I’m able to get most of my books online for free, and have been lucky with professors not requiring textbooks. This semester though I’m forced to purchase a $200 textbook just so I can turn in my homework through some online system, it’s a joke.
Walled gardens encroaching on education.
Can you mention what system it is? There's a few thousand entrepreneurs on this site that might be interested in disrupting broken business models like that one.
There exist free alternatives at least for math but it's kind of a MS-office vs libreoffice situation.
I see it's available for $US6.61 used on Amazon now...
edit: had the price about $50 too high.
And by "they" you meant the faculty (professors etc) or college administration or some other office office? Just curious about it. I am from India and there are no fixed text books here (at least the colleges I know about - central Govt. funded). There are syllabi and you are free to study the course with anything you want - books, or no books. My college library solved textbook problem for almost 40% students and rest were solved by hands-me-downs from seniors, 2nd hand book stores (some of them have very capable xerox machines too), and then there's "online".