The chickens have come home to roost.
One of the things that I am still furious more than a decade after I finished my bachelors degree, plus the year I spent in MBA school, is that the cost of college textbooks is absolutely out of fucking control.
It is just abusive and predatory, and it keeps happening because we let them get away with it.
Why is it that a publishing house can afford to sell a three-inch thick hardcover novel for $20 and still make a profit, yet they feel that a three-inch college textbook, which is nothing more than text and maybe a few black and white pictures, has to sell for a $100 or worse?
Even worse, they change the fucking book every other year, and they shuffle the problem numbers to force the student to buy the new copy.
This is not new, it has been going on for decades.
I really hope that between Amazon and their Kindle DX, and companies like Chegg, they make these old-fashioned highway robbers that run college textbook sales to lose a LOT of sleep.
I also want to see more open sourced college textbooks. Many schools in the country are open sourcing their course materials, so there is no need to blow $100+ on a textbook that you are going to use for just one semester.
By the way, those $100+ college textbooks, do you really think that the author sees a better royalty than what your run-of-the-mill bestseller novel author is getting? Of course not! I am all for capitalism, but this is not capitalism, this is just a brutal, and so far sanctioned, abuse of our next wave of educated professionals in training.