I’m not sure what you mean by rent, but in my day students would frequently buy used books and then sell them after the course. Book publishers didn’t like this so they adopted strategies to prevent it. Like a new edition every year or two. Sometimes, the new edition was really somewhat new; often it just amounted to just renumbering the exercises (so the instructor could not just assign, say, 1, 5, and 13). With maybe a few cosmetic changes. All this had the incidental effect of raising prices even higher. Among other things, they had to allocate even more for returns from the bookstore. It was, and presumably still is, a real racket. One course I taught used a text written by a colleague and put into the public domain, so any student could get a copy from the local copy shop for $10 or $12 (maybe $20 by now) or could just download it for free. I wish more would do that.
But I am afraid that, for the most part, students just have to buy them.
I am told that they often “torrent” the books. By which I believe they mean downloading for free from the dark web. But I really have no practical understanding of how or where (site-wise) this is done.
You can rent many textbooks in electronic form through Amazon or publisher websites, although the cost is not dramatically less than just purchasing a dead tree published book, and the electronic versions (at least in “Kindle”) often didn’t display figures and equations correctly. As noted, publishers tried to undercut the sales of ‘Used’ textbooks by releasing updated versions every year or two even though the revisions primarily consisted of minor changes to problem sets.
In school, some professors would essentially ignore the textbook and teach from notes and self-made problem sets, which was great except you didn’t learn of this until after purchasing the assigned text. In others, professors would update their text to the latest version even though that wasn’t stated in the curriculum, so the ‘Used’ book that was purchased didn’t have the correct problems. For the most part, they would hand out supplemental problem sets that provided the correct problems, but I had one prof who required buying three texts, one of which was never actually used in the course.
I mostly kept my textbooks and have added to that collection to the point that I now have several bookshelves of technical textbooks, handbooks, and reference volumes, many of which I still reference even though they are more than twenty years “out of date”. Even the astrophysics texts are mostly useful despite dramatic changes in the field, and I use a CRC Handbook of Chemistry and Physics, a Shigley’s, and a Machinery’s Handbook on frequent basis that I got for dirt cheap for being 10+ years old. I also have a 10th Edition Mark’s that I paid for new back in 1996 at what I then considered an exorbitant cost and have used only occasionally and would not consider updating because most of the information is so basic that it will never require updating.
Heh, I knew a guy who self published the textbook for his class. He would sell copies, literally out of his car’s trunk. It was a bit of a racket, as you could pretty much guarantee a B in the course by paying $110 for the textbook.
This, you can get any published text online via a few popular illegal torrent sites. Also after the initial introductory classes profs who teach advanced classes normally supply their own collected material as online texts that can be downloaded from school servers.
It’s worse than that. I have three editions of the same calculus textbook with the exact same problem sets. Literally a different color on the cover and number before the edition.
Renting textbooks is a thing, but the cost to rent a book for one semester is nearly as high as buying it outright. Buying the book and selling it back is also a thing, but again, the amount you get back is trivial.
Actually buying (or renting) the textbook from the publishing company will usually, nowadays, include getting access to online resources that go with the textbook. This can be important, because often, the homework will be assigned through that online system. This can have a lot of benefits, if the online system is good: It makes it a lot easier to grade homework (in a freshman course with 200 students, this is a big deal), students can get instant feedback, you can set it to give slightly different versions of the problem to everyone (i.e., the same problem, but with different numbers), so they can’t just copy directly off of each other, and you can set it up so students can take multiple attempts, so the students who need more practice get it. But of course, it also means that students are now tied more closely to the textbook publisher, and it’s harder to circumvent the high prices by the old methods (getting the books in another country where they’re cheaper, buying used copies on the free market, etc.).
I did have a professor once who said “The third edition of this textbook is the current one, and most easily available, but the second edition is better. You can use either one”, and then when he assigned problems, he dug up what the problem numbers were in each edition.
I had one teacher who wrote his own textbook, because it was an eclectic course, and there was no one standard book that covered all of the material in it. He self-published it with a copier and a binding machine, and made it available for cost (about the $10 or $12 you mentioned). This was before electronic publishing was widespread, but nowadays he probably also has a free electronic version.
Another professor told us at the start of the class “There are two good textbooks for this course. One of them (he held it up) costs $25, so that’s the one we’ll be using. Feel free to get the other one, too, if you want.”
So yeah, I had pretty supportive professors. But I have heard of teachers pulling the self-publishing con, too.
I was once teaching a course for which there were many texts available. I wrote (this was at least 30 years ago) in the spring before to 5 publishers asking what their price was. One didn’t bother to answer; one replied that that information was proprietary (they really said that); and three supplied the price. I chose the cheapest, although I think that was still over $50.
“Over $50” is still a very good price for a college textbook. The $25 orbital mechanics text we used was a real outlier.
