School Book Scam

This is something I've noticed throughout my undergraduate tenure, and seems to also be incredibly prevalent in law school as well. There is a serious issue with both how textbooks are assigned/used, and how insanely expensive they are. Well, I've got some solutions that should make everyone (except a select few groups who are massively over-profiting from the current system). Why can't we do this?


Well before we can really get to the solution we should look at the overall problem. Textbooks are frequently extremely expensive, seldom used, and bulky/awkward to carry. Textbooks are usually chosen either by the professor or the department and seldom seem to have a concern for the overall cost. While it might not be that big of a deal to professors (who are gainfully employed) students tend to have a lot of financial concerns. This gets further exacerbated by the fact that their financial aid package won't account enough money to cover the costs of all the "required" books, let alone the cost of any supplemental books that professors will tell you are extremely helpful.

Now some things are out there to help cover the costs, students can search for used books (good luck with condition), there are rental companies out there (again good luck on condition), and of course many bookstores will buy back your books to help recover some of the costs (if they didn't put out a new edition, making your latest book a paper weight). While these are helpful they don't do enough, and they certainly don't address the heavy/awkward part of the problem.

The solution is freaking simple. E-books. Most students today are extremely comfortable with E-books, and they eliminate the trouble with the heavy/awkward problem. Additionally costs can be reduced since it is only a "soft-copy" version of the book. In addition to the E-books, let's move to a system where the departments all work together to assign texts with a specific budget in mind. The school can say "a full-time student with x credits has a budget of y dollars for texts. No text may exceed z dollars." Of course some courses will require more expensive texts, and others won't even need one so the school could adjust for that prior to having the departments select their texts.

Alternatively, schools are making money hand over fist on students. Why can't the texts just be included in tuition. I'm sure eventually it would be built in later, but this allows students to just get the necessary textbooks without having to be overly concerned with costs.

Can someone give me a reasonable explanation as to why either of these wouldn't work?