Educational textbooks are always more expensive, at least here in the US. I’ve bought some of the Principles books (last one I remember is Debt Cycles) for no more than $25 on Amazon. However, some professors write THEIR own textbooks for the class. You can’t find PDF versions or even cheap versions of it. You can only buy through the school.
A former professor used to be an economic researcher for the NY Fed Reserve during the financial crisis... she did research on credit scores through specific quartiles to see which range of credit score was likely to default on mortgage payments. We had to buy the research. Not from her, but through the school. I don’t know if she got a cut, but it’s weird in my opinion.
Most expensive textbook I remember seeing the price/bill for was an applied Monetary Theory and Policy book which was somewhere around $325 and the code for homework’s and study guides being $125. I didn’t buy it.
I have been talking a big game about prices like this, however, I never really spent much money. Friends and I would always pull money for 1 book and share, but the codes are a different story.
They’re not using papyrus, they’re using greed.