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Comment by pseut | Hacker News Reader

>Without absolving the textbook industry (prices are nuts, have been for ages, dig up Supreme Court Justice Stephens' essay on the topic from the 1960s/1970s), this is in some ways a problem of the market-capitalist system.

The textbook industry is different, even from other publishing, since the book is chosen by the teacher, who gets the book for free. Whether a professor teaches from his or her text is largely irrelevant.

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>> Textbooks generally do have to be updated every so often, though annual revisions are pretty ridiculous, and much of the industry is a fat scam, especially where the professor teaches from his own text.

> Whether a professor teaches from his or her text is largely irrelevant.

If a college professor writes and teaches from a book, he's requiring people to buy it. That often gives him royalties, which is a perverse incentive. I wouldn't call this a fat scam, but it's probably relevant to the idea that the textbook industry has some issues.

It might be worth distinguishing between college and public schools, where the burden of cost is on either the student or the public.

Late followup (actually a repost -- first was lost in the Great HN Crash of Jan 2014), Stephen Breyer's article is "The Uneasy Case for Copyright". Apparently one of the most influential papers on the subject in the past 40 years.

I can't find the original online, but Wikipedia discusses it:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Uneasy_Case_for_Copyright

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