It used to be a small industry that nonetheless allowed a brick and mortar store to thrive as a secondary bookstore to the university's student union. Never mind the savings for students.
When I was in college, the internet was relatively young, but that didn't stop us from using it to cut out the bookstore out as the middleman for reselling books. Our local test Usenet group was where all the cool kids hung out and we used that as a place to sell and trade used books for a fraction the cost of the bookstore.
But that mechanism no longer works in the ebook era. So I'm not surprised students found another way.
(Dad was a teacher, too, and he also couldn't bear forcing his students to pay for new editions of a textbook. So he wrote his own. Students could print copies at cost in the print shop (pre-internet). I've continued the tradition of writing my own books and putting them online for free for the students. Greed over educational materials is a poor look. Also, AI is coming.)
It saddens me that with github and the like, and the armies of wikipedia entries, there aren't open source textbooks of greater/higher quality than any of the publishers. I guess biology and some sciences deviate a lot edition to edition, but basic math? physics? chemistry? economics? history? languages?
Of course institutes of higher learning have well exposed themselves as being anything but in the last couple decades. So it doesn't really surprise me. The entire "open coursework" movement died quite quickly when the colleges realized this might cut into their annual 10% hike to tuition.
But like your father, I'm surprised some retired teachers don't do this as a side project, or an emeritus professor, or SOMEONE that wants to leave a legacy.
You could have a site that presents concepts in entirely different fashions, so you could choose a path that suits you, or if a particular concept didn't stick, have it presented a different way.
State institutions in particular should be required to produce and use open textbooks and courseware. Rile up some republicans to make it contingent on getting their state funding (they love doing that).
This is even more egregious since there is the entire British Commonwealth of nations/english speakers and their educational systems to leverage.
My sense is that there's quite a bit of "open coursework" out there if you're talking about mostly raw materials.
If you're talking about MOOCs, universities started pulling back after it became obvious that they had mostly "not lived up to expectations." The combination of the students most needing them largely lacking motivation, the fact that credentials weren't generally viewed as valuable, the lack of lab and tutorial resources, and VC-companies pivoting are probably just the main factors.
Thanks for that. My professors were in part like yours. But some other professors (I think it was about MBA folks, not IT people) apparently urge everyone to buy their really expensive book. And if you did not, you would have no idea about the weird case in chapter 2, he makes the exams about ..
This is how we are. For now.
The problem from a broader point of view is a coordination problem. The people making the buying decisions (professors and departments) are not the people paying (the students). I would wholeheartedly support legislation that forced professors to pay the same textbook fees as their students, and for departments to be required to cover the costs for scholarship students.
I’ll bet we would see a lot more schools opting into open source textbooks and articles from the library if that were the case.
What will happen is that universities will pass these costs to all students where now paying students will pay more.
A better regulation will be encouraging and funding more open access materials that can be used and require public funding receivers to adopt them or decrease the funding and cap the tuition increases.