> https://tophat.com/marketplace/generalchemistry/

$60 plus a "subscription," whatever that is.

I can't speak for the quality of the books, but searching "general chemistry" on half.com gives me a bunch of entries in the $5-30 range. They're a few years old, but I can't imagine general chemistry has had many radical changes in the past decade.

These textbooks work with Linux or any other operating system. They can be re-sold, probably for the same price at which they were purchased. There is no learning curve to using a textbook. The textbook's servers will never be down. The university has to pay no licensing fee to the textbook. Textbooks do not have technical glitches. I can read a textbook on the bus, on a plane, in a car, or anywhere, with no worries about running out of batteries or losing my network connection.

Why on Earth would I ever pay more than twice the price for a far worse user experience?

Public speaking is a fantastic example of a course that doesn't need a textbook at all.

I interacted with communications instructors a lot when I was in university, and literally all of them thought the required textbook was a complete waste. It was there because the department required it, and none of the instructors actually used the text.

Instead they all had their favorite examples of great speeches or debates, and combined that with a few (free) essays on different types of speeches and rhetorical techniques.

But all of the instructors said that the most useful thing they did in the course was just practice. Requiring students to give short speeches in front of (portions of) the class or in front of instructors.

A truly useful platform for public speaking education would consist of recording student speeches and providing a way for peers to provide structured criticism of each others recorded speeches. Perhaps different pre-packaged peer assessment techniques for various types of speeches.

In this and many other cases, I'm very convinced that textbooks serve no purpose outside of accreditation and futile departmental attempts at standardizing ad junct instruction.

Maybe you can get departments/universities to buy into your product, but there's a huge difference between extracting rent from university administrators and actually improving learning. If you have to convince instructors/students to actually use the required instructional material in order to get your cut, you're facing an uphill battle. 99% of students in a public speaking class will either not buy the book in the first place, or else return the book at the instructor's wink-and-nod. And without a truly novel practice speech assessment platform or a very low-priced product, I think that's a good thing.

If you're providing electronic resources, then your competition isn't a $200 paper textbook. Your competition is all the free resources available online, including the PDF versions of most textbooks. There is no money to be made in this market except by conning University administrators.

Content on your platform is reliant on charging each student for it, while these free resources can easily be shared by a Prof with the class, between students in the save class, by the student associations (similar to exam databases) or from upper year to lower year students.

I noticed the first marketplace link refers to a freely available textbook on openstax (https://openstax.org/). What is the advantage for me as a student or professor accessing this content through your site when I can download a PDF directly from the source (the openstax site)?