I teach undergraduate and graduate courses in Rhetoric and New Media at the University of South Florida. For the most part, I agree with your professor--all the books I assign for classes are available used on amazon and I often photocopy resources and provide them to classes as a PDF (fair use is meant to benefit education, not create new profitable markets).
But there are many classes, especially at large, state, research universities, that aren't taught by tenure-track faculty. These are the courses (in the humanities at least) that often require the pricey textbooks as a way of ensuring that students get quality instruction from apprentice graduate students or adjunct faculty. Its not an ideal system. As many on the list have noted, used textbooks are a particular racket--and often the publishing firms rush out new editions to devalue the older ones. E-books are simply a more aggressive strategy in this regard. Rather than requiring students to purchase eReaders, we should be requiring laptops with creative software packages. Let's emphasize production over consumption, learning over teaching, doing it "wrong" (and, hence, developing skills) over reading the right stuff (and regurgitating it on command).
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I teach undergraduate and graduate courses in Rhetoric and New Media at the University of South Florida. For the most part, I agree with your professor--all the books I assign for classes are available used on amazon and I often photocopy resources and provide them to classes as a PDF (fair use is meant to benefit education, not create new profitable markets).
But there are many classes, especially at large, state, research universities, that aren't taught by tenure-track faculty. These are the courses (in the humanities at least) that often require the pricey textbooks as a way of ensuring that students get quality instruction from apprentice graduate students or adjunct faculty. Its not an ideal system. As many on the list have noted, used textbooks are a particular racket--and often the publishing firms rush out new editions to devalue the older ones. E-books are simply a more aggressive strategy in this regard. Rather than requiring students to purchase eReaders, we should be requiring laptops with creative software packages. Let's emphasize production over consumption, learning over teaching, doing it "wrong" (and, hence, developing skills) over reading the right stuff (and regurgitating it on command).