Currently cheaper than some of my hard cover textbooks, and I graduated in 2005, so I imagine its worse now.
So that is expensive in a absolute experimental sense but not excessive in the book industry as a whole.
Also carpentry project expenses can add up if you make things fancy, so I can imagine spending about as much on the raw materials as loading a wheel with kindles.
> "but the kindle is.." Currently cheaper than some of my hard cover textbooks, and I graduated in 2005, so I imagine its worse now.
Yes and no. Text books are needlessly expensive and, to be honest, often superficial content-wise. The information contained in them can be easily gotten from the Internet or, if that doesn't work out, from a good library.
But even if I'd want to use 10 text books at the same time, one kindle isn't going to cut it. I think the biggest problem with using digital documents, for me, is that there's no natural geometrical mapping that I can keep in my head the way I can with books, articles, and stuff scattered around my office. I know that the information on concept A is in that corner, for example, and that going deeper into that pile means going in deeper chronologically. And I put documents on related concepts closer to each other. Somehow, these stacks of documents form a concrete representation of the argument I am constructing.
I tried to do the same with digital documents, I've got thousands of them, but tagging them, or putting them in directory trees, and so on, does not give me the same handle on the the information as I understand it at this moment in my mind. It is quite frustratingly, as digital documents are a lot easier to handle otherwise.
You're forgetting that unless he plans on stealing the ebooks he still has to pay very nearly the same price for the textbook just now they can make it expire (and don't forget to tack on the price of the kindle).
tl;dr [price of kindle] + [price of textbook] > [price of textbook]
Currently cheaper than some of my hard cover textbooks, and I graduated in 2005, so I imagine its worse now.
So that is expensive in a absolute experimental sense but not excessive in the book industry as a whole.
Also carpentry project expenses can add up if you make things fancy, so I can imagine spending about as much on the raw materials as loading a wheel with kindles.