@richard233: Throw in there the question of, who will write the books. The textbook industry leverages academic experts (the professors) and provides them an incentive to create high quality books.
(Sorry to burst your bubble, but a professor doesn't stand to earn much by obligating his class to use his own book. I'm working on a communications book now, and the royalty will be about $5 a book sold. If a class of 30 uses my book, that's only $150.)
(That amount of money doesn't come close to covering the time investment made to write and edit a book, usually totaling thousands of hours. For that reason, most professors do not write their own books. Which is a shame, since the classes would be better organized, more cohesive and interesting if they did.)
(It's a much better strategy to write an exceptional book and have it adopted in many Universities. Which is very hard to do.)
If you take away the incentive to work on books, who's going to write them? Seriously. Volunteers? That might work for most general textbooks, but what about the niche subjects? While I might be qualified to organize a book about the electrical system of the heart, I wouldn't want to tackle a book on the regional cultural history of Nothern Ireland. Moreover, most professors I know aren't going to take time out of writing journal articles (which bring prestige, advancement opportunities, and funding) for textbooks (which don't). And if you're hoping that dedication to students or discipline will provide the motivation, I think you're going to sorely disappointed. Additionally, no volunteer is qualified to organize and write such a book. Nor would they have the discipline to copy edit, fact check and update. Don't believe me? Peruse some of the textbooks over on the wikipedia sites. While there are exceptions, they don't represent what I'd call "high quality scholarship."
I'm not saying that Open Source textbooks are bad, or evil, but that we should be realistic. Paying professors to write books, even if they do force their students to buy a copy, is hardly evil.
And in the case of tech versus books, I think we're merely changing one overlord for another. I have yet to see any significant cost savings from the adoption of tech. Not as a student, and not now.
For that reason, in a war between publishers and technology mega-billionaires, I side with the publishers.
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