A free market for textbooks

The article on e-textbook adoption at IU left out an important point: the school is creating a system where professors can force students to pay an e-textbook fee to take their course — no shopping around for textbooks (electronic or otherwise), you just have to buy this e-book to take the course. 

Of course, the publishers love this because it means no competition for them, and 100 percent of the students have to pay the fee (even if they didn’t want to read the textbook). So they can collude with the University to make students pay more than the e-book would be worth on the free market.

I urge professors who are deciding whether to use this program to opt out. I’m a senior at Indiana University, and I started a free comparison site (textyard.com) for students to get the lowest prices because I suffered the costs of textbooks myself.

The problem of expensive textbooks will end when there is a free market on e-books, not when students are forced to pay for overpriced books (electronic or otherwise) in a new way.

­— Ben Greenberg
Indiana University Super-Senior
Co-Founder, TextYard.com