In your analogy, the vendors are the people manufacturing textbooks that are mandatory, but never get opened and cannot be resold on the used market. The regul

In your analogy, the vendors are the people manufacturing textbooks that are mandatory, but never get opened and cannot be resold on the used market. The regulators are the administrators (or whoever) that require the useless textbooks. Of course, there are many useful textbooks with none of the above properties, but they don’t require complicated incentive structures to ensure they’re made mandatory.