No, their content is shit and everything I've touched has 90's era VHS to digital transcriptions or half-assed attempts at interactive stuff which isn't integrated into the core. They're also limited to textbook format even when you have the ebook/online version, and the latter comes with absolutely atrocious UIs.

I can get college lectures at various levels for free, I can get a variety of interactive programs for free (or make them myself). Not to mention for a lot of the classes I've had, the textbook was not necessary at all - but I was dumb enough to buy a couple before I got wise.

They have a market cornered and it's bullshit and their service is repugnant, they need the air taken out of them.

How much does it cost to make a textbook and have a few editors? There are on average about 20 million college students in the US and for core books and common fields there are tens or hundreds of thousands of students taking those courses every semester. 50,000 students can easily cover the authoring and editing of a textbook and still reap a massive profit with a small fee of $20 per book.

using the word "consumer base" to describe a population of people doing what today is apparently the bare minimum to have consistently good material conditions in this society seems insane to me

I can't believe that societies allow education to be so profit-driven and motivated. It's so blatantly classist.

I don't know, because Openstax charges $0 for an arguably smaller audience than that of higher priced options, so you can't get much lower than that.

'textbook' covers a lot of ground--it could mean something widely used in a lot of schools, or something hyper-specialized. It could be a book that needed a lot of editorial and production work, or none at all.

reasonable ends when books that don't need to change have yearly editions... IE: math books. Math hasn't changed in centuries - core pieces of it. Yet, for some reason, you need 2022 Math Unchained with an Access Code to attend a class and the only changes are... perfunctory changes to the 2022 version? Good thing the costs are attached to your tuition so no only do you pay hundreds for the materials but you get to pay interest on the college loans for decades to come!

No thanks.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/education/battle-over-c...

Yes.

idk but i don't. cause the expensive textbooks are not the $40 ones my upper level classes have. they're the $200 intro class ones where 1000s of students take the course from a single school and there's some shitty online access code bs paired with it.

also, it is def not "reasonable" to repeatedly re-release editions just to make old ones useless.

i usually enjoy reading the $40 upper level ones a lot more btw.