The reason abusive textbook practices persists (i.e. instead of free/shared) is because students and parents direct their anger and complaints in the wrong direction.
Specifically, the people making you waste money with bi-yearly re-releases, one-time-codes, or $150 textbooks, isn't actually the publishing houses. It is the gatekeepers at your very school: professors, department heads, and or the administration. Publishers are acting in an immoral way, but publishers by themselves have no power to force you into this abusive relationship. Your school is the one enforcing this, and yet few students file complaints at their school about the situation, protest, or otherwise make it an issue at THAT level. The level where they actually have leverage, and their complaints are more likely to be taken seriously.
Instead accepting the financial relationship forced upon them, and complaining that they wish publishing houses were less abusive. Publishers actually have little to no power themselves to force you into giving them money, your school does. So start complaining loudly and often at the school level if you want to see change. Every single year, every single class.
Have you tried teaching without any textbook at all? Because that's how it worked during my CS education in Germany. All course content was written up in the lecture notes provided on the course homepage, variously a neatly-formatted LaTeX document or a scan of the instructor's literal handwritten notes. Sometimes there were also optional recommendations for further reading, but I recall one memorable case where a student asked the prof to recommend a textbook, who wasn't able to give an answer on the spot because his course wasn't designed around any particular book.
If you think that writing down everything you want to teach sounds like a lot of work, well, that's how you benefit from relying on a textbook to supply the content for you instead.
EDIT: Perhaps I should've read TFA first, considering that it describes a textbook grown out of the author's lecture notes for a course taught without textbook.
At Caltech, a textbook was often specified by the Prof, but was rarely referenced or used.
> All course content was written up in the lecture notes provided on the course homepage, variously a neatly-formatted LaTeX document or a scan of the instructor's literal handwritten notes.
I discovered (and others have confirmed) that handouts of lecture notes are not very effective. What is effective is the prof writes them on the chalkboard and the student copies them, by hand, into a notebook.
Labor saving machinery doesn't work when trying to learn a subject.
Taking notes during a lecture is a neat trick to force the content to stay in short-term memory for at least a little while. But that also comes with the risk of transmission errors. Instructor-provided lecture notes can serve as a canonical reference. As long as you don't treat them as a labor-saving device, but instead as an error-correcting mechanism, they're helpful.
"It's the publishers" skips the part where you choose what your students will study, and how they will be graded.
Pearson cannot force a student buy anything. But you can.
The moment you decide your course will incorporate MyLab, McGraw-Hill Connect, Cengage MindTap, or WebAssign, the student is on the hook to buy the access code, by buying a brand-new copy of the book. The access code isn't a freebie that comes with the book. It's the main reason to buy the book.
That access code does one thing: it moves the grading work. Grading used to be your job or a TA's, and it was paid for out of the tuition fees the student already paid to your employer.
Now you're double dipping: you make the student pay tuition fees to attend your classes, and then you make the student pay your outsourced auto-grading provider.
Publishers are to blame for much of the situation, but so are professors. I've seen them do things like require overpriced books they authored or charge insane prices for nothing but photocopies held together with binding combs
So you say "It's the publishers" but you haven't really explained the mechanism of action?
Who writes the class syllabus? Nobody from the publishers does, professors and or departments do that. Maybe based on advice from collage admin. But it is all in-house. Ultimately the college picks the books, they're the gatekeepers.
Calling it "inertia" feels very dismissive; and isn't close to an explanation of why somehow Higher Ed Professionals share no responsibility.
Specifically, the people making you waste money with bi-yearly re-releases, one-time-codes, or $150 textbooks, isn't actually the publishing houses. It is the gatekeepers at your very school: professors, department heads, and or the administration. Publishers are acting in an immoral way, but publishers by themselves have no power to force you into this abusive relationship. Your school is the one enforcing this, and yet few students file complaints at their school about the situation, protest, or otherwise make it an issue at THAT level. The level where they actually have leverage, and their complaints are more likely to be taken seriously.
Instead accepting the financial relationship forced upon them, and complaining that they wish publishing houses were less abusive. Publishers actually have little to no power themselves to force you into giving them money, your school does. So start complaining loudly and often at the school level if you want to see change. Every single year, every single class.