Because they US Gov. troglodytes. These are people chasing after some nobodies harming the extortative textbook business instead of going after drug dealers or something. Assuming they even possess two fully functioning brain cells to rub together, the USG never sends it's best.
This.
The government doesnt seem to be doing anything about the textbook business and their questionable practices like:
- Moving a few words/chapters around and calling it a new release
- Selling "activation codes" with the text to kill off the resale book market.
When i went to school (long ago) there was a very active/healthy used book market, not anymore.
My kids were being gouged for books, often written by their prof's and you cant use last years book because the textbook integrates with the testing and you need your code?
But sure, let's not focus on that at all.
Of course, the other worst offender is schools that get their own copy and sell you a printed version (so you can't resell it after).
Entire business is corrupt all the way down. Piracy would be unnecessary if a single semester didn't require almost $1000 in books. Textbook trading was commonplace when I was in school. To the point the CS lab was a veritable copy-factory because one kid would get a textbook and the rest of us would use our monthly credits (something like 2000 pages/semester) to copy it.