As a professor, create your own PDF and give it to all the students free, update it if there's a new development in the field, which is something you'd know as a professor.
It is really not that hard, these professors often write or collaborate on the textbooks themselves so they're writing them anyway. If the textbook is needed for learning and not just a way to get some extra money then this would be standard practice.
What's the longest text you've ever written that you can judge 'it's not that hard' to write a 500p standard textbook?
As a corollary, only very few professors actually have their own textbook and thus don't make any money whatsoever from choosing a specific textbook.
Finally, why would you deny someone money for work they did, typically in their spare time? Who else do you think should give away their work for free? Musicians? Doctors? Carpenters? Bakers? Do you accept money for the work you do?
I never said anything about someone giving their work away for free. Roll it into tuition, whatever, but this predatory textbook cartel hustle has to stop.
The professor is giving a class, they're going to teach all of what is in the textbook, and for those who can't write it themselves and use ones written by other professors, they can give out that PDF, they don't have to write one.
I was simply responding to this:
> It's not like there is a cheap alternative that the professors can switch to. All new edition textbooks are expensive. They can't specify out of print editions because then you can't guarantee that your students can get access to them, and the textbook companies update the problems in the books just enough to make using a different edition from the one specified impractical.
in the parent comment. I'm pointing out that there is a cheap alternative. We have had digital documents for decades, there are ways to keep those documents up to date without rewriting the entire document, there is no excuse to have a publisher and distributor for educational companion text documents for students in classrooms. It is glaringly obvious that the status quo with textbooks is artificially maintained even though technologically there is absolutely no reason it has to be this way.
You verbatim wrote "As a professor, create your own PDF and give it to all the students free". How is that not giving away your work for free?
How is automatically deducting textbook cost from student tuition going to help with anything? If anything it will help maintain the status quo, because then it's even less transparent.
The alternative you propose is for professors who don't write their own books is to give other people's work (the original authors') away for free.
So your solution is that because it's easy to copy digital books, the 'problem is solved' by forcibly taking away the fruit of labor of some people at your convenience?
As I wrote elsewhere: if there were a cartel, college textbooks would vastly outprice textbooks for professionals (because they cannot be 'forced' to buy them) - that's not what I see in my field. Professional textbooks easily cost $200-$300. It's just a niche market.
You can be mad because I proposed a solution to an easily solved problem that doesn't need to exist if you want to. I don't mind.
When you see "buy one get one free" do you really believe the second one is free? Think before you toss what you think are gotchas out at people. Roll it into the cost of tuition. It's really not that hard to get, yet I'm saying it a second time.
It does solve lots of problems. Material cost, outlandish distribution, marketing and production cost, and it means the prices aren't externalized and the students know what they're paying for a course up front. Those are basically all the problems with the textbook market. It solves a couple of other problems too, digital documents can't be resold, doubly so if their cost is counted in tuition, so no need to stupidly re edit the document every year just to make sure last year's edition is worthless, only edit when there is an update in the field.
Speaking of which, the fact that they do that, edit books needlessly to prevent the previous year's book from being resellable at any value, is proof positive that textbooks are a racket. Professional textbooks are a different kind of hustle, it's like law dictionaries, they know the books are valuable to professionals so they charge large prices, this fact is not proof that the college textbook racket is not a racket run by a publishing cartel. Your reasoning is as weak as a limp dishrag on this one.
Unfortunately, the incentives are quite different. In France and Germany, once you get a university research position or CNRS appointment, or in Germany a permanent professorship, you can essentially do what you want within the 36hrs/wk, and writing a nice little handout is what professors often like to do.
In the US, new faculty are judged by their research output and grant input and are still under the threat of losing their job if they don't make tenure after a few years. There is zero incentive to write a book on top of the 80hrs/wk that are put into the job already.
Also, in Germany, a university will absolutely buy textbooks in bulk for students to use, but that's a philosophical decision of how you want to run a society: if it's upheld as important that everyone can get (essentially) free access to top education, that's what you get. If education is treated like a business, you get something else.
It is really not that hard, these professors often write or collaborate on the textbooks themselves so they're writing them anyway. If the textbook is needed for learning and not just a way to get some extra money then this would be standard practice.