Wednesday, April 26, 2006

College Textbooks: The Scam That Got Away

My friend Justin over at Econometics has an interesting post on "new editions" of required textbooks, and how the used textbook market is largely useless to students nowadays. Where else but US colleges can you have a sanctioned, EXPECTED scam perpetrated on people that can normally ill afford it (other than gasoline, but that's another topic)? A professor may issue a single WORD or graph change, and BAM! You've got a new [i]required[/i] edition of the book, rendering the older (but perfectly valid) edition useless. Now, not all professors do this, not by a long shot. But the fact that it DOES happen is freakin' ridiculous.

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