<p>Many professors are snobs, and if you corner them they will actually say things like, “If a student can’t afford to buy the textbook I ordered, she shouldn’t be in college.”</p>
<p>DD has a philosophy professor who is exactly the opposite. All his texts are available online as PDFs. But that only works because they are classics.</p>
<p>Some professors just don’t pay attention. Publishers encourage this by not printing MSRPs on our desk copies. And I would guess that very few professors brave the crowds at the bookstore to find out how much their students actually pay. That’s not really an excuse for looking more closely online; Amazon publishes the list price. So maybe some of it is head-in-the-sand.</p>