>Students are NOT the consumers of the textbook industry, professors are. Exactly. Besides the conflicts of interest you mentioned, the actual contents of the

>Students are NOT the consumers of the textbook industry, professors are. Exactly. Besides the conflicts of interest you mentioned, the actual contents of the texts are crafted for the benefit of the customers (the professors of course). Directly from the article: >To get faculty hooked, Ahrens offers all kinds of extras for the instructor, like test questions, visuals, and homework questions. Not much use for the student's though. And this leads to a situation where you, the student, are simply paying for the professor's laziness, as you put it: >The problem as a student is that I need the problems in the back to do homework, and in many cases exam questions are drawn straight from those problems. Those publishers sure know what they are doing...