It is being done, and is increasing in use.The Annoyed Man wrote:My mother authored a couple of textbooks for French classes. Guess which books she used when she taught her own classes? The cost back then wasn't even close to today's prices, but I seem to remember that it went for about $25 or so, and this was back in the 1970s. OTH, she didn't get rich on it either. In the end, she pretty much did it for the love of teaching, because I'll bet that she didn't make more than a penny an hour for all the tons of time she put into it—if she made anything at all.
The cold hard reality of textbook pricing (even if you remove the university's artificially induced overpricing) is that they just aren't published in large enough numbers, compared to commercial fiction for instance, to keep the unit production cost down. Add in that the authors deserve to get paid for their work, the distribution network costs have to be covered, and the publisher needs to make a profit, and the retail cost per unit goes up considerably.
That may not change the fact that a given university's bookstore is run by crooks and enforces insane policies, but even if they were run by Mother Teresa, the books would still be pretty expensive. Academia ought to be called out on the ecological impact of their revisions. The rational way to do textbooks in this day and age is to have students buy a Kindle, or a Nook, or an iPad (or some other similar technology costing a fraction of a semester's book budget), and make the textbooks available for download at a very reduced price. The technology costs a small portion of a total book budget; the books can sell for much less money; the cost of producing electronic revisions is vastly less expensive than reprinting a book; you get to save a tree; you only need to buy the device once and you can resell it if you decide you don't want to keep it upon graduation........WHY AREN'T THEY ALREADY DOING THIS????
Two problems that I have with it (and has been corroborated by many of my students, young and old):
1) With an e-book, the purchaser no longer owns the book. As with all (stupid) intellectual property laws, the "software" is owned by the author or distributor, and can be disabled at any time.
2) It seems that many people can not easily read electronic ink or LCD devices. We just bought two (a cheap LCD tablet for me, a Nook for DynaBlue) for our recent trip. While they have their very nice points, there are times when they simply aren't as eye-friendly as regular paper.
3) It would probably be unusable in 50 years, unlike our physical books (how about if Einstein's original treatises on Gravity had been originally published in e-format?).
As with everything, one size does not fit all. It has it's place, but it has its problems.
