Thanks to everyone who wrote in — we got tons of mail on this, so rather than post a bunch of responses, I’ll give the gist of the feedback and offer a few additional thoughts.

Basically, students and publishers disagree on how much input students have. Publishers are definitely feeling pressure to offer textbooks with lots of bells and whistles, and students definitely don’t feel like they have the power to exert such pressure. It seems likely to me that professors, on behalf of students, are lobbying publishers to make their textbooks more video-game- and music-video-like.

The problem here, of course, is that while professors are right that students want eye-grabbing and easy-to-read textbooks, professors cannot tell how much such textbooks are worth to students relative to plain-Jane ones. They can only tell how much such textbooks are worth to themselves in terms of students’ paying better attention in class — this value is typically greater than zero, and since professors don’t lose anything by picking expensive books, that’s what tends to happen.

Another common complaint is the “new edition” problem — textbook publishers keep churning out updates of books that haven’t outlived their usefulness, and if they stop printing the old ones, professors have to go along, thus forcing students to buy new instead of used books. One way to solve this would be for colleges to handle textbooks (at least the big expensive ones) the same way high schools do: Buy them themselves, and require students to return them at the end of the semester.