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We Rent Movies, So Why Not Textbooks?
Hugh Pickens writes "Using Netflix as a business model, Osman Rashid and Aayush Phumbhra founded Chegg, shorthand for 'chicken and egg,' to gather books from sellers at the end of a semester and renting — or sometimes selling — them to other students at the start of a new one. Chegg began renting books in 2007, before it owned any, so when an order came in, its employees would surf the Web to find a cheap copy. They would buy the book using Rashid's American Express card and have it shipped to the student. Eventually, Chegg automated the system. 'People thought we were crazy,' Rashid said. Now, as Chegg prepares for its third academic year in the textbook rental business, the business is growing rapidly. Jim Safka, a former chief executive of Match.com and Ask.com who was recently recruited to run Chegg, said the company's revenue in 2008 was more than $10 million, and this year, Chegg surpassed that in January alone."
Did you really have professors that required the newest books? Maybe my department (chemistry major) was a little different, but they didn't care. The semester usually started off with "here is the current book. If you don't have this one don't worry about it, just make copies of what you need." The same went for my math classes.
The problem is mainly with the professors who write the textbook for their own class, thus are the copyright holder, and make minor changes here and there (moving a keyword to another paragraph, swapping the titles of sections, renaming sections) so that an older book would cause more confusion as it didn't match up with the course work exactly.
If you question them on this, they say it is your own fault for not having the newest $160 copy of the book.
To those types, teaching anyone is not their desire, only to extract more money from them.
Granted, those people should never have been able to be hired into a position requiring them to give our their precious knowledge after it was paid for *only* once (gasp!), but that is the state of things for the past decade.
I've even had one professor state he would fail anyone caught with an older version of the book.
(If that happened or not I can't say, since around a quarter of the class including myself dropped it)
Fortunately not all professors are like this. Most that are in that game do it for the teaching the next generation, and kudos to them.
As usual, it is the few bad apples ruining everything around them.
But then I remembered "teacher's editions".
Each textbook has a teacher's edition that has all the answers in it.
Ahem. 7 on the first page.
What prevents me from buying one of these rather than the standard edition of the same book?