"The Textbook Industry Deserves to Die"

When marketing guru Seth Godin enters the fray, people listen. His Textbook Rant blog post today focuses on the expense, impracticality, and lack of engagement textbooks provide and stresses how quickly they become outdated. He declares, "As far as I can tell, assigning a textbook to your college class is academic malpractice."
And he concludes,

This industry deserves to die. It has extracted too much time and too much money and wasted too much potential. We can do better. A lot better.

What didn't he say?

He never mentioned that textbooks are inaccessible to many students - those with physical, vision or other print disabilities.
But he offers a digital solution that offers accessibility at no cost to the student.

The solution seems simple to me. Professors should be spending their time devising pages or chapterettes or even entire chapters on topics that matter to them, then publishing them for free online. (it's part of their job, remember?) When you have a class to teach, assemble 100 of the best pieces, put them in a pdf or on a kindle or a website... and there, you're done.

Teachers, professors are you listening?