The crazy thing to me is that for a lot of the classes that use these online materials, nothing has changed in 50 years. 100-300 classes are largely the same as they were before digital learning.

The problem from a broader point of view is a coordination problem. The people making the buying decisions (professors and departments) are not the people paying (the students). I would wholeheartedly support legislation that forced professors to pay the same textbook fees as their students, and for departments to be required to cover the costs for scholarship students.

I’ll bet we would see a lot more schools opting into open source textbooks and articles from the library if that were the case.