You verbatim wrote "As a professor, create your own PDF and give it to all the students free". How is that not giving away your work for free?
How is automatically deducting textbook cost from student tuition going to help with anything? If anything it will help maintain the status quo, because then it's even less transparent.
The alternative you propose is for professors who don't write their own books is to give other people's work (the original authors') away for free.
So your solution is that because it's easy to copy digital books, the 'problem is solved' by forcibly taking away the fruit of labor of some people at your convenience?
As I wrote elsewhere: if there were a cartel, college textbooks would vastly outprice textbooks for professionals (because they cannot be 'forced' to buy them) - that's not what I see in my field. Professional textbooks easily cost $200-$300. It's just a niche market.
You can be mad because I proposed a solution to an easily solved problem that doesn't need to exist if you want to. I don't mind.
When you see "buy one get one free" do you really believe the second one is free? Think before you toss what you think are gotchas out at people. Roll it into the cost of tuition. It's really not that hard to get, yet I'm saying it a second time.
It does solve lots of problems. Material cost, outlandish distribution, marketing and production cost, and it means the prices aren't externalized and the students know what they're paying for a course up front. Those are basically all the problems with the textbook market. It solves a couple of other problems too, digital documents can't be resold, doubly so if their cost is counted in tuition, so no need to stupidly re edit the document every year just to make sure last year's edition is worthless, only edit when there is an update in the field.
Speaking of which, the fact that they do that, edit books needlessly to prevent the previous year's book from being resellable at any value, is proof positive that textbooks are a racket. Professional textbooks are a different kind of hustle, it's like law dictionaries, they know the books are valuable to professionals so they charge large prices, this fact is not proof that the college textbook racket is not a racket run by a publishing cartel. Your reasoning is as weak as a limp dishrag on this one.
How is automatically deducting textbook cost from student tuition going to help with anything? If anything it will help maintain the status quo, because then it's even less transparent.
The alternative you propose is for professors who don't write their own books is to give other people's work (the original authors') away for free.
So your solution is that because it's easy to copy digital books, the 'problem is solved' by forcibly taking away the fruit of labor of some people at your convenience?
As I wrote elsewhere: if there were a cartel, college textbooks would vastly outprice textbooks for professionals (because they cannot be 'forced' to buy them) - that's not what I see in my field. Professional textbooks easily cost $200-$300. It's just a niche market.