Textbooks (again) and Spotify economics

Talking the familiar text book as an example,  American researcher David Wiley compares the cost of renting 75,000 movies  ($9.00 a month  fromNetFlicks) or renting  any of 20 million songs from Spotify  ($9.99/month) with the cost of renting a college text book . A single biology text book rents for $12.99 a month from BookRenter.  This cost imbalance is especially vexing in that consumers choose to rent movies or songs, while professors (often in collusion with publisher representatives) choose the textbooks that others (the students) pay for.

 

Terry Anderson writes