When I first started college in 2012, I probably spent the same amount, if not more, on access codes to submit homework. A lot of the justification I've heard f

When I first started college in 2012, I probably spent the same amount, if not more, on access codes to submit homework. A lot of the justification I've heard from professors is the fact that now we get access to the terrible, terrible, so called "eBook". As a CS major, I thought this was great, because I wanted to be on the next "evolution" of books and higher ed. I was thinking how great it would be to have vocabulary words and important ideas indexed throughout the book. Unfortunately, this wasn't the case. What you get is an expiring version of the text that forces you to deal the the absolutely horrendous UI of this "book". The menus and header take up well over 50% of the page and then the actual text is loaded into an iframe which loads up a flash player. My last year, many of my professors have moved away from this and started doing their own thing inside of Blackboard. I never would have thought I would be happier to use Blackboard but in this case it is so much better and there is no extra cost. I guess it comes down to the question of why educational software must be terrible to use. I'm thankful my professors eventually realized this and solved the problem in other ways. Of course towards the end, I was in higher level, smaller courses but I still think there should be a way to open source these classes and the technology required for them.