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I knew this would happen. I should of gone ahead and written what I thought would happen on my blog. So I will do my best to bring everyone up to speed.

Some Colleges today are accepting kickbacks from book publishers to force students to buy “custom” textbooks that are created for that specific college. Some of these custom textbooks include special codes inside that students need in order to do their homework online. Each semester, the book publishers release new slightly revised versions of each custom textbook. This makes old textbooks practically worthless and steals from the wealth of students. Gone are the days of being able to purchase old textbooks for College. It is getting harder to save any money in College.

Now the Colleges are saying the price to get the digital textbooks online is what is creating the price hike. But they are forgetting one thing. If say only a couple paragraphs have to be updated each semester, or year for that fact, telling the students that the price of the digital book is higher is wrong. Even if the student has to purchase a new one every semester. Case in point are grades k-12. Many of the teachers have found ways around the high expense. By publishing their own content. This saves the schools thousands and hundred of thousands each year.

But the Colleges are not doing this, and some regular k-12 schools are not either. They are allowing the publishers of the original works to be copied over to digital textbooks instead of the Professors creating their own. Some Professors have been told they must push the digital textbooks from the publishers. They can't make their own.

A few k-12 schools are already having problems with this type of approach to digital content. The digital books are too expensive for the students, and because the digital content is copyrighted by the publishers the teachers can only allow the students to view the content as set in place by the publishers. No printer copy version, no DVD copy version, very few copies allowed in the library.

In grades k-12 a teacher can save their school on average $120,000 to $238,000 every eight to ten years by creating the digital text books themselves. This is if the digital textbook is made for all the students taking the same course those school years. A one time fee to whom ever they choose to make the digital textbooks that take on average of 100 hours each for three people to create.

It doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure out who is being screwed in College. They are using the excuse to update, but even I know updating digital content does not mean a full re-write. It merely means finding a couple places, and updating them. Done in under at least 3 hours. Not hundreds.

It is because the copyrighted content is in the books that is causing the high price. Publishers are once again not giving students a break.

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