I think educators are certainly to blame - as much as it's convenient to blame admin staff, educators in my experience set the course book. Pearson etc offer t

I think educators are certainly to blame - as much as it's convenient to blame admin staff, educators in my experience set the course book. Pearson etc offer them a time saver they don't have to pay for - they take out the effort of assigning and marking exercises, and don't add any cost to the educator. The students pay, and Pearson uses these codes to inconvenience students and force them to buy new copies. If you think like an MBA, it's a great idea - the person in decision making power benefits from this move (exercises handled for them), is probably unaware of the issue for students, and has more time to spend on something else they need to do (raising grants, trying to write papers to keep going on the tenure treadmill). But you also get to sell a new copy of each book annually, at full price, without used sales cannibalising your returns. Given there isn't a huge growth in universities each year, this is a great way to boost revenues sustainably. In my experience on the other side of the pond, we used 1 textbook in the entire degree. It was reasonably priced, readily available second hand, and didn't have any single use license codes. Indeed, one instructor used to upload the relevant chapters of their own book as PDF files, insisting nobody buy the book as it wasn't worth it!!