It's an incredibly toxic cycle. The book is expensive because it is required for completion of an already expensive task (a class). Teachers and departments req

It's an incredibly toxic cycle. The book is expensive because it is required for completion of an already expensive task (a class). Teachers and departments require the latest evergreen textbook because of incentives from the publishers paid for with the profits of the sales of said evergreen books. How does education get off of the treadmill? Students can't reasonable refuse to buy the new textbook. They could organize and demand that professors stop, but in some fields the subject matter does change relatively frequently e.g. advanced medical courses. So the opposition would point to those and ask the rhetorical question "Don't you want your education to be current?. It is unlikely that professors at scale will act unilaterally because they are at best neutral in this situation. It could be solved, perhaps, with legislation, although it seems that such things are fairly universal across countries (although I am somewhat ignorant of how it works in Europe) and if the Europeans haven't tried to regulate it yet, it is incredibly unlikely that the Americans would try. Book piracy is the logical result of this cycle. If book prices were reduced either through reduced evergreening causing the used market to exist again or by some other means then piracy would reduce as well.