do little more than shuffle exercises or one-time-use online codes, the justification for that high initial price tag is lost.
And I say this as somebody who also curated a personal library of textbooks that I do refer to in my day-to-day work!