Published in the New York Times yesterday:

In the rapidly evolv­ing col­lege text­book mar­ket, one of the nation’s largest text­book pub­lish­ers, Cengage Learning, announced Thursday that it would start rent­ing books to stu­dents this year, at 40 per­cent to 70 per­cent of the sale price.

Then, if you read a lit­tle fur­ther down the arti­cle you come across this:

Besides giv­ing stu­dents a new option, rentals give both pub­lish­ers and text­book authors a way to con­tinue earn­ing money from their books after the first sale, some­thing they do not get from the sale of used textbooks.

Bingo, there’s the ratio­nale behind why these book pub­lish­ers are doing this: they’re hop­ing for a renew­able rev­enue stream.

No, it doesn’t seem as though the pub­lish­ers have sud­denly found a soul and decided to stop goug­ing stu­dents on books, it’s just that they’re going to gouge them in a slightly dif­fer­ent way and under the guise of pro­vid­ing a more eco­nom­i­cal option to the student.