The Quality of Online Textbooks is Problematic
Publishers know their customers are locked in year after year, and they’ll always have new suckers to scalp because there will always be new kids going to college.
I'm currently halfway through an online-only M.B.A. program and the constant between classes has been that digital textbooks suck. Every publisher of my textbooks has developed their own proprietary locked-in software to make copying, saving, or even maintaining access to the textbook I paid for as difficult as possible. These massive publishing houses scalp poor college students every year for meaningless updates to perfectly good textbooks that may be a few years old, and we have to go along with it because colleges and teachers are dependent on the extracurricular materials these companies provide. I’m currently in a class where all our resources are locked behind one such portal. Access cost me $131.94, and it doesn’t even work on my iPad. What are students to do?
Unless you’re in a class which only distributes homework and quizzes through these locked-in portals, there are a few methods to improve your course experience. Primarily, ask your professor if an older edition of the book would work for the class. Most of the time there isn’t a meaningful difference between textbook editions other than the order and location of information in the book. Older editions are cheaper, generally more accessible, and—if you’re a bit malicious—can be acquired for free. Which, if a company is selling a loose-leaf copy of a seven-year-old textbook for more than the price of the current edition, is arguably justifiable. How can anyone have such a low standard for their own product to sell it as loose-leaf sheets. Selling loose-leaf for more than the cost of a paperback binding is shipping unmanageable trash.
Especially since book binding, at scale, is cheap.
It's disappointing when you’re required to use something made by a company that obviously doesn’t have standards. Whatever works well enough to facilitate a contract is business. The customer’s experience be damned. Maybe it’s because they don’t need to compete? They know their customers are locked in year after year, and they’ll always have new suckers to scalp because there will always be new kids going to college. It almost feels predatory. Like a machine designed to suck you and your family dry.