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Comment by tshanmu | Hacker News Reader

This is evil on so many levels - no ownership - you only rent!

You see this is because the new generations expect to rent ....

What a lot of horse manure

In theory this model makes sense for a lot of textbooks, in practice I suspect the price difference between buying and renting for a year won't be that big at all.

I would imagine that majority of books would be rented for a year, academic year anyway

> You see this is because the new generations expect to rent ....

Nope. We just can't afford not to rent.

This initiative will probably make you change your mind...

When owners of capital collude to remove owning as an option, they become sole arbiters of pricing.

So "afford" becomes a bit odd when someone simply expands their profit margins as much as the market will bear.

Expands their profits beyond what the market would bear were it not for lock in, lack of competition, and no consumer choice in the way they consume. They only choice you have is not to go to school.

> You see this is because the new generations expect to rent ....

Why do you say that?

It will be interesting to see where this goes. After undergrad and grad school, the amount of times I’ve gone back to hardcopy books or course notes is so tiny that It didn’t justify lugging them around over many moves. (And I love books - prefer bookcases to wallpaper!)

The current model of forcing student to re-buy books that are only marginally updated on an annual basis is wasteful. The real question is will total cost go up or down. I’m ok if Pearson gets more profits if the costs to students goes down, along with complexity to faculty. (Faculty may get less money)

Ah, but that's the trick of the modern price: It does not ever go down. This isn't grandpa's hardware store. These are scientists working to extract as much money as possible from their "customers" in an industry which already enjoys regulatory capture and oligopoly. It may seem as though the price has gone down, in much the same way that grocery stores claimed prices would go down with their club cards, only to have the prices actually go up across the board -- as well as introducing an invasive data-collection system -- and merely appearing to have gone down when compared to the price without a card. There is no such thing as "money on the table", just big ass companies taking more and more and more because people have no choice. Rent-seeking behavior seems par for the course in today's business world. "Fair price" is an illusion.

Certainly there’s a monopoly when the professor can mandate that you buy only their book from only once provider. :-)

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