I'm NOT allowed to throw Molotov cocktails into reply-all emails anymore, so y'all are getting a thread.

Digital textbooks are a scam propagated by book publishers and university admin.

Book publishers, no matter their insistence that digital books don't cost much less to make than physical ones, are for-profit ventures. If you save $1 per unit but sell 100,000 units (that is, 8 or 9 big state school's worth) that's $100,000 in extra profit. That's level one.

But digital books are more insidious than that. Because they are digital, they're never actually sold to students; they're leased for a given period of time/set of circumstances. Students cannot sell their access to other students the way they can sell physical books.

This means that students pay full price for textbooks without any chance of recouping their loss at the end of the term. It ALSO means that there is no used book market for digital textbooks; there's no mechanism for publishers to keep their prices competitive.

So what ends up happening is a monopoly on a particular title. The only place to get the book required to pass your gen ed class is through the people who publish it, which means they can charge what they like without worrying about individual consumers.

On its face, this is classist. Only the wealthy students can get the books they need. But what's galling is that often, as in my field of English, is that the information in the textbook is not proprietary or even recent. Aristotle wrote about rhetoric and he's free online.

But in addition to the need for a chunk of capital for books, digital texts assume that every student has a laptop and access to the internet. In my experience as an English professor, this is simply not the case. Another class boundary.

University admin is a second grifter in this con. Running a bookstore is expensive, the thinking goes, so if we don't have to pay for physical textbooks up front or hire people to sort, stack, and distribute them, we've saved the taxpayer money.

But what often goes unstated in the justification of digital textbooks is the monetary relationship between universities and publishers. Universities have always profited from bulk textbook assignments; the publishers just use the same game to encourage digital textbooks.

When a textbook is assigned by a department or a Dean rather than an individual professor, the result is a race to get the best deal, which is often in the form of donations or grants to the university. That's even without considering a university mark up on digital textbooks.

So what can we do?

Protest loudly. Do not allow your department to require digital textbooks. They are bad pedagogy if only because they are by their nature anti-collaborative.

Assign physical books whenever possible. I myself always give the latest and one older edition ass options, so my students can make the monetary choice that's right for them.

If you MUST use a digital textbook, make sure that it is available for free via your university library. You owe your all of your students frictionless access to course materials.

If you want to be digital like the cool kids, use open access textbooks. They are there, they are great.

If you are tenured, raise holy hell about this. Digital textbooks are stealing away from you too.

Lastly, everybody needs to push back against money being the sole mechanism of value in a university setting. We're here to teach, research, and serve, not turn a profit.

Unroll plz @threadreaderapp