Textbook publishers painted themselves into a corner by adopting ridiculous, aggressive and price-gouging sales strategies in a world where it’s getting easier every day for customers to dump them.
They constantly release “new editions” to get universities to pay again and again for the same bloody textbook.
My university is paying professors to ditch textbooks and use stuff that’s openly available online. I’m participating not even for the money but for the joy of being able to tell the salespeople that we don’t want to hear from them again. I can’t tell you, folks, how supercilious and nasty their sales pitch has become. One salesperson asked me “Do you even care about the needs of your students?” I asked her not to contact me again but she keeps writing me.
Textbook publishing is a dying industry and instead of looking for ways to exist in the new reality, publishers are wiping themselves out of existence by indulging in greed and hysteria.
Clarissa's Blog 
Can’t say I’m sad to see this
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Totally serves them right.
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About dang time.
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“Do you even care about the needs of your students?”
“I sure do! Especially after reading the article by Thurston and Dogoodle in the latest issue of Educational Phenomenology that finds a correlation between increased textbook prices and minority drop out rates!”
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At our university one publisher made a proposal to include textbook prices into tuition (obviously – increasing tuition by the price of the textbooks, effectively making buying textbooks obligatory for everyone). I am somewhat surprised it did not work…
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I have also been bombarded with e-mails by a rep of a company that offers immediate solutions to any physics, math , etc problems, for a price. Who is proposing to “look for solutions for a cheating problem”…
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That proposal would, at least, have made the cost of textbooks cover-able by any grant or scholarship money (some can only go to tuition). It’d at least be a wee step in the right direction. But I’d much rather just see the textbook industry die.
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Most textbooks can be found online for free.
Students often buy used textbooks.
Etc.
There are many ways to avoid buying new textbooks.
Besides, in the context of our university it would probably be not even “tuition” per se (that is regulated by the government) but some kind of “fee”…
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It’s not the book itself that’s the point of contention. It’s the bloody digital workbook that accompanies it. Faculty like to use it for the lab portion of the final grade (which is 25%). Plus, the faculty use pre-fab quizzes and tests from that bloody digital platform.
If we don’t purchase these 200 physical copies of the new edition of the textbook, the publisher closes our access to this digital platform. That’s where the drama begins.
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“the publisher closes our access to this digital platform”
That is insane… and an economic model that needs to die horribly, screaming in pain….
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