If the screen size of an iPad is an issue, trying to read a textbook with a Kindle would be awful.

Actually the Kindle DX is the same size as the iPad and has a slightly higher resolution. Still, the sizes are not comparable when the screens themselves are completely different. Trying to focus on small text on a backlit screen is much harder on the eyes over extended periods of time.

I'm not sure if it would increase, but I'm almost certain it wouldn't go down. College textbooks are a conspiracy, designed to screw students over.

That was also a topic our professor went into; how textbook companies fuck us. It's not just with textbooks, either; a couple of my classes require einstruction CPS remotes, which cost $25 each. Then the instructors have to buy the software and hardware that utilizes the CPS remotes, and that shit is expensive.
No wonder college prices are increasing exponentially; it's a non-stop clusterfuck from all angles.

My girl just got her A&P book for $20 off ebay rather than $200 in the bookstore... AND she can sell it afterward. Try and do that on an iPad.

It's kind of depressing that a university would actually do such a stupid thing. It goes to show that even in universities, there's plenty of idiots who are incapable of seeing the drawbacks of any given idea. I mean, the list I wrote was done in 10 minutes time and I still had other issues with it that I didn't write down.
One major such issue I didn't mention is the risk of having your battery die on you - that would be a major annoyance - a notebook you can close for a while when using your books but if the books are on iPad, they'd be in constant use and they would NOT last the day and with Apple not allowing swappable batteries .... well students would end up having to recharge between classes.
Seriously, I'd fire the guy who came up with this idea as "completely incompetent".

yes, things like that happen in the real world...
wait a minute!

So thats fine as an excuse for price hikes across the board or are books special?

Good. Now you can tell the good universities apart from the ones that cannot realistically be considered educational establishments by even the most meagre of qualifiers. That level of fail can only be demonstrated by the mentally incompetent. Thus you'd be wasting your time trying to learn anything from them.

Maybe, if you didn't have to buy 15 textbooks every six months, each of which cost about the same as your average house mortgage, there wouldn't be such a large used textbook market. I for one, would like to buy new textbooks, and hang on to them later on. I'd like to be able to highlight stuff and make notes in the margins and to go back later on and look something up if I need it. This would be possible if textbooks weren't so ridiculously overpriced. As a student, I simply couldn't afford to buy all the textbooks I needed new. And I also couldn't afford not to sell them on later, to raise money for the next batch.

There's also the fact that they have an essentially captive market. You get assigned a textbook in your subject outline and you have 2 options, buy it or don't, the subjects are taught from those texts and no other book would do.

For that reason, I suspect some professors are on the take, getting bribes from publishers to promote certain books.
At uni, our teacher made us buy a €50 book on C++ which came with a CD-ROM full of exercises. "Not a bad deal" some of you might say, BUT we never used the CD-ROM - he made his own exercises which seemed pointless since the exercises in the book were pretty decent. You basically paid a 25 euro premium to have the CD and not using it! Then later we discovered that the writer of the book was a friend of his - he let that slip during one of his classes - and then it became very clear why he had made everyone get that book when there were a lot cheaper alternatives.
Personally, I'm offended by the total disregard for a student's personal wealth (or the lack thereof) that so many teachers and schools have. At uni, it happened all too often that we had to buy certain stuff for a teacher that barely got used in the end. I had to buy a $150 calculator for math, recommended by the teacher ... only for me to be told it was illegal to use during exams so I had to buy ANOTHER calculator worth $100 that would do the calculations it needed to do minus the parts that were not allowed (no graphic display was allowed or you could let it draw curves for you). Considering I had to pay all this from my own pocket (my father paid for rent and $10 a week for food, that's it) I was pretty pissed off.
If I was a student now and my teacher was a Mac fanboy who wanted the iPad to become required, I'd shove his so far up his ass, his tonsils could operate the touch screen.

People actually USE the CDs that come with the books? Never seen that before.
To be fair, the point of university is to prepare students for the real world and what better training is there than being routinely milked by uncaring corrupt dicks for the sole purpose of lining their pockets?

Am I the only one who got through college only buying like 1 out of 10 text books anyway? I even got A's in literature classes without ever reading the assigned literature, and no I never cheated.
The only books I ever bought were science and math books, and as a Sociology and English major I didn't take many of those classes.