“Kind of funny, I remember in 1985 for college, I spent like $170 for books. When we got a new president, he issued an edict that textbooks had to be changed out every year and I ended up spending like $400. Plus no used book market either. He came from the East Coast.”
I’m a teacher now. I use 100 percent public domain sources. Textbook costs - 0 dollars. Students shouldn’t have to pay money to obtain quality instruction materials. The cost on my time in first year was somewhat high - but now that I have all the materials put together - the cost is very little. Just a print run once a year, say a couple hours with the photocopier and all the students are done.
There certainly is plenty, and probably as "quality" as the high dollar titles most of the time. Likewise I am a fan of free and open source computer software. One time one of my girls had a first year class which required "Microsoft Office". We were pretty broke at the time, I had a legit older version which wasn't functionally up to date so I set her up with the most current release of OpenOffice. The prof's reaction to that was "Hell yes I should have thought of that!" I honestly can't remember the last time I bought a piece of computer software. At work I have the usual corporate supplied package but the homework is all done with open source titles on Linux. It all goes back & forth just fine!
Funny you mention this. I am teaching a web programming class and we went with a web site instead of a standard text book. Students like the aspect of not having to buy a useless textbook.
> I’m a teacher now. I use 100 percent public domain sources.