High Cost of Textbooks - Revision

It all goes back to the beginning of college. I had to be careful with my money or I wouldn't have enough for textbooks. Sometimes I would have to decide between buying a full meal versus just getting an Apple or no food at all. On top of tuition costs, my books could be as much as one of my classes. I find it difficult for someone to pay for rent, food, and bills without debt when tuition and textbooks cost so much. This has made it increasingly difficult to pay for school and books over the years. 

I have paid for school by working part time at minimum wage jobs and struggling through the week to week grind of homework and work. Which is why it is rigorous to pay for school and textbooks. Honestly no one wants to work for minimum wage but as my parents have always reminded me, you start at the bottom not the top. Which is why I go to school in the first place, so I can do something I love and make more money doing it. On top of making minuscule money every term, I was required to get the newest textbooks, which were hardly used since everything is on the internet. On top of this, when I went to book buybacks to try to get money back, they wouldn't accept the books since there was already a new edition. 

 There can be new editions of books, but there can't be new editions of the internet, which is why I prefer the internet over textbooks. Often times I find myself using the internet over textbooks since the internet has vastly diverse information from a variety of people, as compared to textbooks that only use a few authors. In my opinion, books are outdated. I believe that textbooks are outdated because they have few effective examples to interact with the reader and I find that most are dull to read. Videos are more useful than textbooks because you see someone go through the process to either solve a problem or explain a difficult concept. If books are inferior then why do they cost so much more than free resources like the internet?  

Textbook costs have increased over the years and there is little reason for this in my opinion, other than to make more money. The same textbooks are just re-printed over and over again and they just label them as a new edition. There is little information that changes in the textbooks, typically the only changes that are made are the questions or the order of the questions. What other alternatives do we have as a student? Why aren't there any e-textbook alternatives that we can use that cost less money and don't have to be carried around everywhere? These should be simple solutions to a problem that we have all had. What about the companies that choose what price to put on books. 

 It seems unusual to me that the prices books are listed at are regulated by the book companies that publish these books. Shouldn't there be a committee of some sorts that looks to see if the information in the book has actually changed to constitute charging so much for books? Committees should be a group of people that don't have monetary interest in what is trying to be sold, but have knowledge on the product. While committees can help reduce the price of required textbooks, what are our professors doing to help make life easier on their students. 

Why not have professors use older versions of the textbook or a PDF of the newest textbook. Perhaps teachers can't give out a copy of the book because they will get in trouble by their superiors, which makes me question how the hierarchy of our schooling system works. How much choice do our professors actually have in what textbooks we use in class? It's not only the professors, but students also need to voice their opinions and say that high textbooks costs are not acceptable. Through the collected effort of teachers and students together we can lower book prices and make living more affordable for students. 

Notes: changed some sentence structure and vocabulary. Reworded and added sentences to all the paragraphs except the first  paragraph. Expanded on previous ideas and tried to make sentences flow from one to another.