Open-access, then, has the capacity to put textbook publishers out of business. Talk about killing the goose that laid the golden egg!

My school also had a website that someone made where students could advertise their used textbooks to each other. That was also much cheaper than the bookstore. Of course, that only worked because a lot of the required intro courses have found textbooks that have been the same for many, many years, and those courses have fossilized around those texts. (One of my profs actually required an old edition of the textbook- she said the new one was too thick.) Most of my upper-level courses didn’t use textbooks but instead relied on articles, which we could access for free on the campus internet.

Wonder if a person could…wow! If you were doing that for this university, at $9 a book you could clean up. The main campus alone has over 40,000 students, and before the crash our beloved president was aiming for a student body of 100,000. You might be able to extract a bookstore discount from publishers.

Imagine. Eighty bucks for a freshman composition text! It’s not like it’s full of four-color illustrations or complex formulae and tables (the latter are generated on the ultracheap through LaTex, anyway!). This is a garden-variety $12 paperback. Inexcusable.

I hate not having my syllabus ready to go. The way my life is, some crazy complication always comes up just as some project approaches deadline, converting the effort to get the project done on time into some kind of living hell. Also, I highly resent working for free over the summer, so I normally (when paid on a regular nine-month basis) prepare the fall syllabi before the end of spring semester.

My school has a text rental system. I hated it at first, but now that my kids are in college I see the point. $18.00 per course for 2 books.

Some enterprising kids started an e-rental system.