4. Digital copies are often available online for free.
False.
> The whole industry is a racket, designed to exploit kids in a situtation where they have no choice.
True. But your previous sentence does not follow from this. The bad actions of others do not justify your own bad actions, no matter how tempting it becomes to think otherwise.
Dunno. 15 years ago all the Ivy League libraries campaigned against Elsevier's pricing and achieved precisely nothing. We had to wait for Scihub.
Textbook publishers aren't really hurt by this as much as the legitimate textbook purchasers (your fellow students).
The solution isn't to pirate/steal the content. It's to vote with your feet before you go to a post-secondary that chooses expensive copyrighted books when there are free or very affordable alternatives.
Besides, voting with your dollars is a fallacy.
very true.
>Besides, voting with your dollars is a fallacy.
in an oligopoly such as education where the purchase and sale of goods/services is subsidized then the power of voting with your dollars is diminished. the core concept is not a fallacy, and is actually a good metaphor for market action.
the problem is that 18 y/o young adults are able to borrow far more money than they ought to be able to, creating a market of naive buyers with extraordinary buying power. its no surprise that some of them buy things like comparative literature or gender studies degrees.
>voting with your dollars is a fallacy What do you mean by that? Are you suggesting that companies will survive without any customers buying their product?
The only situation in which voting with your wallet doesn't work is when you have no choice. In this situation, the students do have the choice to pirate the books, buy used books, or bite the bullet and buy the book.
Definitly not true. Many classes require entering a code just to submit homework
Howso?
This was all the rage when I was in school, especially since our bookstore sold at retail price (or about 80% for a used copy) and _generously offered_ to buy the books back at the end of the semester for 3-10% of list price. College bookstores are a racket.
There are already business models that have started to chip away at this type of racket. Chegg and Amazon rentals are decent examples.
Sadly I'm unimpressed with the progress it has made. I'm convinced replacing expensive formally published textbooks with cheaper or freeware digital books is superior. The problem is with department deans and professors that hawk their own books in their courses.