Photo by Sanja Gjenero
The idea of using digital textbooks has been with me since my first semester at college, when I spent $600 on textbooks and staggered limply under their combined weight for four months. All of them were good only for that semester, and when I sold them back to the campus bookstore I got less than $300. One of them I couldn’t even sell back, because the teacher wasn’t offering the class the next semester (also, it was badly written and not worth the $20 I spent on it).
It was at this point I turned to buying my textbooks used and cheap, and I saved lots of money. I lorded over the fact that I was bypassing most of the insanity that is textbook publishing. Change one little thing in the text, make it a new edition and charge triple the price of the old edition? Brilliant!
Or evil and irresponsible. Seriously! I just buy the old edition. My psychology text for the spring, for instance, is $40 used. The last edition? Only $4. I’m going with the $4 edition. I win. Kinda.
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