Oh, and I also had a course (an upper-level English course) where the “required text” was the complete works of Shakespeare. There was a specific edition that the school bookstore had, of course, but I already had my own copy, and that was fine. Obviously there’s many, many different sources for the complete Shakespeare. Several other humanities courses also used books which were either out of copyright, or popular-press novels, which therefore didn’t have the exorbitant prices typical of textbooks, and which were often available for free from various libraries.
I was always so happy with the number of professors I had who were unhappy about the school book “racket.” Despite being prohibited from doing so, many of them actively made an effort to see to it students could find cheaper alternatives.
In the early 2000s I had a few professors who gave assignments in at least two versions of the textbook since the only real difference was page numbers and such. For my more niche architecture classes most professors had “readers” which were the comb-bound photocopies of multiple sources of text from the local print shop for generally under $20. I suspect there was a lot of copyright infringement involved there, but…educational purposes? In any case, when I got to grad school, one student learned that grad students could check books out from the library for the entire quarter, while undergrads were limited to a week or two. I think he had to wait a few days for a couple books to come from offsite libraries but that was a clever gambit.
Frankly, for basic engineering and science courses there is little reason most teaching couldn’t be done using a Schaum’s Outline, and for advanced courses instructors often had enough issues with some aspect of the textbook (organization, nomenclature, errors or ambiguities in the text) that it would have been easier if they had just published their lecture notes; in fact, I had a number of professors who did essentially that, using the text only for problem sets. I also had a professor for partial differential equations who used four texts, one of which was long out of print so he put one copy in the library for borrowing and the other in his office, which made little sense because it isn’t as if partial differential equations are some obscure area of study for which no adequate textbooks are available.
Prohibited by whom? The only time I was directed what to use was in a multi-section course with one syllabus and one final. And the multi-section course I taught most often was linear algebra for which we almost always used the Schaum’s outline, which back then cost around $20. And I once met the author who said that even at that price it made him relatively wealthy. Win/win.
Plenty of my engineering physics professors published their own notes. Fortunately, the ones who did so were gifted teachers who also wrote clearly and with insight. The available books were not as good. Schaum’s are certainly okay, but really only for the basics.
Several of my medical school professors also published their own notes. Sometimes these were good, but often they were surprisingly useless. I remember one course which had a ridiculous amount of time devoted to it, hundreds of hours of class time, with lecture notes over a thousand pages. I relied on an old hundred page text which covered the same material concisely. After getting an A, I mentioned this to the teacher, who said that I had used a later edition of the textbook he used during his doctorate. He could have just assigned that. Not every teacher is good at writing notes.
Most material changes slowly. Even in medicine, a book ten years old is mostly useful. I don’t know what current students do, but the availability of current textbooks, only 2-4 years old and cheap, on used book sites is definitely the way to go. Borrow a buddy’s book if the question numbers have been changed around, though most don’t even bother to make any real changes in the absence of new information. How much has basic calculus changed in a hundred years?
I’m not quite sure. Maybe contracts the university had with various publishers forbade the faculty from recommending other sources for textbooks or perhaps it was just a university rule. Whateve the case, my professors were a bit oblique in meeting their obligation. i.e. “I can’t tell you that you can find the exact same textbook for half the price here” or “If you have the earlier edition go ahead and use that, it’s not much different.”
I"m a math professor and also a textbook author for a series of books for non-math/science majors. Go ahead and flame me for the latter, but my coauthor and I do our best to make the books readable and pedagogically sound. We must be doing something right, as the books have provided me a good second income for some 30 years now.
For the last couple of editions, our publisher has supplied an online homework system to go with our books (and all their other books). For a student to buy access to the system isn’t cheap, but it’s cheaper than buying a physical copy of the book and comes with an electronic version of the book. That’s what I have my students do now when I teach the classes that use my books. (I donate the royalties I make from sales at my University back to the school to mitigate any conflict of interest.) That allows me to assign weekly graded homework to two classes with 70 students total and not go crazy.
Our publisher is now pushing heavily into online publishing, something we’ve been wanting them to do for years. The latest editions of our books, which came out this year, don’t even come in a hardcover version anymore, the only printed version is paperback. (They still charge several arms and legs for it, though.)
When I teach classes that don’t use my books, I do take cost to the students into account, preferring to use a cheaper book when I can. But a good online homework system really is a big plus to me and many other profs.
Often, a school’s bookstore will be run by an outside company, like Barnes and Noble, and likely there used to be terms in the agreements that said that students had to be directed to the school bookstore to buy their texts, sometime to even find out what the required texts were. At least in my area, there are laws now that require information about the required texts be given to the students well ahead of time so that they can buy the books (physical or online, or rented, or…) wherever they want. No requiring them to buy the books through the school bookstore anymore.