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I agree that renting is incredibly popular, but I worry about Chegg's success. I see more and more students (I'm a Ph.D. student in Computer Science) just "obtain" a PDF of the book and skip buying new/used or trying a rental service. The ones who still want dead tree buy copies from India for significantly less than the rental price, with the only difference some text on the cover.

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What's wrong with those things? Obviously books costing $70 or $100 are not priced to target people subsisting on ramen noodles. And it's only the current debt-madness which has lead people to think those prices are anywhere near sane.

http://www.datc.edu/files/datc/departments/bookstore/textboo...

Like most things, no one is getting terribly rich off textbooks. What bothered me most in college was when they would release a new edition and refuse to buy back the old one.Even when the difference between the versions wasn't noticeable.

> no one is getting terribly rich off textbooks

That dollar in the PDF is sliced so many different ways and spread apart that you don't really notice that the publisher takes 64.6% of it. Of an estimated 6 billion dollar market. I'd say _someone_is getting rich off textbooks, but it ain't the author.

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