"But in an effort to sabotage international sales, Ms. Allen said, some publishers have made small changes to the pagination or text to make it more difficult to use in the United States (as they might do with new editions of the same text here)."

Gouging has been in place in the Southeast for at least ten years. Colleges take advantage of computerized typesetting to order customized versions of textbooks. They then change the revision annually to force students to buy new books, rather than buy or borrow last year's edition. Even in the case where the SAME basic textbook is used by two different colleges in the same area, the mandatory book lists prescribe different edition numbers.

I'm not somebody who discards textbooks, and I sort of understand the professional indignance a professor might feel when a student declares them useless once class is over, but this is simple extortion, the product of a different driver: professors get paid for their textbook's use.

Geology, mathematics, physics, astronomy doesn't change because a class happens in a different building.

campustextbookrentals.com

I get through every semester for about $100. I have since starting my ADN program years ago.

I've never kept a textbook, nor wished I had. Google answers the odd question I've had just fine.

I've also never had an instructor care what textbook version I used, even back at UT in the 90s.

Uh-oh, momof4 -- just went there, and it seems it's no more. Was it .net or something?

I see them for rent on Amazon, but even those prices are not cheap.

I use textbooks, which I get by begging like a little dog at SPSP, the big psych conference, after the booksellers take down their displays. ("You don't want to carry that big heavy thing back to New York with you, do you?")

One of these books, this wonderful Michael Gazzaniga textbook, "Cognitive Neuroscience," helped me understand the brain. http://amzn.to/2dBxGlZ

As I wrote in a review of it on Amazon: "Before I got this book, I thought I somehow had a block in learning in this area. I don't. It was the murky, dull writing of all the other books and textbooks that gave me a hard time."

https://www.campusbookrentals.com/ is still there.

Google and wikipedia are good for a lot of general knowledge. But I still keep my text books and even bought a few more post college. Ferromagnetism by Bozorth is $170 and worth every penny. It is a truly excellent book. Though over an inch thick and about as dense as a block of tungsten.

But yeah, most of these revision games are purely a way to extort a captured audience.

I take a night class or two at the local junior college and see this problem first hand. Technology isn't going to solve it for us this time because technology is at the root of the problem.

The problem is a scheme that textbook publishers have come up with to destroy the market in used books. What they do is move part of the content of your book out of the book and onto a web site (a very common example being McGraw-Hill's "Supersite"). The web site then offers to do part of the instructor's (unpaid) work for him/her by collecting and correcting students' homework itself.

The result is that instructors require access to the web site as a condition of enrollment. Then those students who bought a used book (or an international edition) find out the hard way that the web site password that came with the book is only good for one semester. But McGraw-Hill will be happy to sell that student a new password -- at a price that more than takes away what he saved by not buying a new book in the first place.

The only solution to this awful racket that I can see is for colleges to adopt policies of not allowing instructors to require access to the Supersite (or similar sites at other publishers) as a condition of enrollment. But I have not yet managed to convince my school to adopt such a policy.

It is extortion. And as the colleges sees no problem engaging in theft neither do I. Steal the books if you can.

When I was in college the first time (early 90s) my books were generally close to $1200 (8 classes * $150). Before that I went to a community college and for one class tuition was $169 and books were ~$300.

A couple of years ago grad school was not nearly as bad because it was mainly papers which you could access for free through the schools computer system. In one class that did use a book we had 5 versions. Old revision was for US (hardback). Then a slightly update international version (softback) - most changes in questions and examples to make them more international relevant (and change names and units (e.g. to kilometers). Then a second international softbank version with some change. The fourth version - hardback for US - all new questions, many updated examples some significant rewrite over the last international version. The fifth was a USA softback with some minor typical graphical type corrections...and new questions. And the prof had an instructors version that was closed to newer usa hardback but didn't match any of the others exactly.

Some had a book that mentioned they publishers online services and they asked the prof about that. THe prof said some others had tried and there had been a bit of a dust up -- that was not available then because it had been determined that providing correcting services etc made them under state law to be the highest class of state education contractors and the companies weren't will to jump through those hoops.

I'm guessing that it's all corporate and university publishing. Good small businesses wouldn't try to screw you over this way, IMO.

Access codes are the thorn in my side and the drain on my bank account. Daughter has now progressed to her major-specific courses and every single one of them requires access codes that range from 75-150 each. Just ridiculous overpriced garbage. I Amazon rent and BN rent all textbooks for her, but sometimes a teacher begins to use a newer version of a book (meaning no rental available) that no one can distinguish from the older book. I swear they're in on it - there are much cheaper books available yet they perpetuate the problem and I can only think it's because they are somehow making a buck off this.

"I've never kept a textbook, nor wished I had. Google answers the odd question I've had just fine."

Good books are works of art, and as Amy notes with her reams of printed output, the analog nature of print lends an air of (calming?) permanance that scrolling and opening new tabs and windows can't convey. Web sites go offline more often than books do, too.
If you read as fast as I do, big tables like The Chart of The Nuclides (Nuclides and Isotopes, GE Nuclear Energy) are best unfolded and viewed without scrolling. Happy you've found what works for you!

Access codes are the thorn in my side and the drain on my bank account.

Isn't it awful? I got out of school before access codes became a "thing," and I was the champion of buying used books/tracking down students who had taken the class before and buying their old books off them. I'd sometimes even find course books at local libraries and therefore didn't pay a dime.

It's killing me to know that these work-arounds are getting blocked because, for a lot of students, it's the only way they can afford to stay in school.

I'd be tempted to draft a study group of 2-3 members and rent a single textbook together.