Buying textbooks: 'A sense of desperation'; The Exponent (Purdue University), January 23, 2020

Joseph Ching, The Exponent (Purdue University); Buying textbooks: 'A sense of desperation'

"[Justin] Race [director of the Purdue University Press] said a major misconception is that people who purchase a physical book are buying the actual book itself. By this logic, online content would be inherently free.

“It’s much better to think of it as, ‘I am buying the intellectual property,’” Race said. “The distilled expertise by a scholar, the copy editing, proofreading, the design, the cover design — and not so much for the paper and binding.”

Purdue Libraries is in the early stages of its Open Bytes project, a partnership with the College of Engineering to create educational resources accessible to the world. These resources include textbooks, lecture notes and case studies available beginning mid-2020, according to a University press release."